Chapter 7: Wandering Eyes
Friday, I was done with classes and lab work by noon, so Dad and I went to the computer store on 42nd Street, across from the old mall.
(Why Odessa would need two malls within a mile of each other is beyond me and a lot of people who live there. Who knows what the development company that built the second one was thinking? Surely they could have been more imaginative. On the other hand, most malls are intentionally built near the higher class enclaves of a community, which shows how little real estate people think ahead. Parasitic attitudes.)
With some urging, Mom and Giselle came, too.
We asked to look at the Apple II, checking the prices for disk drives, RAM, an 80 column display card, a monitor capable of displaying 80 characters, and a printer. When the owner, Jim Harrow, showed us the prices, Dad whistled a low whistle and muttered under his breath, "Could buy a decent used car for this kind of money."
"Would you like to try the word processor, sir?" Jim was quick on the pick up.
"Dad teaches Spanish. Does the word processor handle diacritical marks?"
"I have a number of customers who buy computers specifically for Spanish word processing, and I have this one set up for it. You could sit down and give it a try."
"Sitting down isn't going to find us an oil patch in the back yard," Dad complained with a wry grin as he sat.
Jim smiled at the joke and showed us how to select the keyboard layouts and type in several European languages, then how to print the results out, showing how to adjust the output for a daisy wheel printer and for a dot-matrix printer. Dad was impressed.
Giselle and Mom each tried it out, as well. I had tried it out in the past, and we didn't have all afternoon, so I declined.
"I could almost justify this for the time it would save making tests and handouts. Almost." Dad was thinking out loud.
"But then you wouldn't be hiring students to help you," Mom pointed out. Then she turned to me, "Now, Joe what about your classes?"
"You're taking classes at UTPB?"
"OC. Electronics."
"Hang on."
Jim went into the backroom.
While he was gone, Mom noticed the synthesizer keyboard on the table on the side. "Does this thing play music, too?" she asked.
"Yeah. That plugs into a synthesizer, which has a lot of sounds our organ can't even try to make. Realistic sounding chimes and drums, echoes in pitch, ..."
"Well, maybe I don't need that."
"Realistic sounding strings and horns, too. I think the whole setup is less than what you would have paid for our organ, new."
"Well, that could be interesting, especially since it's about time to get the organ looked at. The atmosphere in west Texas sure seems to be hard on electronics." She referred to the tendency for the desert air, polluted as it was from refinery and well burn-off made excessive by operating companies that could not be bothered with considerations of pollution or waste, to eat into the metals in switches and sockets.
"I could look at the organ sometime." I was thinking it would be interesting to try controlling the family organ with the computer, but decided not to mention that.
Dad shook his head. "You're too busy."
The keyboard alone cost about as much as the Apple II that would host it and the synthesizer. These days, you can get a good integrated keyboard with a lot of preset synthesized instruments built in, for much less than that keyboard cost. But you could program your own waveforms on that synthesizer card, which is still high-end functionality these days, only available on certain higher-priced keyboard synthesizers.
Jim came back out with a woman I recognized from previous visits. She was carrying a couple of prototyping boards, one of which would fit into the Apple II's expansion bus.
"This is my wife, Jayne. She likes to dabble in hardware."
"We both do electronics. But Jim is usually busy with customers, so I get to have all the fun." She grinned and showed me what she was working on. "This is going to be a remote temperature sensor, for permanent downhole installation."
"Oilwell?"
She nodded.
"Looks interesting. But the class is structured towards a more limited trainer environment."
"What CPU?"
"8080."
"Hmm." She nodded.
"I have a 6800 prototyping board that I'm building up a bit."
"Ah." Her expression brightened.
"Ultimately, I want to take it a bit beyond what the class will use, maybe even add a floppy drive."
"That's ambitious."
"Right now, it can load code through a serial port. Are cross-assemblers for the 6800 series available for the Apple?"
"Actually, yes. And there's also a Pascal development system with a great screen editor you can use for writing programs. You could use that to write the code and do initial tests, then upload the source code and use a native 6800 compiler from there."
At the time, Pascal was the language to bet on for applications that didn't require the high-powered math functionality of ForTran or the business and data functionality of CoBOL. C and Unix were just coming out of the universities.
"No cross compilers for Pascal?" I asked.
"Somebody will probably will have something soon. Or maybe you could write one and sell it?"
"It's a thought."
"Oh. And we have a 6809 co-processor card called the MILL on order for the store, that you might be interested in. It runs OS-9/6809 and Uniflex." Both of these operating systems were strongly influenced by Unix, and, while I was not yet familiar with Unix, I had heard something about the OS's flexibility, particularly from fellow students in the BASIC class.
"Uh, yeah. I've read something about it in the magazines. When do you expect it in?"
"They were talking about two weeks two weeks ago. You know how that goes."
"I'll have to drop back by in a few more weeks, then." I looked over at Mom. "Could my mom try out the synthesizer before we leave today?"
"Sure."
They set up the synthesizer and demonstrated some of the sounds, then let Mom play a hymn using synthesized glass harp.
"It sounds nice. Maybe we can afford one someday." She was impressed, but was definitely not thinking seriously about it.
After a bit more discussion of available software and hardware, we thanked them for their time and left the store.
"Should we go to the Radio Shack in the new mall, or the one close to home?"
Giselle decided for us. "Close to home."
At Radio Shack, we looked at the Model III and the Color Computer. The salesperson, Trina, let us play with the built-in BASIC on both, but did not have much in the way of word processing to demonstrate. Nor did we have much time left to examine the computers, since I had to get back to deliver newspapers.
While Dad and I talked with Trina, Giselle commandeered one of the Color Computer demo machines and started playing with it.
Trina did show us the store copy of the catalog of third party-products. Tried to send us home with another copy of the current general catalog, but I told her I already had it.
She also showed us some printers. But she wasn't able to provide any information about Spanish language word processing at the time.
On a later trip, she showed me in an updated 3rd party catalog that Spanish support was available for the Model III, similar to the Apple. The color Computer would require more hardware for displaying Spanish characters, but it would be simple to add drivers for it if we used the OS-9 operating system.
Giselle really took to the Color Computer while she was playing with it that day. I was less impressed, knowing about the hardware and thinking that Radio Shack had managed to avoid taking advantage of the potential of the 6809 in it for any purpose but price-cutting. But it was still interesting.
Dad tried to compare the Model III with the Color Computer.
"Okay, the Color Computer is significantly cheaper, if you have a TV already, but the Model III's 80 column screen is much better. The Color Computer's 32 column screen makes it look like a toy in comparison."
I agreed. "But if you use OS-9, you can hang an 80-column terminal on it, so it isn't a fatal flaw."
"But it makes the Color Computer more expensive."
"True."
"So why buy the Color Computer instead of the Model III?"
"Your son is looking at developing computer software and hardware," Trina began.
Dad nodded.
She continued, "The market for 3rd party software and hardware for the Model III is pretty well filled with established players. It's a crowded market. There's a lot more room to compete in in the 3rd party market for the Color Computer."
That's the kind of response I was always slow with when I worked for Radio Shack before my mission, and that's probably the biggest reason I didn't do well at sales.
"And there's OS-9," I added. "But with the way Radio Shack focused on cheap hardware, OS-9 is not as much of a plus as it should be."
Trina left my comment alone, and Dad just looked at me with a blank look.
On the way home, Dad said, "Radio Shack's computers look cheaper, but I get the impression the add-ons nickel-and-dime you to death, as Denny would say."
It was something I had thought about, too. "Right now, any way you go, you get the same need for add-ons. Jim showed us an integrated system with the Apple. With Radio Shack, we'd have to do more of the integration ourselves."
"But you can handle figuring out what to integrate and how?"
"Probably. No guarantees I won't make mistakes."
"No guarantee Jim won't make mistakes, either. There were other computers beside Apples in Jim's store, weren't there?"
"Northstar, Exidy, at least. I didn't ask about them because I didn't think they'd have as good support for the stuff you want and for my stuff."
After the newspapers were delivered, I went out to the garage and got to work. By the time I went to bed, the box was built, waiting for the sheet-metal lining for the Faraday cage to keep the Federal Communication Commission happy by reducing radio interference, and to protect the computer from static electricity.
Then I checked my homework. I had everything taken care of, so I started looking closely at the spec sheet for the 6829 memory management unit (MMU). I liked the idea of being able to move blocks of memory around logically (or virtually) in a 2 megabyte physical address space. But the 6829 was designed for the 6809, so I would have to design circuitry to mimic the 6809's control signals, and then I would have to verify all the existing address decode timings, and rework a lot of it to fit the 6829 in between the CPU and memory and I/O devices.
It looked like more work than I wanted to do.
And I got distracted for a half an hour, looking ahead and making scratch diagrams of a computer like the Micro Chroma based on the 6809. (The real me wasted quite a bit more than half an hour on such attempts to plan ahead.)
[Backed up at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/02/bk-33209-wandering-eyes.html.]
No comments:
Post a Comment