Saturday, November 5, 2022

33209: Discovering the 6800 -- Parents and Polygamy

A Look at the 8080/TOC

"Whoa, Merry, look who's here!" Jim said, sotto voce. He, Roderick, and I were at our lab table working on more assembly language code.

Everybody looked up and then looked at the door, except me and Jim. I gave Jim a look, and he tilted his head towards the door and grinned.

"Hi guys." Beryl walked in.

"Hi!"

"Hey."

"Yo."

"Hi, Beryl." I stood up and reached for an empty stool, but Roderick grabbed it first and slid it over next to me.

Beryl came in and came over to our lab table, greeting Trina with a touch of the fingertips and a "Hi" before sitting down on the offered stool.

"How was practice?" I asked.

"Good enough. Whacha doin'?" Beryl looked at our scratch paper, where we had diagrammed what we understood of the problem and were writing tentative sequences of code.

"Working out how to add big numbers," Roderick answered before I could.

"Bigger than what fits in the eight bits we showed you yesterday," I added.

She looked at the diagrams with a bit of interest, then shrugged. "Geek to me." 

Chuckles came from various directions. 

"Got time to wait while we test this?"

"Sure. If it's not more than half an hour."

Todd looked up from where he and his group were helping Mr. Forrest test the serial I/O board in the computer. "Should we yield the field and let them try their code?" he asked.

Mr. Forrest nodded. "Time to take a break and see if we've figured anything out, anyway."

I gave Jim and Roderick a query with my eyes, and they both shook their heads. 

"Not my code," Roderick responded.

"Let's use yours," Jim said.

Todd, Chuck, Moose, and Mr. Forrest stood up and yielded place for us at the Altair's table.

I sat in front of the Altair 8800 and used the front panel interface to toggle in the code.

Beryl came over and stood behind me, resting her hands on my shoulders. I stopped working the switches long enough to give one of her hands a squeeze, using the time to squelching the nervous thrill that tried to stop my brain from working. I also ignored the snickers and murmurs around me. 

"So what are these numbers in real num -- uhm, decimal?" Beryl asked.

"123 million 456 thousand 789 plus 987 million 654 thousand 321."

"Ah. One billion, one hundred eleven million, one hundred eleven thousand, one hundred ten." 

More murmurs around us.

I turned and grinned at her. "And you pretend you don't know what we're doing here."

"Just an easy arithmetic problem." She grinned back.

Chuckles and quiet groans. Trina snickered. "Genius attracts genius?"

Beryl turned and they exchanged finger waves.

I looked at the ceiling. "How am I supposed to respond to that?" I muttered. I looked back at the computer.

Beryl gave my shoulders a squeeze. My stomach jumped, ever so slightly.

"Okay, let's see if it flies." I stepped through, reading the input numbers and results aloud.

00010101 plus
10110001 equals
11000110

I checked the status register LEDs. "-- with no carry. Good," I breathed.

11001101 plus
01101000 equals
00110101

"-- again, with no carry. Okay," I nodded, cautious.

01011011 plus
11011110 equals
00111010,

The carry bit in the status register array of LEDs lit up. 

"-- with a carry. So far, so good. Okay," 

The carry, plus
00000111 plus
00111010 equals
01000010

And everybody clapped.

"Let's see your code." Mr. Forrest checked my work. "Lots of repeated instructions. That's faster than a loop, but it takes more program space, and we only have 4K that we know is working just yet. Try a loop?" 

"Well, that's what Jim and Roderick were working on, but we weren't comfortable with where we put the loop count or with what happened to the carry while counting the loop."

"Let me see that, Jim." 

Jim handed Mr. Forrest his work, and he checked through it, nodded, and handed it back. "Want to give it a try?"

"No confidence."

"Results might be interesting?"

"I'm not sure I'd have any idea what went wrong."

"We can all think about it. Joe, write your code up on the board for everyone to look at. And Jim, you can write yours on the board next to Joe's. Try to line up instructions that do the same things."

Jim and I went to the board and put our code up. We consulted about what lined up where, leaving some empty lines in my code where the loop control went and putting the repeated code from his loop in parenthesis to show where it matched my code.

"Still hesitant to try it, Jim?" Mr. Forrest asked.

Jim went back to our lab desk and looked through the summary of 8080 machine code instructions and their effects which Mr. Forrest had handed out for each lab group. He looked up and said, "Sure. Why not?"

"Hot seat." Mr. Forrest indicated the stool I had vacated.

"Do I get a back rub from Beryl?" Jim asked, with a wink at me. I grinned and looked at Beryl. 

She grinned back. "Oh, since you're Joey's lab partner, why not?"

Jim looked surprised, but pleased, and sat down. Beryl stood behind him and rubbed his shoulders, then gave them a hard squeeze.

"Ouch. Feels good!"

Everyone laughed.

JIm's code ran successfully, as well, and we all applauded.

"Okay, I'm thinking we can leave the teletype for tomorrow and just let the rest of you try your code, and then maybe I can get home by midnight tonight. You can go when your code runs."

We all laughed.

After discussing the results we got with Jim and Roderick, I packed up my stuff and left with Beryl. We turned left out the door, and she slipped her hand into mine.

At the first cross hall, I started to turn the library and bumped into her. We both giggled as I corrected course. 

"This is the long way to the library?" I asked.

"Dad and Mom are home."

This time I couldn't squelch the butterflies in my stomach, and stopped.

Beryl turned back without dropping my hand, challenging me with her eyes. 

"Erm, okay." 

I started moving again, not quite feeling the faux granite floor under my tennis shoes. I couldn't say anything as we walked. 

Beryl gently but playfully swung my hand in hers. She was doing the swinging. My muscles wouldn't have obeyed me if I had tried.

"Cat got your tongue?" she asked as we left the south wing. 

It would be a few more years before the entire campus would be fenced in, se we headed unimpeded for the street where she lived, less than ten minutes away.

"The cat or the butterflies she's chasing."

She giggled. 

"Meeting your dad?"

"And Mom and Donna."

"Donna?"

"Kid sister."

"You've never told me about your family."

"You haven't told me much about yours. Your dad's a professor at the college, but other than that?"

"My mom, well, she teaches at church and volunteers at the Globe."

"Globe of the Great Southwest. Does she act?"

"Took the part of Juliet's nurse, and the witch in Macbeth."

"Do you act?"

"I did some sort of extra part in the Wizard of Oz. I'm the youngest of six. Four sisters and a brother. One sister's married to an Air Force codebreaker stationed in the Philippines, the others are working their way through school. Denny's working on an engineering degree."

 Beryl was suddenly quiet. "My big brother died when I was kind of young."

"Oh." I didn't know what to say to that. "Sorry to hear about that."

"I miss him sometimes. But I think he's happy in heaven."

"That's a good hope to have. I believe in the afterlife, too."

"Yeah. Heaven's a good place."

We came too soon to her house, and her dad faced me at the front door with an impassive expression. Her mother took Beryl's hand and pulled her inside, hugging her closely.

"So. This is the Mormon boy that has been stalking my daughter for four years."

He didn't seem to be joking.

"Dad?"

"Yes, sir." I said, not cracking a smile.

"What about this polygamy thing? How many wives besides my daughter do you plan on marrying?"

"No, sir. Beryl and I are not anywhere close to discussing marriage in the first place. Yeah, I've had a terrible crush on her since junior high, but we haven't been talking about the future at all. And, in the second place, Mormons don't do polygamy any more."

"Any more?" her mom asked.

"One of my great-great grandfathers lost his wife while crossing the plains to Utah, and when he got to Utah he married a widow with six kids who lost her husband on the way. With the second wife's permission, he married a third woman." 

"So, two living wives?"

"Yeah."

"And what do you think of it?" her father took over interrogation again.

"Don't really think about it much. The third wife, from what I understand, was not getting any offers for marriage on account of her health, and was having trouble supporting herself, so it was a way to provide for her without putting her on the street. But there were jealousies."

Beryl's parents looked at each other.

"But you don't do that any more?" her mom asked.

"Why is that?" her dad followed on, in a tone that broached no nonsense.

"Well, there are several reasons. One is that God told us that, rather than go to war with all the people who thought that polygamy should be a capital offense, polygamy would no longer be required of us."

"Required?" Beryl asked, puzzled.

"It was a different world. A single woman back then was looked on with suspicion and misunderstanding."

Her dad cleared his throat.

Beryl's puzzlement increased. "Huh?"

Beryl's mother hugged Beryl tighter, whispering something to her. 

Beryl's face drained color. She turned to her mother. "No!"

I continued, "Anyway, it did help prevent the worst options. When it worked well, it seemed to give women more and better options. And that was what the glory was supposed to be all about -- pure religion is when you help those who need help, and society didn't really have good ways to provide for single women back then."

"Still don't," her mom muttered, and her dad gave her a sideways glance.

"I think we at least have more options now," I continued. "Also, part of the principle was that, if a man were being abusive towards a wife, the wife wouldn't have to stay with him. That principle is still supposed to apply. It helps that modern law recognizes the rights of women better than it did then."

Beryl's mom relaxed a bit, and her dad's expression became a little less stern.

I continued. "Unfortunately, members with fundamentalist ideologies sometimes got things wrong about it and instead of being an opportunity to help, it became a focus of power struggles within those families, and a tool of abuse. Towards the end of the last century, that was happening too often. I tend to think that was the real reason the Lord let the government force us into a position where we had to quit. We weren't doing it right."

"So, you're saying no Mormons marry polygamously any more." Her dad was still pressing.

"There are still members who misunderstand which principles of the Gospel are fundamental, and some of them practice polygamy in secret, or leave the Church to practice it. If members who are doing it secretly are found out, they are excommunicated."

"Well, that could cause problems, too, couldn't it?" her mom questioned.

"Yeah. Unfortunately, we aren't very perfect. We should be making sure that, even if they are excommunicated, we still try to help them, but I think we have trouble doing that too often, as well."

"So, would you ever do it?" Her dad asked.

"Not planning on it. I'm not sure I could avoid the problems that often occur. I hope I don't have to face the question, but I also don't expect to."

"Why not?"

"According to my understanding of the scriptures, it's supposed to be only for exceptionally difficult times. We have scriptures that are pretty explicit about that."

Her dad frowned, and probably a full minute passed while he thought. Then he turned to his wife and something passed between them that I couldn't read. He turned back to me. "Son," her dad said, "I've heard enough good about you from Beryl that I'm going to give you a chance to prove yourself."

I took a deep breath. "I hope you will not be offended that I won't be trying to prove myself. I always do my best to live a moral life and treat all people with respect, and I'll just hope that will be good enough."

He grinned and reached out and shook my hand. "We'll see. We'll see. Well, come in so you and Beryl can study. That's what you came for, I think?"

"Yes, sir."

Donna was standing in the front room, watching the exchange with wide eyes, and Beryl introduced us. The two of them exchanged looks and giggles and grins, and Donna dragged Beryl off into the kitchen to talk for a minute. 

While they were gone, I introduced myself more properly to Karl and May, and they introduced themselves to me.

Then Beryl and Donna came back, and Beryl pulled me away from her parents and over to the couch, where we sat, spread our books out on the coffee table, and dug in.

TV or Not TV (Typewriter)


This is a minor revision of https://joelrees-novels.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-other-os-9-alternate-reality-calculations.html.

33209: Discovering the 6800 -- A Look at the 8080

Preface: 

This is not a memoir. God has told me not to look back at the things I have done wrong in my life. But I'm not really looking back, if it's something I never did, right? 

;-)

My apologies to the real-life Roderick, Beryl, Trina, Todd, Mr. Forrest, Merry, and others that I drag into my alternate reality retro fantasy where I fix a few things that went south in our reality.

I still find myself daydreaming about a fictional world in which I got more actively involved in the microcomputer revolution. More than one fictional world, in fact. I keep trying to write stories that are too big. That bad habit is probably inherent in trying to revise history. 

(Cough.) (I know, God, I'm looking back. But real life ain't very fun any more.)

This time I'm going to try turning my senior year into a story of its own (instead of the start of a reboot). Except, it isn't my senior year, it's Merry's. And, instead of buying a cheap programmable TI calculator, he saves his money and buys something more useful to his future.


(33209 Book 0:)

Discovering the 6800

by Joel Matthew Rees
Copyright 2022, Joel Matthew Rees


Prologue, a Look at the 8080

Beryl looked over at me with puzzlement in her blue eyes. "The lights flash."

I nodded. 

She shook her head. "I don't get it."

Jim snickered. 

I sighed and looked aside, searching the wall of the electronics lab for clues.

"Your eyes just turned green." Beryl smiled at me with a quiet laugh.

Roderick laughed out loud. "Merry, buddy, you're wasting Beryl's time making her look at this Altair here."

"Shooash!" Trina let out in exasperation. "No, he's not. Beryl's trying to understand. Everyone just shut up and let Joe show her what we're doing."

"Who's Mary?" Beryl asked. "Oh." She looked back at me.

I looked at the ceiling and nodded. 

She frowned and turned to Roderick.

He backed off his stool, raising his hands in defense. "It's a nickname."

"Yeah," I laughed. "Only my best friends get to call me that." 

Roderick grinned and sat back down as Beryl turned back to query me silently, those blue eyes confusing me, as usual. 

I shrugged, and gave her a lopsided grin. She wrinkled her nose and her puzzled expression turned into a wry smile.

"Anyway, we start out putting forty-nine in the accumulator." I picked up the hand-written program listing again and indicated the line that did that.

 3E 31    MVI A, 49 ; 00110001

Then I used the microcomputer's front panel switches to set the starting address back to zero. "The LEDs that are lit are ones and the dark LEDs are zeroes, and that was binary 0-0 1-1-0 0-0-1 on these lights here after it did the first instruction." I stepped the processor through the first instruction and the lights that showed the accumulator value lit up again with the 00 110 001 pattern.

"You showed me how you convert forty-nine into base two and it turns into that long string of ones and zeroes." She pursed her lips and wrinkled her chin. "A is another name for the variable you call the accumulator."

"Yeah."

"Move to A, forty-nine. Deliberately backwards grammar."

"I guess some engineer at Intel thought it would make more sense to engineers or something." I shrugged apologetically.

Beryl shook her head. "I still don't get it, but I'll play along."

"Yeah," Chuck complained. "Play along. That's what we all do."

The students around us broke out in laughter, and Mr. Forrest, our teacher, chuckled. 

Beryl tilted her head. "And then you move the number from accumulator A to register B, right?" She put her finger on the next line.

 47    MOV B, A

I hit the step switch on the front panel. "Right. You're getting it."

"No I'm not." She pouted, then giggled.

Trina laughed. "That's the way, Beryl. Keep these guys in their place."

Beryl grinned and leaned over and bumped elbows with Trina.

Turning back to the listing, she continued. "And you move nineteen into the accumulator so I can see the pretty lights change." She pointed at the listing.

 3E 13    MVI A, 19

And I stepped the instruction. "Yeah. Binary 00 011 001." And that was what the accumulator output LED array showed.

"I guess I see that. Maybe. And you move it to register C to get it out of the way for some reason?" She pointed at the next line.

 4F    MOV C, A

I stepped it. "Pretty much exactly. I thought it would make it easier for us all to watch."

"And then you move the forty-nine in B back to the accumulator for the same reason."

 78    MOV A, B

"Right," I nodded, stepping again.

"And add the two numbers."

 81    ADD C

"Uh, huh."

"And stop so we can think about what the pretty lights say." She pointed to the last instruction.

 76    HLT

"And the result is binary," she read from the front panel, "01 000 100." She took a deep breath. "Which you showed me is sixty-eight."

 Todd showed her the conversion on his HP calculator again.

"Thanks, Todd."

"Any time you want to look at my calculator, just ask."

"Careful, Todd!" Chuck warned him. "Merry, I mean, Joe, might have something to say about that."

I gave Chuck a look. "Last I checked I don't give orders to anyone in this room." I looked back at Beryl apologetically.

She wrinkled her forehead and nose at me. "Thanks for the offer, Todd."

Some of the guys in the room started to give wolf whistles, but Mr. Forrest cleared his throat and they stopped.

"But I still don't see the point."

Mr. Forrest stood up. "Well, I think I've arranged for the university to loan us a teletype, and I got a package with the free software Tiny BASIC language interpreter on tape, so we might have something more interesting to look at in a few days."

"Thank you, Mr. Forrest. And thanks, everyone, for showing me what Joey gets all excited about."

"Whoa." Jack pulled his head back in mock horror. "Nobody gets to call him Joey."

I rolled my eyes again and raised my hands to the sky in mock resignation as the guys in the class broke out in laughter again.

Beryl gave me a wry smile and a wrinkle of the nose. "Now are you going to help me with the political science homework?"

"Sure. Let's go."

"Wooped. Just wooped," Frank commented, earning a dirty look from Trina while most of the guys in the class erupted in laughter.

I chuckled and shook my head as I put the listing away.

"Wait a minute, Joe." Mr. Forrest stood up. "The rest of you guys, too. I need to tell you all something."

We all quieted down.

"I have an opportunity to go to a microcomputer show in San Francisco, April 16th and 17th, and there's room in the car for a couple or three students to go with me. I've got permission from the school, but you'll need parental or guardian permission."

He looked around at us while we digested the information.

"If more than three of you want to go, we'll have to figure out a way to choose who goes. Maybe a programming or electronics problem to solve. We can talk about that tomorrow, but anyone who's interested, please check with your parents tonight."

"Whoa, yeah."

"Alright!"

"Cool!"

"I'm in!"

"Count me out."

I didn't say anything. 

Beryl looked at me with a question in her eyes as she picked up her books.

"Shoot yeah, I'm interested." 

I switched the power off on the microcomputer and picked up my books. Then I stopped. 

"Oh. Wait."

She looked down quickly as she stood up. "Well, let's go study poli-sci," she said, disappointment tinging her voice.

I followed her out of the electronics lab into the hall. "That's when the cheering squad's year-end competition is, isn't it?"

"Never mind." She didn't turn back to look at me. "If you need to go, you need to go."

She walked ahead as we headed to the library.


Chapters (tentative list):

  1. Parents and Polygamy
  2. Calculations and Revelations
  3. TV or Not TV (Typewriter)
  4. Faire Enough
  5. BASICally Proceed Forth
  6. Surveying the Field
  7. Sacrifice and Service


Parents and Polygamy


(This is a minor rewrite of https://joelrees-novels.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-other-os-9-alternate-reality.html.)

Sunday, January 16, 2022

The Other OS-9, an Alternate Reality -- Calculations and Revelations

[I think I'm going to repurpose this chapter and the story it began. See https://joelrees-novels.blogspot.com/2022/11/33209-discovering-6800-parents-and-polygamy.html.]

Prologue/TOC

"Whoa, Mary, look who's here!" Jim said too loudly, pretend sotto voce. He, Roderick, and I were at our lab desk working on multi-byte addition in hand-written assembly.

Everybody looked at the door. I looked over at Jim instead, and he raised his hands with a grin, backing away on his stool.

"Hi guys."

I rolled my eyes and shook my head and turned to the door. "Hi, Beryl."

She came in and walked over, greeting Trina with a touch of the fingertips and a "Hi" on the way.

Roderick shifted over to an empty stool, and Beryl sat down by me.

"How was practice?" I asked.

"Good enough. Whacha doin'?" Beryl looked at the scratch paper where we had diagrammed what we understood of the problem and were writing tentative sequences of assembly language.

"Working out how to add big numbers," Roderick answered before I could.

"Bigger than what fits in the eight bits we showed you yesterday," I added.

She looked at the diagrams with a bit of interest, then shrugged. "Greek to me." 

Chuckles came from various directions. 

"Got time to wait while we test this?"

"Sure. If it's not more than half an hour."

Chuck looked up from where he and his group were helping Mister Forrest test the serial I/O board in the computer. "Can we let them try their code?" he asked.

Mr. Forrest nodded. "Time to take a break and see what we've figured out so far, anyway."

I looked at Jim and Roderick, and they both shook their heads. 

"Let's use your code," Jim said.

Todd moved an empty stool over for me and I sat down at their lab desk. Jim and Roderick stood at either side of me to watch while I used the front panel interface to toggle in the code. 

Beryl came over and stood behind me, resting her hands on my shoulders. I stopped working the switches long enough to give one hand a squeeze, deliberately squelching the nervous thrill that tried to course through me and stop my brain from working. I also ignored the murmurs around me. 

"So what are these numbers in real num -- uhm, decimal?"

"Decimal. 123,456,789 plus 987,654,321 equals --"

"One billion, one hundred eleven million, one hundred eleven thousand, one hundred ten," she finished for me.

More murmurs around us.

I turned and grinned at her. "And you pretend you don't know what we're doing here."

"Just arithmetic." She grinned back.

Chuckles and quiet groans. Trina snickered. "Genius attracts genius?"

Beryl turned and they exchanged finger waves.

I looked at the ceiling. "How am I supposed to respond to that?" I muttered, and looked back at the computer.

Beryl gave my shoulders a squeeze. My stomach jumped, ever so slightly.

"Okay, let's see if it flies." I stepped through, reading the input numbers and results aloud.

00010101 plus
10110001 equals
11000110

I checked the status register LEDs. "-- with no carry. Good," I breathed.

11001101 plus
01101000 equals
00110101

"-- again, with no carry. Okay," I nodded, cautious.

01011011 plus
11011110 equals
00111010,

The carry bit in the status register array of LEDs lit up. "-- with a carry. So far, so good. Okay," 

The carry, plus
00000111 plus
00111010 equals
01000010

And everybody clapped.

"Let's see your code." Mr. Forrest checked my work. "Lots of repeated instructions. That's faster than a loop, but it takes more program space, and we only have 4K that we know is working just yet. Try a loop?" 

"Well, that's what Jim is working on, but we weren't comfortable with where we put the loop count or with what happened to the carry while counting the loop."

"Let me see that, Jim." 

Jim handed Mr. Forrest his work, and he checked through it, nodded, and handed it back. "Want to give it a try?"

"No confidence."

"Results might be interesting?"

"I'm not sure I'd have any idea what went wrong."

"We can all think about it. Joe, write your code up on the board for everyone to look at. And Jim, you can write yours on the board next to Joe's. Try to line up instructions that do the same things."

Jim and I went to the board and put our code up. We consulted about what lined up where, and where I needed to leave empty lines so we could line things up.

"Still hesitant to try it, Jim?" Mr. Forrest asked.

Jim went back to our lab desk and looked through the summary of 8080 machine code instructions and their effects which Mr. Forrest had handed out for each lab group. He looked up and said, "It might work."

"Hot seat." Mr. Forrest indicated the stool I had been sitting on to use the computer.

"Do I get a back rub from Beryl?" Jim asked, with a wink at me. I grinned and looked at Beryl. 

She grinned back. "Oh, since you're Joey's lab partner, why not?"

Jim looked surprised, but pleased, and sat down. Beryl stood behind him and rubbed his shoulders, then gave them a hard squeeze.

"Ouch. Feels good!"

Everyone laughed.

JIm's code ran successfully, as well, and we all applauded.

"Okay, I'm thinking we can leave the teletype for tomorrow and just let the rest of you try your code, and then maybe I can get home by midnight tonight."

We all laughed.

After discussing the results we got with Jim and Roderick, I packed up my stuff and left with Beryl. We turned left out the door, and she slipped her left hand into my right.

At the first cross hall, I started to turn right and almost bumped into her. I corrected course quickly and followed her straight across. 

"This is the long way to the library." 

"My house tonight. Dad and Mom are home."

This time I couldn't squelch the butterflies in my stomach, and stopped.

Beryl looked up and back at me, challenging me. 

"Erm, okay." I started moving again, not quite feeling the faux granite floor under my tennis shoes. I couldn't say anything as we walked, Beryl gently but playfully swinging our hands between us. She was doing the swinging. My muscles wouldn't have obeyed me if I had tried.

"Cat got your tongue?" she asked playfully as we left the south wing. The fence wouldn't go up around the campus for another couple of years, and we headed unimpeded for the street where she lived, less than ten minutes away.

"The cat or the butterflies she's chasing."

She giggled. 

"Meeting your dad?"

"And Mom and Donna."

"Donna?"

"Kid sister."

"You've never told me about your family."

"You haven't told me much about yours. I remember you're the youngest and you have, what, four sisters?"

"And one brother."

"... and one brother." She paused, suddenly quiet. "My big brother died when I was kind of young."

"Oh." I didn't know what to say to that. "Sorry to hear about that."

"I miss him sometimes. But I think he's happy in heaven."

"That's a good hope to have. I believe in the afterlife, too."

"Yeah. Heaven's a good place."

We came too soon to her house, and her dad faced me at the front door. Her mother took Beryl's hand and pulled her in, hugging her closely.

"So. This is the Mormon boy that has been stalking my daughter for four years."

I couldn't tell if he was joking or not.

"Dad!"

"Yes, sir." I said, not cracking a smile.

"What about this polygamy thing? How many wives besides my daughter do you plan on marrying?"

"No, sir. Beryl and I have not discussed marriage in the first place. No plans about that at all at this time. And, in the second place, we Mormons don't do polygamy any more."

"Any more?" her mom asked.

"One of my great-grandfathers lost his wife on crossing the plains to Utah, and when he got to Utah he married a widow with six kids who lost her husband on the way. With the second wife's permission, he married a third woman."

"So why don't you do that any more?" her dad asked, in a tone that broached no nonsense.

"Well, there are several reasons. One is that God told us that, rather than go to war with all the people who thought that polygamy was a capital offense, polygamy would no longer be required of us."

"Required?" Beryl asked, puzzled.

"It was a different world. A single woman back then was looked on with suspicion and misunderstanding."

Her dad cleared his throat.

Beryl's puzzlement increased. "Huh?"

Beryl's mother hugged Beryl tighter, whispering something to her. 

Beryl's face drained color. She turned to her mother. "No!"

I continued, "Anyway, when polygamy worked well, it helped prevent the worst options. It didn't always work well, but the leaders of the Church were rather strict that a polygamous wife who felt that she was in a bad marriage could be released from the bad marriage and be free to seek someone better. In marriage. Without having to leave her children or her belongings behind."

Beryl's mom suddenly relaxed, and her dad's stern expression softened slightly.

I continued. "Unfortunately, the members with fundamentalist inclinations who sometimes leave us, leave us before they understand what polygamy was supposed to be. And that can cause some pretty abusive family situations for them. Which brings up a third reason we quit. By the end of the last century, too many of our regular members were beginning to practice it without understanding it."

Her dad and mom both relaxed at the same time. 

"Son," her dad said, "I've heard enough good about you from Beryl that I'm going to give you a chance to prove yourself."

I took a deep breath. "I hope you will not be offended that I won't be trying to prove myself. I always do my best to live a moral life and treat all people with respect, and I hope that will be good enough."

He grinned. "We'll see. We shall see. Well, come in so you and Beryl can study. That's what you came for, I think?"

"Yes, sir."

Donna was standing in the front room, watching the drama wide-eyed, and Beryl introduced us. The two of them exchanged looks and giggles and grins, and Donna dragged Beryl off into the kitchen to talk for a minute. 

While they were gone, I introduced myself to Karl and May, and they introduced themselves to me.

Then they came back, and Beryl dragged me over to the couch, where we sat, spread out our books on the coffee table, and dug in.

TV or Not TV (Typewriter)



Backed up here: https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2022/01/bk-the-other-os-9-alternate-reality-calculations.html.

Monday, January 10, 2022

The Other OS-9, an Alternate Reality

[I think I'm going to repurpose this chapter and the story it began. See https://joelrees-novels.blogspot.com/2022/11/33209-discovering-6800-look-at-8080.html.]

Prologue, part I: 

God has told me not to look back at the things I have done wrong. He has not told me not to look back at things I haven't done wrong.

This story is something in the vein of the 33209 story, but with a simpler technology timeline than that. More like the one I laid out in this blogpost about the first OS-9: https://defining-computers.blogspot.com/2021/10/alternate-reality-early-microcomputer.html

I  think I'll use a simpler story and plot, as well, as well as the simpler technology roadmap. 

I'll go back to Japan almost immediately after my mission to chase Satomi, and end up meeting Chika while she is still in high school. And she will make herself obnoxious so that I have to invite her for a year of home-stay high school studies with my parents. And she will be one of the women who push me to develop my interest in the nascent microcomputer industry. 

And I'll have to push Jeff Raskin ahead on that text-based Apple IX in 1980 somehow. That's a tough one, but not nearly as tough as inventing reasons for Motorola to keep a double flagship market profile with the 68000 and 6809, and to evolve both more rapidly. 

In order to do that, and to clear up how the whole mess started, I guess I'll have to back up to my senior year in high school.

 

The Other OS-9
an Alternate Reality

by Joel Matthew Rees
Copyright 2022, Joel Matthew Rees


Prologue, part II:

Beryl looked over at me with puzzlement in her blue eyes. "The lights flash. I don't get it."

Jim snickered. 

I sighed and looked aside, searching the wall of the electronics lab for clues.

"Your eyes just turned green." Beryl smiled at me with a quiet laugh.

Roderick laughed out loud. "Mary, buddy, you're wasting Beryl's time looking at this Altair here."

"Shoosh!" Trina let out in exasperation. "No, he's not. Beryl's being patient, everyone just shut up and let Joe show Beryl what we're doing. Go ahead, Joe."

"Who's Merry?" Beryl asked me. "Oh. Wait. Marion. You."

I glanced at the ceiling and nodded. 

She frowned and turned to Roderick.

He backed off his stool, raising his hands in defense. "It's a nickname."

"Yeah," I laughed. "Only my best friends get to call me that." 

Roderick sat back down as Beryl turned back to query me silently, those blue eyes confusing me, as usual. I shrugged. She wrinkled her nose and her puzzled expression turned into a wry grin.

"Anyway, we start out putting forty-nine in the accumulator." I pointed at the hand written program listing again,

 3E 31    MVI A, 49 ; 00110001

and then used the microcomputer's front panel switches to set the starting address back to zero. "The shining LEDs are ones and dark LEDs are zeroes, and that was binary 0-0 1-1-0 0-0-1 on these lights here after it did the first instruction." I stepped into the first instruction and the lights that showed the accumulator value lit up again with the 00 110 001 pattern.

"You showed me how forty-nine decimal is that long string of ones and zeroes in base two. And for some reason," she pointed at the listing, "you write forty-nine after A, instead of before where it ought to be if it's going to be put in." 

"Intel's backwards assembler grammar," I shrugged apologetically.

Beryl shook her head. "I don't get it, but I'll play along."

"Yeah," Todd complained. "Play along. That's what we all do."

The students gathered around us broke out in laughter, and Mr. Forrest, our teacher, chuckled. 

She tilted her head. "And then you move the number from accumulator A to register B, right?" She put her finger on the next line.

 47    MOV B, A

I hit the step switch on the front panel. "Right. You're getting it."

"No I'm not." She pouted, then giggled.

Trina laughed. "That's the way, Beryl. Keep these guys in their place."

Beryl grinned and raised her elbow towards Trina, and they bumped elbows.

"And you move nineteen into the accumulator so I can see the pretty lights change," she continued.

She pointed at the listing,

 3E 13    MVI A, 19

And I stepped the instruction. "Yeah. Binary 00 011 001." The front panel showed the value in the accumulator output array.

"I guess I see that. Maybe. And you move it to register C to get it out of the way for some reason?" She pointed at the next line.

 4F    MOV C, A

"Pretty much exactly. I thought it would make it easier to watch."

"And then you move the forty-nine in B back to the accumulator for the same reason."

 78    MOV A, B

"Right." 

"And add the two numbers."

 81    ADD C

"Uh, huh."

"And stop so we can think about what the pretty lights say." She pointed to the last instruction.

 76    HLT

"And the result is binary," she read from the front panel, "01 000 100." She took a deep breath. "Which you showed me is sixty-eight."

Chuck showed her the conversion on his HP calculator again.

"Thanks, Chuck."

"Any time you want to look at my calculator, just ask."

"Careful!" Todd warned him. "Mary, I mean, Joe, might have something to say about that."

I gave Todd a look. "Last I checked I don't give orders to anyone in this room." I looked back at Beryl apologetically.

She wrinkled her forehead at me. "Thanks for the offer, anyway, Chuck." She didn't turn to look at him.

Some of the guys in the room started to give wolf whistles, but Mr. Forrest cleared his throat and they stopped.

"But I still don't see the point."

Mr. Forrest stood up. "Well, I think I've arranged for the university to loan us a teletype, and I got a package with the free software Tiny BASIC language interpreter on tape, so we might have something more interesting to look at in a couple of days."

"Thank you, Mr. Forrest. And thanks, everyone, for showing me what Joey gets all excited about."

"Whoa." Jack pulled his head back in mock horror. "Nobody gets to call him Joey."

I rolled my eyes and raised my hands to the sky in mock resignation as the guys in the class broke out in laughter again.

Beryl looked over and gave me a wry smile and a wrinkle of the nose. "Now are you going to help me with the political science homework?"

"Sure. Let's go."

The show over, the other students started to pack up, amid a buzz of conversation.

"Wait a minute, Joe. I have another announcement." Mr. Forrest stopped me.

We all quieted down.

"I have an opportunity to go to a microcomputer show in San Francisco, April 16th and 17th, and I can take a couple or three students with me. If more than three want to go, we'll have to figure out a way to choose who goes. Maybe a programming or electronics problem to solve. We can talk about that tomorrow, but anyone who's interested, please check with your parents tonight."

"Whoa, yeah."

"Alright!"

"Cool!"

"I'm in!"

Amid other excited responses there were a few less enthusiastic responses such as

"Count me out," 

as well.

Beryl looked at me with a question in her eyes as she picked up her books.

"Shoot yeah, I'm interested." I switched the power off on the microcomputer and picked up my sample program listing, slipping it back into my notebook, before picking up my own books. Then I stopped. "Oh. Wait."

She looked down quickly as she stood up. "Well, let's go study poli-sci," she said, disappointment tinging her voice.

I followed her out of the electronics lab into the hall. "That's when the cheering squad's year-end competition is, isn't it?"

"Never mind." She didn't turn back to look at me. "You need to go where you need to go."

She never let me bring the subject back up again.


Chapters:

  1. Calculations and Revelations
    To be written (tentative list):
  2. TV or Not TV (Typewriter)
  3. Faire Enough
  4. BASICally Proceed Forth
  5. Surveying the Field
  6. Sacrifice and Service
  7. Picking up Threads
  8. Rotating Media and Braun's Tube
  9. Unique OSses
  10. Splitting Their Stacks 
  11. Ken Thompson's Trusting Trust vs. Bootstrapping Your Own
  12. FM and Other Oriental Interests
  13. I Been Moved to PCs -- Microware, not MicroSoft
  14. A Piece of the Orient in Texas
  15. 2809 and 68010
  16. 68451 -- and Motorola Eats Their Own Dogfood
  17. Simulating Circuits and Automatic Layout
  18. Bounding Stacks and Other Segments
  19. 68RISC 
  20. Segments and Bounds -- 3XX09
  21. ... 
  22. Chikako on Her Mission, Marion in post-grad
  23. ...
  24. No Phishing
  25. ...
  26. Social Engineering
  27. Straits


Calculations and Revelations


Backed up here: https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2022/01/bk-the-other-os-9-alternate-reality.html.

33209: Discovering the 6800 -- Parents and Polygamy

A Look at the 8080/TOC "Whoa, Merry, look who's here!" Jim said, sotto voce. He, Roderick, and I were at our lab table ...