Mastodawn

if you were around during the 8-bit computer era, what computer brand/series/system would you want to have?

	Commodore (PET, VIC 20, C64, TED, C128, etc)
	Atari (Atari 8-bit line)
	Apple (Apple II)
	Tandy (TRS-80, TRS-80 Color Computer, etc)
	Texas Instruments (TI-99)
	Sinclair (ZX80, ZX81, ZX Spectrum, etc)
	BBC Micro
	MSX
	Amstrad CPC
	NEC (PC-88, etc)
	IBM (5150, etc)

Poll ends at Jun 23 at 11:53pm.

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Bert Driehuis 1d ago

@mjdxp I really wanted a TRS-80, but could afford a secondhand PET 2001 only. Learned a ton from it. Had a blast reading through the disassembly of the BASIC ROM. I vividly recall discovering the tokenizer. It seeded my interest in lexers and later yacc and regular expressions. The hardware being way to advanced (a single chip CPU, a 6522 for almost all I/O, etc). I was as elated that my high school had a disused PDP8, with schematics, which allowed me to study how instructions flowed through simple TTL logic. I hate all the black boxes we have to use ever since.

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Maddie 🎉 1️⃣7️⃣

1d ago

@bertdriehuis the PET is really cool, but honestly the main thing keeping me from getting one isn't necessarily the price, it's more that it takes up so much space which i really don't have :P

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Bert Driehuis

@mjdxp mine is in storage for that reason... It's been years since it was last powered up. And I lost the cassette tapes, so I have nothing to run on it. The little spare time I spend on retro computing these days goes to the PiDP11 with its beautiful blinkenlights. If ever I reach retirement age, I will probably sink some time in modifying the PiDP8 into the PDP8/e looks, especially the toggle switches...