12 Oct
2022
12 Oct
'22
2:23 p.m.
*From:* Steve Lewis via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
*Subject:* [cctalk] datapoint 2200 programming
*Date:* Wednesday, October 12, 2022 at 1:54 PM
*To:* cctalk(a)classiccmp.org
*Cc:* Steve Lewis <lewissa78(a)gmail.com>
Does anyone know how the 1970/1971 original Datapoint
2200 was programmed?
It had tapes containing terminal programs to access different types of
systems. And the instruction set was said to be similar what became the
8008. But how were these terminal programs created and how were the tapes
written? Were they under emulators on larger systems, like a PDP-10?
Were there any tapes that had something like a machine code editor and
tape-write routines? I assume no kind of ROM was built into the system
(unless it had a built in machine code editor, and routines to write that
content to a tape?) Was a version of BASIC ever built for the 8008 that
ran on a Datapoint 2200 or similar system?
-Steve
I think you can find the answers here:
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/datapoint/2200/
I only skimmed a couple of the manuals briefly, but it appears that it
was programmed in assembler, and that the source code editing, assembly,
and tape preparation were all done on the 2200.
These manuals look like they are for the Version II machine that was
introduced in 1972. The introduction to the Reference Manual states v.II
was upward compatible from the v.I system, however, so the programming
was probably similar. Once significant change was that v.II had RAM and
that instructions ran between 4 and 80 times faster, which perhaps
suggests that the v.I had a rotating memory or perhaps some sort of
delay line memory.
Paul