Post #1266224
2026-02-07 07:38 UTC
@fluidlogic @quinn maybe more of a mix than you might guess.
I'm not active in any "retro" sense, but I did work for an 8-bit maker in the 1980s - as well as having the same gear personally.
Which means I don't have a rosy nostalgia and instead remember how flaky the hardware was, how scant the documentation was, how few were our ways to get answers - etc.
But what I am grateful for in retrospect, is how understandable those systems were. So much of what I learned then, still guides me.
Replies (1)
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@AbramKedge@beige.party 2026-02-14 05:53
@geraldew @fluidlogic @quinn The lack of information gave us that brief time when computer magazines were useful - how to do things, rather than what to buy. Years later I used a software PCM trick from Byte magazine to give a very pleasant bell sound in a medical instrument. I loved that my Nascom 2 came with a thick binder that included circuit diagrams - my first hardware hack was to find a spare DIP switch and a clock that I could feed into the cassette interface, boosting it to a screaming fast 4800 baud 😎