I still do have some, I think, but I'm not sure I can currently extract them from the floppies and/or syquest cartridges I saved them on. I will scour my drives and upload any I can find.
This is the first time I've seen your project, and I love it!
The two that I would most like to find and post online were
* A matrix math tool
* A gadget that monitored a serial port for errors from a giant, industrial label printer
I also had one that was very similar to the then-popular tool BackOrifice but for macs of the day.
If I can get any of them onto a modern system I will definitely upload :)
Same here. I made a DOS spreadsheet program (with modeX charting! And formulas), a couple of games and a couple of viruses (aaaa TSR looked like magic)... I think they might be in some floppies in my mom's basement.
Tons and tons of them over the years. I wish I'd kept better track of them because I've caught myself reinventing the wheel now and again.
- When I was a kid using a DOS PC I'd write them in Microsoft QuickBASIC or Turbo Pascal and compile them to EXEs. (I used to drag a few particularly useful ones around with me until a few years ago when the prevalence of 64-bit Windows made running them on a stock Windows machine impossible.) I had stuff there like a random password generator, dumping files to VGA mode 13h (to visually look for patterns in data), drop the DTR on a serial port (to hang up a modem from the command line), search/replace on INI files, and lots of others I've forgotten.
- I wrote a proto-Markdown text processor back in high school when I was taking notes on a vTech Laser PC4[0]. It took files from the vTech and rendered output files with Epson printer formatting codes, centered text, made headings, etc.
- I regularly use a script I wrote to import my phone backups' SMS logs and dump them into my IMAP mailbox. I love being able to search all my email and SMS communication in the same interface.
- I have a podcatcher I wrote bolted onto my (heavily forked) tt-rss[1] installation to download podcasts to a local webserver for archiving and playing.
- My father persists in using a DOS accounting package for his business. A small program I wrote ingests check printing output from the DOS app (meant for dot matrix tractor-fed checks) and reformats it for sheet-fed checks in a laser printer.
- Front-end scripts for lots of command line utilities so that I don't have to remember obscure options for common tasks.
I believe I remember them having remarkably simple and comprehensible source code. I had some old book by like dr dobbs or someone about dos internals in the 90s and I remember seeing all the technicals laid bare in the source back when I was in high school. It was one of the earliest memories I have of seeing what true software competence looked like.
Apparently it's still maintained. I wonder where it's being used, fuse and things like that I had assumed replaced all this.
I need to find a way to remember that passion and capture it again
Mine were all printouts from the library from microfiche. I remember a stock trading simulator, a lemonade stand game and 3D sine wave program that was mostly in machine code.
I just restored some backups from 1995, and am digging through that archive to see if I can pull out the multi-tasking libraries I wrote for Turbo Pascal under MS-DOS. No practical use, mostly nostalgia.
I didn't document things as well is I should have, of course I was the only user, and had no thought that future me would be looking at it 27 years later.
Damn, that makes me want to see if I can dig up the asm code I wrote for the TI-83 and run in on an emulator on modern hardware. Really happy for you that you were able to find that jar!
Interesting that they used a KryoFlux [1] (just visible next to the laptop in the third image) to recover the data. I used one earlier this year to recover some source code from some old 5.25" floppies that I'd last used in the early/mid eighties and which were otherwise unreadable. This was some of the first code I ever wrote, and it was fascinating to read it again and run it under emulation. The KryoFlux software is definitely not simple to use but it did the job for me.
If you've got any old floppies that you might one day want to read then get the data off them now because, if they've not already succumbed to entropy, they soon will.
(If anyone in the UK wants to buy a slightly used KryoFlux then my email is in my profile.)
I used to do these all the time, I think it was mainly from Byte magazines I would get from the library. It was on a TI-994A. External floppy drives were a godsend over the tape machine.
One of my few regrets is leaving old computers/disks at my parents house when I moved out. I didn’t value them at all at the time - they were old crappy computers.
So my Commodore 64 and 128 and all the software I spent my childhood writing were thrown away. I had a full BBS program that I wrote when I was 14 along with a half dozen BBS games. Would love to see that code!
Thanks for the uploads! I will check today but I believe I've got hardcopy of the datasheets/appnotes you have -- Burgess also grouped design docs into binders, so I have his originals. It's a habit I started carrying over to my own projects a number of years ago, never have to worry about something being deleted by accident, a format becoming hard to read (switched EAGLE CAD -> KiCAD 9 years ago), etc. Plus, I find it easier to read dead tree reference material when working with something on the bench!
We did a R6501Q based SBC a number of years ago, and eventually got RSC FORTH kernel and development ROMs running on it. We'd found a copy of the ROM object code in Burgess's archives and got it going from that. I want to eventually add a floppy controller to it, a friend had been working on replacing some of the floppy-based screen storage with CompactFlash backed storage, but got busy on other things.
What was the intended purpose for your R65F11 hacking?
Matt is much younger than I am. I would love to see "time capsules" of my earliest programming efforts, but they were many years and many systems ago, and I no longer have the source.* Something like Github did not exist when I began programming.
* - with the notable exception of a couple of things that I printed out on paper. Things stored electronically are now inaccessible on 5.25" floppy disks stuck somewhere in my attic. But a few things printed out on paper still survive.
I was also happy to find old issues of Computer Language Magazine [1] which I used to love back in those days even though many of the articles were way beyond me.
They also have Nibble Magazine for Apple ][ Enthusiasts [2] with playable versions of their code diskettes! The magazine images are all in monochrome though as they were extracted from microfilm, and one needs to sign up and borrow the magazine to see the full contents. It's worth supporting the Internet Archive to do so though.
I remember typing in the machine code listings to get some software to run, and proofing long printouts on the bus ride to and from school when they didn't work! Developing fundamental development skills!
Still have mine in the loft somewhere, that and the ribbon cable to attach it to my TRS-80. Being able to print out program listings and annotate them revolutionised debugging for me.
The "O" character and "0" number looked very similar, so we used to use a hack to print "0", followed by a backspace escape code, and then a slash. That produced a slashed zero.
I am currently pulling BASIC and Z80 assembly programs from cassette tape that me and my dad wrote in the late 70s early 80s - games and robot armdroid drivers for the NASCOM 2, a kit computer from 1977.
Most run in the emulutor but luckily I have the original NASCOM2 and 2 armdroids so (hopefully) I can get my dad's physical SOMAS cube solver from his master thesis running again.
Older than that is a punch tape teletype 'program' that I wrote thank you letters for me, pausing for input of the names of grandparents.
Thanks for posting this! I have a physical copy at home. This is from a time that was similar to now, when hackers were building things and showing them off. I'd say I miss those days, but right now is a pretty good time to be a hacker.
Pet project of mine: several times I have built BASIC interpreters that are compatible with the MS-BASIC used in these books (BASIC Computer Games, More BASIC Computer Games). I keep thinking about doing one in Ruby.
All my notes at the time were made with pencil on paper. Even if I could find them, I'm not sure they would still be readable. The Basic programs could only be copied by re-typing them manually on a contemporary computer. Presenting this pre-internet stuff on a website would just be too much work, sorry.
This is the first time I've seen your project, and I love it!
The two that I would most like to find and post online were
* A matrix math tool * A gadget that monitored a serial port for errors from a giant, industrial label printer
I also had one that was very similar to the then-popular tool BackOrifice but for macs of the day.
If I can get any of them onto a modern system I will definitely upload :)
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