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The Product That Won't Die
Message
De
04/09/2002 23:14:37
Dragan Nedeljkovich (En ligne)
Now officially retired
Zrenjanin, Serbia
 
Information générale
Forum:
Visual FoxPro
Catégorie:
Autre
Divers
Thread ID:
00696149
Message ID:
00696952
Vues:
17
>Not completely. There's still stuff out there. There's a LOT of traffic in the 'first laptop' the Model 100 - look on eBay. They get used for remote data gather and lab controls - along with another classic from the past, the Timex-Sinclair 1000 (yeah, I had one of those too - still do). I have a friend who's father is a professor at a local college, when they disontinued the TS-1000 he bought up literally CASES of them to use as controls for his lab equipment - pretty handy little boxes as the expansion slot on the back fully exposed the Z80's pins, it was like a CPU development system you could program in BASIC.

I still have the Centronix interface for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum; it's a dongle which plugs onto this expansion slot, and ends with a regular printer cable. Now writing a driver was a different matter; you had printer buffer space which was supposed to hold one pixel line (256 bytes) for screen dumps, but would go unused if you wrote your own. I remember it took me two days to replace two drivers (graphical and characters) which were published in a magazine, with one combined which would fit into the same space. That was fun :).

Of course, I had a full keyboard with a steel case (actually the motherboard fit inside it), a reset button and a joystick port (plugged in parallel to keys 6 to 0 of top row). There was a problem of how to isolate the board from the bottom of the case, but that was solved by rubber pads (the ones used for faucets) and a few ballpoint pen outer shells cut to proper lengths, to keep the distance from the top part.

Last time it worked, its video output was losing it a bit, and I think it needs a new AC adapter, or at least a cable for it. It's probably one of the oldest - the serial number is 6xxxx, five digit only, and I think there were about two million of those made.

back to same old

the first online autobiography, unfinished by design
What, me reckless? I'm full of recks!
Balkans, eh? Count them.
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