Episode: 696
Title: HPR0696: MrGadgets Path toward Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0696/hpr0696.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:03:37

---

Oh
Hello, this is Mr. Gadgett again, and I guess this is my second segment for hashbub
look radio talking about kind of the history of computers.
It's not my first computer, because I already talked about that my 1802 cause back
else, but this is a continuation of the early days of micro computing and the
computers that I owned during that the start of the computer revolution.
So phoning it in again for Kansas City, and the second computer I guess that I really
owned past the cause back elf was a 6502 base computer, and you know of course the
6502, the 6800, and the Z80 were really the ones that were in competition at this
particular point.
This is the, oh a couple of years after the initial 80008 base computers, so the Z80 was
a popular computer and had a lot of S100 bus computers.
The S100 bus was an early bus that was available for plug-in cards and things like that.
By this time we're talking about mostly computers that were going to be computers that you
could use with a keyboard, they'd have a composite video output that you could use with
a monitor.
You no longer had to have that teletype machine in order to save and even load a program
in.
It was a higher level language kind of a program, even assembly language.
And so we progressed along there about this time as when the Apple 1 came up and it was
a kit computer of course with the steam, so I was the act in jobs there in California,
the California Computing, you know, home group computer club there in the San Francisco
Bay area.
And there were several S100s, I remember one that was called the Saul 20, and oh man,
I left it after that Saul 20, but there's no way I was going to be able to afford that.
So there's another episode I'm going to talk about probably about why I got into computing
in the first place given the fact that I have a music degree, but I was working in the
recording studio at the University of Missouri Conservatory of Music and we had a pretty
extensive mode synthesizer, big wall about, oh, five feet tall and eight feet wide of modules
for the mode synthesizer.
And to actually be able to have that be computer controlled, we did have a little bit later
than the Saul 20 and everything like that, but somewhere around this time, 77, 78, somewhere
in there, they got a Commodore PET computer, Commodore being very familiar with a lot of you
I think because you know the Commodore Big 20 or Commodore 64 were your first computers.
Well this was a precursor to that, it was an all-in-one computer, it looked like a terminal,
you know it had the tube and the keyboard all-in-one with the computer board in there, all-ah,
the model three radio shack and all those kinds of things.
The radio shack model one had come out by now, I never had the money for a radio shack
model one, although I did do a lot of programming on it because there was one store in the
city area that actually had a model one in the store that you could actually go in and
see it.
It was a franchise store and the guy who owned the franchise's brother-in-law had bought
it, he had convinced him to leave it in the store and he would program it to do inventory
control for him for his business.
Still cassette, cassette had come on for saving in and storing a program, so that was a big
improvement over the old punch tape or having to enter it in by hand every single time.
I actually owned a Commodore programmable calculator, a lot of us, the programmable calculators
were the first things that you had that you could actually program that had a keyboard
in a display.
I had an early Commodore programmable calculator that was a reasonable cost and got that
as a birthday present.
So there was that Zic, I mean sorry, that Commodore PET computer, it had a special bus that had
the capability of controlling instruments like laboratory instruments and things like
that.
That's why we had that in the recording studio, we could use that to control some instrumentation
that we had as part of that MOG lab and things like that.
So I had access to those, but the actual first computer that I had with a keyboard and
the video built in and all that kind of stuff that I could afford was a Ohio scientific
computer and it was 6502 based.
As I said, there was a 6800, the 6502 and the 80 and this one happened to be based on
the 6502 and it had the keyboard, it kind of looked like a large electric typewriter,
but the back part didn't have a printer included in it.
In fact, it had the computer board and all those kinds of things.
You took up a cassette to load and save programs and it had a video out or a video monitor.
So I managed to scrounge enough money together to afford a Ohio scientific and could use
that to program in basic, taught myself basic and eventually got myself a job for the
local Ohio scientific computer dealer here in town writing programs for the Ohio scientific
systems and selling, you know, being a salesman and his little storefront operation that
he operated here in Kansas City.
So that was my second computer that I actually owned and eventually I got a Radio Shack
Color computer when it came out, it was a 6809, so it was a 6800 based computer.
The 6500 and 6800 series computers were very similar to one another.
There was some kind of commonality, I forget exactly what it was and the original development
of those.
So the instructions that's very similar, the actual layout of, you know, how the CPU worked
and how everything worked in the system were very, very similar.
The Z80 was a completely different kind of an animal, it was a different kind of a thing.
So the 6809 had the same advantage of the Cosmic Elter, a few things kind of built into
it, made it a little bit easier and fewer parts counts, those were talking about discrete
parts and, you know, dual inline package parts back then, so they'd take up a lot of room
on your board and there were fewer parts that were necessary in order to design a 6809
as opposed to a 6800, which was the original Motorola processor that came out.
6800 was Motorola and I forget who it was, it made to 6500.
The pet had that 6500 computer and the color computer that had the Radio Shack, by then
I had red, you know, my first byte magazines taught myself everything I do about computers.
I love reading of magazines taught myself programming and eventually made by living as a computer
programmer also taught. And so there was one other computer I thought that was a note here in
this transitional phase of these computers that were pre, you know, PC, right, pre-IBM PC,
advanced thoughts and all that kind of stuff in the early days. And that was earlier than even
the Commodore pet. There was a small single board computer called the Kim, the KIM, forget what
that stood for. Anyway, the Kim was also a 6500 base computer and it was kind of similar to
the Cosmac else because it had a little hex pad to enter in programs and little LED displays
that were actually started to the board to give you some output and things like that.
And it was a single board computer. It was a lot better than the Cosmac also because of the
expandability of it. It was a nice single board computer. It was designed as a single board computer
and you could, you had some good input output from that and everything like that. I found one of
those used out east of Kansas City and drove out there to purchase that and I found that in
the paper, I think, you know, this was before the internet. So I found an advertising that he
had it for sale and purchased that from him. And this is oh, not quite 20 miles east of Kansas City,
15 miles or so. drove into town to go to one of my best friends in college, shoes house and show him
my Kim computer that I had just bought my single board computer. And he talked me out of it,
and I own that computer for about three hours, I think, maybe a little bit less than that because
I bought it from the guy who I bought it from used and then I sold it to my friend and he eventually
used that and put it into his keyboard that he had for his PAI, a synthesizer, which was a bunch
of modules that you could build by hand and build your own synthesizer from scratch. And he had
put together all these modules for the synthesizer, he worked in a recording studio with me and
with the most synthesizer and all that kind of stuff and this was kind of like the poor man's version
of that might call in a whole episode on early days of synthesizers. But he used it and bounded it
in his keyboard and then used that to provide MIDI control to his synthesizer. This was, you know,
the actual keyboard that he had for his PAI was a resistive keyboard. You pushed down the key
at a certain point and that would short out a resistive strip and whatever the resistance was,
was the equivalent of the voltage, which was controlled the oscillator, which would be the pitch.
And so he had no way to feed in computerized kinds of things. So with the Kim, he could actually
feed in and control the voltages with the computer. He'd have programmable tunes that he could do.
He had a sequencer and he even had MIDI, which is the standard input output for synthesizers that
he could do through that Kim computer. So it lived a good life and it performed well over several
years for him. But I only owned that computer for about three hours, like I say. So I can't really
say how great the Kim was as a single board computer from direct usage just from watching how it
was used. Anyway, I think that will conclude things for the second episode of the history of computing
pre-dawspree IBM PC computing here. This was Mr. Gadgets and I think the next one that I'm going to
call in is my path towards Linux, which oddly enough it was going to be related to the color computer.
And I'll leave that as a teaser. We'll talk to you next time. Be careful out here on the technological
frontier. This is Mr. Gadgets, your trailblazer out here and I'll be looking at a path for you here by now.
Thank you for listening to H.P.R. sponsored by Carol.net. So head on over to C-A-R-O dot N-E-T for all of us in need.