The good ole guys and coding skills from way way back ;-)

All of you can now edit this first post,

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that is only 5 years long than me for writing code:smiling_imp:

you win
:money_mouth_face:

I wasn’t going to jump in on this, but . . . I might actually be the old guy of the bunch . . . my programming started on a General Electric GE-635 mainframe when Fortran 66 was just an infant. But . . . being such a dinosaur, I have to say how impressed I have been to see the work that all of you are doing. Wish a dinosaur could learn new tricks, but I guess I’ll just be happy playing with my SQL queries and tinkering a bit with JS code.

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For the record I’m two years younger than Don Lancaster.

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Now there’s a name that I haven’t heard in a long time! Ironically, I was cleaning out a storage closet at work last week and found my personal copy of his TTL Cookbook from the 1970’s. I also found a folder with hand-compiled 8080 opcodes for the system EPROM in my S-100 computer. Silly kids these days think that building a computer is slapping a motherboard into a case and popping in a Windows CD. It took me over a year to hand-compile a working EPROM to even boot CP/M from 8" floppy so that I could run an assembler!!!

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I started with an IBM 360, a Super Cray and then moved up to a MITS Altair 8800 and IMSAI 8080. 43 years later my phone has more computing power than all four combined. Todays “script kiddies” don’t have a clue what it’s like to actually build a process and understand logic.

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I’m not THAT old, but started my computer tinkering with a Trash80, dual disk drive. Was the awesome-est around.

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The TRS-80 model 3 was an amazing machine. I modified mine by pulling out the two full-height 360K floppies, installing two half-height 360K drives in the top bay and two half-height 720K drives in the bottom bay. And also added a real-time clock.

2.1 MBytes if storage. I’d never run out of space.

Fun stuff.

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here you can tchat the good ol’ days stuff :slight_smile:

First was an OSI C1P. 6502 CPU, 4K RAM, MS Basic and tape drive. Couldn’t afford the $600 180K single sided 5-1/4" floppy. But did update the RAM to 8K for an additional $400. That was in the late 1970s I believe.

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@GaryFunk - The reason why I get upset when someone lumps my work in with all other programmers is because I don’t consider myself a programmer. Any 5-year-old can slap together an app these days, but let’s see one of today’s generation of programmers get their greatest hits album to fit into a 2708 EPROM…with room to spare! :grin: Heck, let’s see them even pick a 2708 out of a police lineup… :wink:

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Hey . . . I believe I still have some 2708’s in my parts cabinet . . . but it sure has been a while since I used one. And I probably still have a TTL Cookbook around here somewhere, too. I understand that today’s app developers (of which some are certainly Gary’s “script kiddies”) are able to do things that we “older folks” didn’t have the computing power to accomplish . . . but still, all of today’s hardware and software is built on the same foundations that we “older folks” worked with day in and day out. I, too, don’t think that “slapping a motherboard into a case” counts as “building” a computer. I feel privileged to have worked on the foundations of today’s computing. The knowledge that came from working with vaccuum tubes and discrete transistors and diodes (ok . . . and selenium rectifiers, too) is still valuable to me today.

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Do any of you guys have RPI with 3.5" LCD?

I have a Pi3 set up with the official 7" touchscreen. Haven’t found a place where it would be useful yet, and not really thrilled with the kludgy support for an official piece of hardware in the last version of Raspbian…

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Yes. I have one. I have it set up to run softconsole to interact with the ISY.

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Can you link to the LCD you used? I’m on a quest to find the ideal LCD and case.

It’s not been easy and there is a lot of crap being sold.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2441

Currently listed as out of stock. It was quite a while ago that I got it. It says Adafruit 3.5" tft for RPi B+ on the back of the panel.

I also have a 7", I think this on https://www.adafruit.com/product/2718 I have it in a case with the RPi.

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That LCD, at $45 is about three times the cost compared to screens on Amazon. However it may very well be worth the price so I will order one to test with.

Someone needs to make a nice case and bezel.

I don’t know if it’s worth it or not, I bought mine quite a while ago when there wasn’t very many choices. I think the only other choice was a 2.8" LCD.

I had a friend print me this case for it. It’s not bad.