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Comment by dmbaggett | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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. :-)

https://archive.org/details/tvtcb_doc

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.

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