Re: For the fun of it

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

carbide@egine.com wrote:
> Bill Heckel wrote:
>
> > Post your current age and the first computer you ever used.
>
>
> 53.
>
> I was an electronic tech at hp, and  I took a class at work. I don't
> recall the title, but it was about algorithmic state machines. We got a
> crappy little microcomputer with a keypad and LED readout to work with,
> and we had to program it by entering hex on the keypad.  It was really
> frustrating because the keypad bounced. Ironically, hp sold a quality
> version in an attache case at that time, but our management was too
> cheap to buy them for us.
>
> We were assigned to program it as a function generator that could
> output square, triangle, sawtooth, and sine waves.  I still have a
> cassette with that program on it.
>
> I know it was '79 because I also programmed it to write  A L I E N on
> the screen of my oscilloscope.

Very cool, Paul!

Tom Osborne introduced the "algorithmic state machine" at HP Labs, but
you should know that it was the basis of Woz's Disk ][ Controller!

http://www.hp9825.com/html/osborne_s_story.html

Quite a few people in the mid- to late-1970's were figuring out that
ROMs plus latches made a nice programmable state machine.  There was
even a school of thought that ROMs would replace most logic--which
was not exactly right, but not all wrong, either.  ;-)

-michael

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