Supremetronic Redux

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Scott Allen <mlxxxp-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

| On 4 September 2012 11:21, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
| > I was thrilled and amazed by the first computer store I remember in
| > Toronto (1975).  I forget it's name, but it was in a house on
| > Gloucester (parallel to Wellesley, a few streets north) between Yonge
| > and Church. They sold these cute Poly 88 computers and lots of other
| > things
| > <http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=563>
| > An early S100 that didn't have switches and lights.
| 
| I bought my Poly 88 kit in July 1977 from
| Computer Mart Ltd.
| 1543 Bayview Ave.
| 
| I still have it.

Wow.

That seemed to me to be about the first micro done right, at least on
the surface, so to speak.  It had enough of a monitor in ROM that you
didn't need a bank of switches.  It eliminated a TON of TTL circuitry,
not to mention all the wiring and the switches and lights themselves.
It also made to box small and light, but not photogenic (it didn't
appear in WarGames <http://www.imdb.com/media/rm542161664/tt0086567>).

Of course that made it a little less useful for hardware debugging,
but I didn't want a computer optimized for hardware debugging.

Polycom distributed a neat poster advertising the Poly 88.  I used it
quite a bit as an 8080 reference card.  I still have it somewhere.

When did you last turn your Poly 88 on?  I've not turned my Altair on
in 20 years and now I've heard that I ought to go through a careful
bring-up procedure because failing capacitors might take a lot of
other bits with them.  (I bought my Altair, used, much later -- 1981.)

BTW, when I said Computermaster (yes, that was its name -- thanks, James) 
had lots of other things, I was exagerating.  They had a few and could 
order lots of others.  An example of what I remember: they had a 40-column 
printer, with a bunch of tradeoffs to reduce its price, for $400. Real 
printers (Qume, etc) were a LOT more expensive.

Instead of buying a computer at that time, I bought a clone of an IBM 
2741: a terminal that had at its core an IBM Selectric typewriter.  Speed: 
134.5 baud (15 characters per second).  It had a built-in modem with an 
acoustic coupler (i.e. you dialed up on a regular NE 500 style telephone 
and then placed the handset in the coupler).

To use it, I hacked 5th or 6th Edition UNIX to support the 2741.  Not 
actually easy: the character set was unrelated to ASCII (it was "tilt 
rotate code, encoding the position on the typeball of the character), 
shift was a character, the terminal was viciously half duplex (when the 
keyboard was unlocked, the computer could not print, and vice versa, and 
switching directions required an explicit act of the side in control).
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