Wow! Where did you score that from?? -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- PowerPC inside! ------------------------------------------------------------

I am openly jealous. If you decide you're not interested in the wafertape anymore, I would be delighted to negotiate further ;-) -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- This message will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jim. -- M:I ----

On Apr 23, 2008, at 2:11 AM, Jim Battle wrote: Huh? I thought the wafertape was never released. Did this one get leaked or something? -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On Apr 24, 2008, at 1:07 PM, Jim Battle wrote: Absolutely fascinating. I hope you plan to put up some detailed pics of this beast. :) -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On Apr 23, 2008, at 12:04 AM, Jim Battle wrote: ;) Well for Christmas, she showed up here with an Osborne-1 with manuals, software, an external (green-screen) monitor, and an Epson RX-80, including all cables, all in near-perfect condition! Apparently she scored that system at a thrift store for something like ten bucks. One can't argue with that. She has a good eye for stuff like that. Hmm, interesting, I'll look for one. Subroutine-local variables in a BASIC interpreter?? Wow, that's something I'll need to try. That's cool. I agree with your take on Microsoft BASIC. I think it is a good BASIC, but it's just so common, on so many different types of systems, that it has become "old hat". I have been working (off-and- on, very sporadically) on extending the BASIC used in Intel's 8051AH- BASIC chip with some new functionality; I'm interested in studying unusual BASIC features. Are there specs available for hexbus? Neat! -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On Apr 24, 2008, at 12:58 PM, Roy J. Tellason wrote: Nope, no DD or ScreenPac, it's just a plain '1. I remember selling Kaypro systems at an after-school job in the mid-1980s. We pushed them pretty hard on the "much bigger display than an Osborne 1" selling point. I still like the overall design of the Osborne, though, especially the little cubby holes for floppies. That's very handy. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On Apr 25, 2008, at 9:53 PM, Roy J. Tellason wrote: Eeeeeek! I'd love to see that. Got any pics? -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

Roy J. Tellason wrote: Understood. :) I've never actually seen an Exec in person. It seemed to be a pretty nice box from their ads in Byte, but of course that's the point of advertisements. Hmm, bummer...The hard drive in my Kaypro 10 seems to have died. It worked the last time I powered it up (~1.5 years ago) but now it just sits there and blinks the access LED. I can hear it spinning up. I wonder if it has a stiction problem. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

Dave McGuire wrote: ... I recall reading through the manual a bit and inferring something about the interpreter's structure. Like most BASICs, it is tokenized in memory. Variables aren't stored as literals, unlike MS basic. Instead, there is a byte token meaning: a variable, and the next byte is an index into the symbol table. Thus a given program can have no more than 254 unique variable names, or something like that. With a 8K computer, that seems unlikely to be a problem. The symbol table has the variable name, attributes, and value. Thus if you have something like 10 THISREALLYLONGVARIABLENAME = 1 20 THISREALLYLONGVARIABLENAME = THISREALLYLONGVARIABLENAME + 1 the name is stored only in the symbol table, so there is very little penalty for long names. Accessing vars can be done quickly too, potentially just a double index, but perhaps it is not implemented that way. The down side is that if you enter this line: 30 FRISTAJAMTHINGAMABOB = 3.14 and then change the line 30 FOO = 3.14 the FRISTAJAMTHINGAMABOB var is still in the symbol table, even though nothing references it. There is a command that cleans up dead vars in the symbol table. It has been too long to recall the details, but there is something about attaching and detaching subroutines that seemed interesting. It wasn't a matter of threading, it had something to do with scoping, but I forget now. It seemed interesting. Another fun thing is that the FP format is decimal, but it doesn't use BCD. It uses base-100 digits, one digit per byte. It saves a lot of nibble level mucking around, but it does hurt a bit in that the mantissa are effectively normalized by pairs of digits, instead of a single digit. I don't recall if the CC-40 has it, but the TI-74 has a debug mode that can be entered, such that you can access register state, change the PC, inspect memory, set a breakpoint, etc. If you like quirky BASIC's, check out Wang BASIC and BASIC-2. It starts with the classic Dartmouth basic, including MAT statements, but then adds on a lot of Wang's own syntax. Here was my attempt at a comparison between MS BASIC (say, the kind found on TRS-80 Level 2 BASIC), and Wang BASIC. BASIC-2 enhances BASIC in many ways, including adding the ELSE clause and allowing conditional conjunctions, but I didn't get into that. http://www.wang2200.org/basic_comparison.html Wang BASIC itself evolved over time before BASIC-2 came out. Here is my terse summary of that: http://www.wang2200.org/versions.html Here are some examples of the crazy syntax that Wang had for searching and sorting array data. It is an extension of the MAT command syntax: MAT CONVERT A() TO A$()(6,8) MAT COPY A$() <X*Y, 100/X> TO -A$()<10,20> MAT MERGE A$ TO W1$(), W2$(), S$() MAT MOVE A$(), L$(2,3), M TO B$(1,1) MAT MOVE A(), L$(1) TO A1(1) MAT SEARCH A$()<1,5>,=STR(Z$,1,5) TO B$ STEP 5 MAT SORT A$() TO W$(), L$() Want to convert a number to a string with formatting? Here it is: 10 CONVERT A TO A$,(+#.#####^^^^) Want to fill a string with a character? INIT("x") A$ Want to rotate each byte of a string left three bits? ROTATE(A$,3) Want to translate an array of strings from EBCDIC to ASCII? The $TRAN statement will do that (or any other byte mapping). On the other hand, they kept some of the worst features of Dartmouth BASIC: variables are all either a single letter, or a letter and a digit. There are no local variables, except for the "10 DEFFNA(x) = SQR(x)/3" type of statement. Strings are statically allocated, and can be at most 64 characters long (in BASIC; BASIC-2 allows 124 bytes per string).