[Coco] More ebay madness

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 26 January 2009, Ries, Rich (NY80) wrote:
>From: Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net>
>
>
>Tee tee. $5k?  Boggle...  Having once owned one of those, and finding
>its keyboard was a 30 minute wonder, I put a TI99/4a surplus keyboard on
>it by putting the whole thing in a bigger box, along with the 16k
>rampack, and gave it to my kids.  They had a blast with it, but sadly
>all turned out to be windows users to this day.  Something in the water
>maybe?  Dunno, but it
>makes me sad.
>
>
>Sorry, it was probably NOT the water. Remember, the TS-1000 had
>"windows": the listing window, the edit window, and the run window!
>
>I'm kinda fond of the Z-80, 'cause writing some assembler for it at work
>got me moved from Electronics Technician to Software Engineer!
>
That is another chuckle, but, IMO, you'd have to be a software engineer to 
understand the z80 and its warts well enough to write working code for it.  
Whether you had the title or not.  And I suspect in some cases they pass out 
fancy titles in lieu of raises.  Looks good on the business card. :-)

Treat that as the passing grade on the final test. :)

In my case I was also building the hardware to interface to an FM transmitter 
and control virtually all aspects of its performance, including the air 
conditioner required to hold the finals air environment to about 65F.  Early 
Sparta 600 tx, bipolar output transistors which would go into a thermal 
runaway and destroy themselves if it got up to 80F inside the cabinet.  It 
sat on a pedestal about a foot high with the window air conditioner feeding 
directly into the bottom of the cabinet.  I also ran the studio end of it on 
a ups of sorts, the supply output about 80 volts, which kept a half farad 
capacitor charged, and the controller ran on the output of a switching 
regulator I designed and built connected to that, including winding the 
transformer.  That would run the controller for about 2x what it normally 
took to get the standby generator started and up to speed when the commercial 
power took a dump.  Nobody told me I wasn't supposed to be able to do that, 
so I did.  But, that was also more than 25 years ago, and I now know 
better. :)

But I have a history of doing things I'm not supposed to be able to do.  I 
can't work for any telco for instance, no high school diploma, 8th grade 
only.  But its been a long, interesting ride, picking up a 1st phone ticket 
early on, a C.E.T. a bit later, a degree from the University of Hard Knocks, 
and even a G.E.D a few years ago just to complete the circle.

Yeah, I'm an old fart, but there are several of us on this list, so I figure 
I'm in pretty good company.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Time flies like an arrow.  Fruit flies like a banana.