Sunday, May 11th, 2008

!!

I had a pile floppy disks waiting patiently on the shelf. I decided to let them meet their end today. While looking through them I found lots of memories. I've got both 3.5" and 5.25" disks in surplus.

A lot of disks say "c:\bbs" which came from my Fidonet BBS--I think my handle was Aquamarine, but I don't remember what the BBS was called.

Some of them are dated 1992 & a few say 1987..

There's GCC 2.70 and two disks labeled Linux 1.2.12. (Those 2 got saved from their doom after all.)

I have a box (of expensive) Xilinx XACT software for development of software for FPGAs. I spent lots of money on the software and a development kit and never did anything with it before the timeout. I found the dongles recently, but I don't remember whether I saved those. Now Xilinx has a free version of their software that will do anything I want. The only project I did with the newer one (so far) was to make a 32 bit serial multiplier using the design in The Art of Computer Programming vol. 2 p. 297-99.

There is a folder of even older disks that I refuse to throw away--TRS-80 software--TRSDOS, a FORTRAN compiler, mmsFORTH and I'm pretty sure there's a TRS-80 Pascal compiler in there too.

I get in these modes of cleaning house. I just went looking for my "loose wires cause fires" photos and couldn't find them but oh I found so many memories! I know I have most if not all of the negatives and I'm interesting to see how well they will scan in. There'll be a rash of new photos on my deviantART site with the non-people photos.

Sometimes there are advantages of being reluctant to throw things away!

- Bill
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Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

TRS-80 artifact

I recently found a summary sheet that I used to help program my TRS-80 in assembly language. about 25 years ago.

Here's a link to a picture of it on deviantART: Artifact from TRS-80

Someone suggested that I offer it to a museum. I wonder if any LJ folk know of somewhere that would find it interesting.

- Bill
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