[rescue] WANTED: Apple II cards

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

wa2egp at att.net wrote:

> I have a bunch of disks.  Some are used for interfacing a IIe with external
> sensors and graphing the results, some describe various concepts graphically.
> The ones I use the most was one that shows waves, intereference, Doppler
> effect, etc.  Another does a fair description of how electrons interact with
> light, particle motion of gases, gas laws (for chemistry).  There is a lot 
> of info on how to use the game port for interfacing.  Unforch the info is
> a little spread out in the basement.  I even have (somewhere) a gizmo that
> will measure your heart rate by using an LED and phototransistor connected
> to the game port.  Pretty neat for an old machine.

Sometimes it is easier to do things on the older hardware.

On a modern PC, there is a lot of hardware and software between the sensor and
the CPU, and you can't probe most of it.

With an old micro, they might be slow, but the realtime response can actually
be quite good because the pipeline between sensor and CPU is relatively
simple, you can probe it, and you can learn it inside and out.

A ton of current sensor work is still done with 8-bit micros for precisely
this reason.  It isn't just cost, because a lot of embedded boards cost as
much as a gaming rig.

-- 
shannon           | The object of war is not to die for your country but to
                  | make the other bastard die for his.
                  |         -- General George S. Patton