Simviation Forums

That was the question posed by fozzer before the thread got locked.

Yup!  I used to do Z80 machine code development on the Timex Sinclair.  There was no assempler I could get/afford, so I had the cheat sheet with the nemonics and their associated hex code.  I did the translations, loaded the code and ran.  I learned BASIC, some Pascal, C and C++.  I then became a professional programmer and then programming ceased to be fun.  It's a job.  I code in C# at home for my wife's business, and I code in C++ and enterprise java for high visibility company that I won't name.

When I use my computer at home, and don't have to work, I DON'T code for fun anymore.  All I do is game.

Yup, sure do, and the Motorola 68000. Never had anything that ran either one though. That was back in the days of real computing, before all this point-and-click nonsense.  :D

I had a Zenith Z80 in my Apple 2E to run the CPM operating system. Wrote a lot of programs in basic do to the lack of commercial software at the time. I can't say I really miss basic or machine code.... ROFL

Ah yes... the Z-80.

Top this one:

Circa 1985 I was a System Administrator for a company running Radio Shack's TRS-80-II  (monitor, keyboard and all, in one housing.. including two of those 11" floppy-drives) with a first generation release of Xenix (Radio Shack's hack of Unix), and it had 11 terminals hooked up to it throughout the building.

That's right, an ancient, 11 user LAN (with two printers) supported by an 8-bit Z80..

Is still have nightmares about it  :'(    It especially liked to lock up on Friday, when all the guys from the shop were waiting on paychecks to print  

I started with a TI-99 plus some other unmentionables. I bought the Apple 2E in 1982 and it set me back $2500.00. With that I got the built in dual 360K floppy drives and an Apple multi color printer and the color monitor. For another $800 I could have bought a 40M HDD. I put an Applied Electronics quick load board in for another $800. You could load your floppies to the board eliminating the floppy access while you were working. I don't remember what I paid for the Z-80 board.

On the upside, Apple included Apple Works which was as good as any word processor on the market at the time.

For the $3300.00 I had in that computer you can build one heck of a computer today.

I used a cassette recorder on the TI-99 to record and save any work that was done on it.

Actually I would say that the TRS-80 was probably the most used 8080 computer at that time.

Adjust that $3,300 for inflation and you're looking at a $6,000 computer, today

I also remember my consultant was a hard-core gamer... by the time I left that company, he had dumped $5,000