Quote:
Originally Posted by vreihen16
It was an early homebrew S-100 bus computer with an 8080 CPU, sorta like this:
...with the cat's meow of a TI Silent 700 terminal as the user interface:
Notice the lack of a screen. All output was on rolls of thermal paper, similar to what the early fax machines used when they came out 10 years later.
I was being forced to track about two dozen low-medium orbit American and Soviet satellites, a few with some extremely elliptical "Tundra" like orbits like Sirius used with their first-generation birds many years later. Keplerian elements were broadcast daily by voice on HF radio, and I had to spend an hour or so writing them on paper and then keying them into the computer to run the next day's above-horizon orbital passes and print them.
Kids these days will never know the pain, since they can download a free smartphone app, point their phone at the sky, and it will show them live what satellites are overhead and in the camera's field of view..... |
I had an HP-85 (I think) which had a small CRT and thermal paper output. I don’t recall what the storage was. BASIC language. I wrote a lot of code on that, mainly for stock market and options trading, but also some simple games for my infant son. Around 1982 IIRC.
Wrote my college thesis (Economics) on a PDP-11 with a 300 baud dial up modem and a dumb terminal in my apartment. All caps on the terminal, so I had to go to the computer lab and edit. Good times.
Relevance to thread: I wrote a rocket launch game, and one for aiming a projectile (mortar).