13 Mar
2013
13 Mar
'13
11:09 p.m.
On 2013 Mar 13, at 9:25 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 9:38 PM, Brent Hilpert
<hilpert at cs.ubc.ca>
wrote:
Well that's very prescient, you're answering a question I was just
about to ask.
Rob and I have been discussing 9830s lately (and thanks to Rob I have
one to work on here) and we realised, somewhat to our surprise, that
we had both encountered the 9830 in school in the mid-70's, in
geographically very-separated regions - Rob in the Montreal area and
me in the Vancouver area.
Both instances had the mark-sense card reader too. Everybody sat at
their desk in class and pencil-marked off their first program (10
PRINT "<MY NAME>"..), lined up at the computer and submitted their
card deck for batch-style processing. Keeners could use the machine
after hours and type and edit directly on the keyboard and LED
display (whoo-hoo!).
So just how widespread or prevalent were 9830s in schools - did
anyone else here encounter the 9830 in highschool (or gradeschool)?
As Rob pointed out, the 9830 one must be special
order to HP
though, to
obtain the lazy-T cursor, unless there's some alternative tortured
way
they're injecting the T into the display scanning that I'm not
seeing.
Thank you for mentioning this. I've asked on the list now and
again about
a computer I used c. 1976 that had a "lazy-T cursor". I was quite
young
at the time and it was only brought to our school for a special
occasion,
so my memories are quite fuzzy about it, but having now googled with
some useful keywords, I'm reasonably certain that the device I was
trying
to describe was an HP 9830 with an HP 9860 mark-sense card reader.
It seems unlikely I'll ever end up with one, so I'm happy to have
found
this emulator, updated less than a year ago...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hp9800e/files/go9800/
Thanks again for the very helpful nudge in precisely the correct
direction!