About this time I moved to Belmont with my brother Paul and his little daughter Christina, and also a friend of ours from our church named Stuart Harrington. Belmont is a very nice little town between next to Waltham where I worked, so I had a 15 minute commute. What a great place to live. Drive 15 minutes one way and you're in Boston. Drive the other direction and you're in Lincoln. I really enjoyed that.
Eventually Stuart got married and moved out and we were joined by another friend from church named Paul Ward. Paul was a sonar operator in a fast attack sub when he served in the Navy. He told interesting stories. We decided to share a room. We bought a steel tubular framed bunk cot. I would get up early in the morning and help him deliver newpapers in Lexington. I had inherited one of the Osborne 1 computers from work which Paul and I would spend some time tinkering with and banging out simple BASIC programs. My memory is a bit foggy, but I seem to remember giving the computer to Paul.
I thought I might be able to purchase a new computer for myself now that I had a regular paying job. I was interested in practicing my C programming and Radio Shack had a nice little portable called the Tandy Model 600. I read somewhere that CP/M and a C compiler could be had for this little machine and I thought this would be a very neat computer to own. When they were getting ready to discontinue this model the price dropped well below a thousand dollars. However I wasn't very good at saving money.
I never did purchase a Model 600. Just as well because I think I would have outgrown it very quickly.
Showing posts with label osborne 1. Show all posts
Showing posts with label osborne 1. Show all posts
Friday, March 19, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
CNC Machine Simulator
The two Osborne 1 computers we were using in engineering were getting a bit worn, so Bob sprung for some Kaypro computers. I don't think they appeared all at once but soon enough we had two Kaypro II machines and one Kaypro 10. The Kaypro II's were similar to the Osbornes but with bigger screens. Now we had 80 columns of bright green text. The Kaypro 10 also had a built in 10MB hard drive.
One really important difference with these new machines is that they had block graphics characters, and you could plot lines and points. This wasn't high resolution but it was good enough to inspire me to write a simple interpreter for the CNC programming language. Remember how I tried to write a programmable calculator program for my VIC-20 but never finished it? This interpreter was the realization of ideas that I'd been kicking around for a while. I wrote this as an extension of the machining text editor in MBASIC.
Now we could run a rough simulation of how a routing or drilling program would work and see the result on the screen. There was no fine detail, but it was easy to see if we accidentally drilled outside the board, or if a panel would be ruined by an accidentally placed cut. This certainly saved time and money because we were able now to make fewer first pieces so the single head Excellon machine and it's operator were more efficient.
One really important difference with these new machines is that they had block graphics characters, and you could plot lines and points. This wasn't high resolution but it was good enough to inspire me to write a simple interpreter for the CNC programming language. Remember how I tried to write a programmable calculator program for my VIC-20 but never finished it? This interpreter was the realization of ideas that I'd been kicking around for a while. I wrote this as an extension of the machining text editor in MBASIC.
Now we could run a rough simulation of how a routing or drilling program would work and see the result on the screen. There was no fine detail, but it was easy to see if we accidentally drilled outside the board, or if a panel would be ruined by an accidentally placed cut. This certainly saved time and money because we were able now to make fewer first pieces so the single head Excellon machine and it's operator were more efficient.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
My First Text Editor
Using a word processor to edit CNC programs didn't seem quite right to me, so I decided to write a text editor especially for editing drilling and routing programs. I had never written a text editor before, but I had a pretty good idea how to go about it. The Osborne 1 had a terminal style display, so there were control and escape sequences for inserting and deleting lines and characters which makes it pretty easy to write a screen editor.
One thing that motivated me to write this editor was to save time. Sometimes it was really useful to be able to mark of bunch of drilling coordinates and move them or make copies at an offset. My editor made this easy to do.
I wrote the editor in MBASIC. I'm pretty sure it was also compiled to a standalone application using BASCOM. This was in a before IDEs, and programs needed to be compiled and linked.
One thing that motivated me to write this editor was to save time. Sometimes it was really useful to be able to mark of bunch of drilling coordinates and move them or make copies at an offset. My editor made this easy to do.
I wrote the editor in MBASIC. I'm pretty sure it was also compiled to a standalone application using BASCOM. This was in a before IDEs, and programs needed to be compiled and linked.
The Osborne 1
The Osborne 1 was a portable CP/M computer with a Z-80 processor. It looked like a portable sewing machine. You tip it on its side and undo the latches and the end would come off revealing a keyboard which was attached to the rest of the machine by a wide ribbon cable. Removing the keyboard revealed two large floppy drives, a tiny 5 inch screen, cubbies for floppy disks, and a bunch of ports. We would plug the RS-232 cable from the paper punch into one of the ports.
The 5 inch screen could only display 52 characters wide, but it could scroll. You had to have a tolerance for reading very small type to use this machine. I was okay with it, but today I probably wouldn't enjoy it.
Aside from editing CNC programs, we also had MBASIC on these machines and so we could do a little programming to help us with our work. Bob knew how to write in BASIC and he had written a few things. For example there was a program for spitting out a simple routing program for a rectangular board. You just punch in the size of the board and it would generate a file. Anything more complex than that required manual coding.
One problem we had with the Osborne 1 machines we had was that the keyboard bezel was metal and it wasn't grounded well. If you walked up to the computer and touched the keyboard it wasn't unusual to discharge some static electricity and reset the computer, losing whatever work you were doing.
The 5 inch screen could only display 52 characters wide, but it could scroll. You had to have a tolerance for reading very small type to use this machine. I was okay with it, but today I probably wouldn't enjoy it.
Aside from editing CNC programs, we also had MBASIC on these machines and so we could do a little programming to help us with our work. Bob knew how to write in BASIC and he had written a few things. For example there was a program for spitting out a simple routing program for a rectangular board. You just punch in the size of the board and it would generate a file. Anything more complex than that required manual coding.
One problem we had with the Osborne 1 machines we had was that the keyboard bezel was metal and it wasn't grounded well. If you walked up to the computer and touched the keyboard it wasn't unusual to discharge some static electricity and reset the computer, losing whatever work you were doing.
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