The star of this evening was an under exercised
Commodore Pet 8032 brought by John Herron in advance of the
PET Hospital thread April 24 -> May 2.
In attendance were Charlie B., Chris B., John H., Keith S., Mark T.,
George W. which is quite a turnout... and to good effect.
In sobering news Sarah B. came out of a car flip this month with
a mark on the forehead and a sprained thumb. All this was due to a tire
blowout causing a veer into a guard rail culminating in an over-turned car.
Add that to a down turn in the economy seeing a 25% reduction in her
duties here at Conan's which is this very night. Conan's sure looked
crowded to us.
After downing beer and about 3 slices of pizza each, swapping stories
about kids, work, cars, prospective, new Amiga hardware the Sam460ex,
then John cracked open this Pet.
We unerringly followed John's plan of translating a printed BASIC
program to test the maxed out 32K Pet memory and save the program to
mass media!
Mark volunteered to be the data entry personnel. Ah! Brings back old
reflexes, like never forgetting how to ride a bicycle. Mark, through
his fingers, started remembering short cuts for data entry. The Pet
keyboard's "x" key was recalcitrant, so John, Mark, and I substituted
"l" whereever X was used as a variable (and that was often).
There was the usual mistaking "O" for "0" and vice versa. A real
conundrum, "[CLEAR,DOWN 11]", that stupidly scrolled on the display
was solved after we tumbled to the idea that it must somehow be an
ESCAPE sequence to perform a "Clear Screen" and "cursor down 11 lines"
operation. Mark said, "Aha! I remember. We edit and in place of
[CLEAR,DOWN 11] we press the <Clear> key followed by 11 (5
sufficed for us) <Down_arrow> key presses".
Ta Dah! It worked.
John H., appreciating the fight to get the page or so of compressed
and turgid BASIC, presented a Commodore tape drive for storing the
debugged program. He averred that he didn't know if it worked or
not.
You can see in the right most picture that success did come, but not
without some labor on our part. In keeping with his data entry
role Mark was the official "ground wire" holder while the program
was (over and over again) written and read from the tape, until we
got it right.
We had enough fun that we overran the usual meeting conclusion time
by 45 minutes.
Mon Mar 15, 2010<--
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Mon May 17, 2010
