In SX Microcontrollers, SX/B Compiler and SX-Key Tool, kmonsx wrote:

My earliest experiences were on a TI-99/4a writing basic programs and saving them onto a cassette tape.  I also spent an awful lot of time on a TRS-80 CoCo II (which I think was also 65xx processor, maybe 6509) with 16k of RAM, and a cassette drive.  And man those tapes were unreliable when you read them over and over again.  I can remember a fun time I had once trying to get a terminal emulator running so I could get online(read: compuserve and bbs's)  A friend also had a different CoCo, but he didn't have a tape drive, and lived too far from me, didn't have the right interface etc.  He had a terminal program that was about 8k bytes, fairly sizable for the time.  We had no way of transferring the program (chicken vs egg syndrome)  So he read me, byte for byte, over the phone, the raw data that made up the executable in HEX.  It took us 7 hours on the phone (thank god for unlimited metro calling.) I still remember him saying, "5E" and I would echo "5E", "EA", echo "EA", "14", echo "14".

You know, the program worked flawlessly, which given checksums etc we must have gotten 100%, or real close, of the program exactly perfect.

I had an Amiga where everyone else (except for the local Commodore Users group, which was pretty big at the time) was using a PC, or perhaps an Apple or Atari.  I found that by having "non-standard" stuff, I learned so much more because solutions were never cut-and-dry, or correctly packaged specifically for the amiga.  It always required a non-standard cable, or some special shareware software download from a BBS.  You had to "hack" things(hardware, software, and otherwise) to get them to work properly.

Fun times.

Keith

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