[SunRescue] Re: Best wishes for Bill...

[Greg]

[ On Monday, November 6, 2000 at 23:33:24 (-0500), Ken Hansen wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [SunRescue] Re: Best wishes for Bill...
>
> I remember the 1802 from the Popular Electronics articles - I always wanted
> to build one of those "ELF"s as they were called....

I would have built one except the bastard I tried to buy the kit from
walked off with the money (over $500[cdn] in ~1980 $$$).  He was, IIRC,
up until that time a fairly regular advertiser in some of the PC
magazines of the time and I don't know how many times I wrote to him and
talked to him on the phone, etc., only to get the run around about how
the shipping wasn't working right or whatever (meanwhile Canada Post
would no doubt have had it to me in no time flat even at the cheapest
surface rate since the guy was in Hamilton, Ontario and I was still in
high school in Saskatchewan at the time).  It was my Mom's money and she
finally had me go in to town and talk to our lawyer who basically said
there wasn't much one could do for that "little" money in a different
province and all without spending more on his fees!  :-)

Live and learn I guess.

I did write a lot of 1802 assembler code for that thing even though I
never got to test it out, so I guess I learned more than just the hard
lesson about mail-order fraud.  It was way more cool a computer than the
AIM-65's we used in 1st-year University too (though the AIM already had
a full ready-to-use querty keyboard).  Writing the 1802 code and testing
it in my head helped with the AIM-65 though as I did end up writing a
fully multi-tasking system in 6502 assember for playing music on one
AIM-65 keyed from the keyboard of another that was connected by a
parallel bus, and vice versa, all while sitting in the TV room at
residence and waiting for the first space shuttle blast off.  I never
saw/heard that code work but my lab partners typed it in, did a bit of
debugging, and made it all work sufficiently well to get a good grade
for us (all while I was sleeping the next day).  I was totally
dumbfounded because all I handed them was foolscap sheets of opcodes,
and very few scribbled comments.  The damn shuttle never did blast off
that night either!  :-)

My little 1802 mail fraud episode wasn't anywhere near as big of a mess
though as that with the turkey who took off with about $200K in cash
after using wooden mock-ups for his adverts of cool new TRS-80
peripherals ($30K adverts that he never paid for either of course).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods at acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>