S-100 Virtual Workbench | Hacker News Reader

S-100 Virtual Workbench

grantmestrength.github.io

135 pointsrbanffy29 comments

I remember reading Byte Magazine when I was 7 and not understanding why I couldn’t plug one of those cool S-100 bus graphics cards into my Heathkit H89.

So I made space invaders out of box drawing characters.

BASIC was slow so I tried using C. (Yes, there was a minimal C compiler for the H89!) But then C was too fast and “for (i=0; i<10000; i++);” didn’t seem to slow things down like it did in BASIC so then I was stumped. “C is too fast for games!” — me

The H89 had a built-in monitor and a 5 1/4” floppy drive. Its precursor, the H8, was much like this emulated S100/Altair, with LEDs and switches as your only I/O.

You could put a terminal on an H8 and not have to use the hexpad. Lot's of people built one from the TV Typewriter Cookbook by Don Lancaster (or one of the similar designs floating around then). Knew several folks with that setup.

https://archive.org/details/tvtcb_doc

WUT, I had no idea. That’s cool!

It wasn't hugely useful unless you also bought/built some sort of mass storage. Fortunately, Heathkit sold a paper tape reader! And a cassette tape interface! And something new and expensive called a 'floppy disk', but who could ever use that much storage?

In the same era (age 7-12) I went to school on an airbase in Germany and at some point “they” (no idea who) decided I should not do normal math, but should instead spend time with the Airmen who ran the computers. They had an Interdata-something-16 minicomputer which had both punched tape and teletype I/O. I played Oregon Trail on the teletype and always died of dysintery. I once asked the wise and aged Airman (he was probably 25), “can I punch my own holes in the tape and make the computer do cool things?” To which he responded “Yes. No.”

Around the same age, I went to a 'gifted student program' as well, and they had a Teletype connected to the school systems mainframe (pretty sure a Univac 1100, but it was a long, long time ago) by an 110 baud, rotary dial modem. The nice thing, was this particular model of Teletype had a paper tape punch as well as a reader, so we could sorta 'save our work'. We had a Star Trek game (very popular) and wrote some (very rudimentary) Fortran programs that once in a blue moon compiled and ran (the teachers didn't know much more than we did, and the documentation was minimal). It was still pretty amazing.

Fun fact...the Interdata 8/32 ended up being pretty significant to Unix history down the line.

"Yes. No.". I had that conversation with adults when I was that age a couple of times. :-)

You could attach an H-19 to an H-8 and play advent on H-DOS.

The first computer I ever used. I was so young I didn't know how to spell "bird."

Hard sectored drives!

I had “Microsoft Adventure” on the H89, which I played for a million hours and was why I dug up the original (probably not really; it’s complicated) Don Ekman Colossal Cave FORTRAN code and ported to TADS, which then led to Graham Nelson’s Inform port.

Wonderful! :-)

Was going to comment that this reminded me of the old S-100 bus, and looking at the ads in Byte, and reading Chaos Manor, but obviously that couldn't be it, it had to be something else entirely, clicked and was pleasantly surprised.

I have a cassette copy of Microsoft Advanced Basic for the SOL-20 that I got in a box of "junk" (junk in quotes because it included a very rare early copy of Zork for the Apple II that paid for the box about 40x over) at an estate sale years ago. Need to figure out if I can get it to load in this somehow.

It has IMSAI-8080!

You don't get the satisfying tactile flick-click of the real thing, but still, for about 0.06% of us, this brings an enormous smile!

OTOH, with the IMSAI-8080 you'd have the satisfaction of using the same machine as David Lightman of Wargames fame

Once you got the S100 box too full, you'd send it to my late friend Lloyd Smith's shop, DigiTek, where he would split the power bus, and add a second power supply to handle the load.

Heh, not sure why but it makes me wonder if you could 'Ship of Theseus' something like that into a modern day desktop. By going thru the different eras of DIY compute.

At some point you have to go from S-100 to original “8-bit” ISA. There might have been a combo backplane in period.

Yeah I was thinking that. Also at some point you will be switching motherboards every other cpu update just due to the socket changes between generations.

S-100 went as far as 68020 and Unix clones, but you'd be at a dead end there

Fantastic! Load the Altair Z80. At the CP/M prompt type: 'DIR' to see your files. Try out: 'MBASIC STARTREK' - be patient while it loads and then go save the galaxy! Just like old times :)

Oh my. I've spent waaay too much time trying to figure out how does the Ladder works. Still was unable to play that one.

And I won't even mention that I have no idea how to use ED.

Holy crap! When I was a child, my father got me my first computer, and it had a bunch of dongles and red LEDs. I looked at it for a few minutes, and was like, what the hell am I supposed to do with this? My dad was an electrical engineer at a steel plant, so I had assumed it was some sort of industrial automation computer. But no, it was an Altair 8800.

I couldn't figure it out so they just got rid of it. Wish I could go back in time and try again.

I have no idea what's going on but it looks really cool

How do I... use this? There's no help button or anything

That was the very same reaction of many early S-100 computer owners. This emulator has done a good job emulating that.

Click "Start" admire the CP/M startup, you have an "A>" prompt go for it.

Start with

https://archive.org/details/cpm-primer-second-edition/mode/1...

Or this if you dare:

https://archive.org/details/TheCpmProgrammersHandbook/mode/1...

Was the front end designed using Claude Design?

Thanks! Now I will procrastinate the whole day.

The UI is unreadable due to low contrast and tiny text.

Wish I could read the text but someone decided it was more important to use dark gray text on black and dark-green backgrounds because it looks all trendy and cool and shit.

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