Way, way, way back when, I was working on a rather complicated control
system. The company I was working for had been very low tech up to that
time, and I was forced to sneak new technology into the products behind
everyone's back.

I was thinking Z80, they were thinking relays. At some point, I decided
to stay up late and build a pretty cool state machine using eproms,
counters, timers and some other glue logic. I had to build an eprom
programmer with switches and lights (did I mention that this was a LONG
night?). Within a few days, this was working better than anything they
had done up to that point. I was still thinking Z80. Now they were
hooked on the state machine, and I had to screw around with that thing
for months tweaking, tuning and cursing.

One day when the boss was away, I brought in the TRS80 Model I. It took
a couple of hours to hook up the address & data busses in place of the
eproms, and just a few hours to write  some assembly code to make
something that worked WAY better than the best we had had up to that
point. The final product had a Z80, and the boss never looked back.

So, the Model I lives in my attic.

-----

Since I've gotten this far off topic, I might as well go a little
further. I have boxes FULL of Z80 development stuff. Emulators,
debuggers, data books, parts, software... Everything you need to do some
major Z80 projects (and I've done quite a few). This stuff is up in the
attic with the TRS80, and I'd love to find it a new home. Anyone
interested? I'd trade for pretty much anything useful. My wife wants me
to put it on ebay, but I thought I'd ask here first.

Phillip

> On Wed, 24 Dec 2003 00:38:50 +1300, Russell McMahon wrote:
>
> >> A hand assembled program entered in binary dip switches
> enabled a hex
> >> keypad.
> >
> > Hex keypad!
> > You had a hex keypad ! ????????????
> >
> > When I was a boy we only had binary switches for all input (address
> > and data).

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