
Playing Games on a 60s Computer [video] - souterrain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L743MjJthHY
======
gimmemahlulz
I just find the concept of programming at such a low level fascinating.
Stripping away all the complexities, boilerplate, and niceties of modern
programing and ending up with a system like this where you go from directly
modifying the contents of memory, to playing a fully fledged game written in
basic is amazing.

A good reminder that at the end of the day all this CS stuff is just ones and
zeros in a chip.

~~~
danielrpa
This is the computing I fell in love with back in the 80s/90s, when I could
realistically understand most, if not all about a given computer (that applies
mostly to 80s computers).

Nothing wrong with the stuff we do today, but I think some of the "magic" of
fully mastering a computer and seeing all those raw commands executing at
lightning speed (relatively speaking!) was lost.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
Its not lost, Its now microcontroller/arduino programming. Its a lot of fun to
write code for something so direct to the hardware. There is no OS, no
security, no multi tasking. You just write a bit to a certain memory address
linked to a pin and motor go brrr.

~~~
WWLink
Sometimes I think the higher end embedded chips are even more fun, because you
have an FPGA with shared memory to the processor and tons of IO pins. You can
do some truly ridiculous things, including emulating other processors in the
fpga fabric hehe.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
I haven't tried FPGAs yet, just doing basic AVR programming with GCC-AVR and
avrdude. Do FPGAs have an open source/hobby community around them like AVR
does? I have heard bad things about FPGA companies being old
fashioned/secretive.

~~~
opencl
It's true that the FPGA vendors are very secretive, often to the point of
requiring NDAs for access to datasheets and toolchains.

There is open source tooling for some FPGAs and a fairly small but very
helpful community around it.

Yosys, IceStorm, SymbiFlow, and nmigen are the major projects in the space
that I'm aware of.

------
nickt
Lovely background on what looks like the same machines working life here (PDF
link)

[http://vtda.org/docs/computing/SEL/SEL810ARonPrice.pdf](http://vtda.org/docs/computing/SEL/SEL810ARonPrice.pdf)

------
nsxwolf
Was there a more convenient way to perform the bootstrap? Couldn't it have
been in some kind of ROM? It appears to be only a handful of bytes.

~~~
inyorgroove
I also wondered this, what did the pipeline company do if/when there was a
loss of power?

~~~
rst
What you saw was the cold start procedure for a completely uninitialized
machine -- manually enter a short bootstrap loader of a dozen instructions or
so, just enough to load a longer one from whatever I/O device was handy. A
_lot_ of machines had this kind of start procedure -- if there's a large row
of switches on the front panel, that's probably what they were there for.

(Core memory would retain its contents without power, so if you were
absolutely _sure_ nothing could _possibly_ have disturbed that initial
bootstrap routine since the last time you toggled it in, it might still be
there. But a lab minicomputer of that era, probably didn't have any memory
protection at all, so that's a pretty big "if".)

~~~
bananicorn
Why is this being downvoted? Is it incorrect?

~~~
implements
I saw a Prime 750 minicomputer cold booted exactly as described in the 1980s -
so I can’t see any problem with that post.

Edit: It’s describing a situation where a “Resident Monitor” isn’t built in,
but is manually loaded after power up.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_monitor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_monitor)

------
jes
I enjoy these retro computing videos. I have fond memories of programming on
IBM 360 series systems, DEC, DG, TI and PR1ME systems. I was fortunate that my
high school in the 70s had a PDP-8 and an ASR-33 TTY that students could sign
up to use.

So much of life is a matter of luck, and I was definitely lucky to be a part
of the computer revolution over the course of my career.

------
coldpie
If you want to learn more about what he's doing on the front panel there,
check out this fantastic introduction to how the first PCs were operated with
front panel switches. This series is about the Altair 8800 but the same ideas
apply to most computers of the era. It starts out writing programs with front
panel switches, then shows how bootloader programs worked to load larger
programs off of tape or some other IO mechanism.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suyiMfzmZKs&list=PLB3mwSROoJ...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suyiMfzmZKs&list=PLB3mwSROoJ4KLWM8KwK0cD1dhX35wILBj)

------
mordechai9000
This brought back an old memory. My first exposure to a lunar lander game
looked very similar to the game he plays in the video. It was at the Pacific
Science Center in Seattle. This was in the early 80s, so it was probably
running on a microcomputer, not a behemoth like this. I only vaguely
understood what was happening, and I couldn't land successfully. But I loved
it, nonetheless.

------
xrd
I really wish I could have gotten my 7 year old son to think that this was
what games looked like. He would have stuck to his Diary of a Wimpy kid books
and never looked back.

~~~
coldpie
Point him at the Twine community :) Though be careful, some of them are uhhhh
"for mature audiences."

[http://twinery.org/](http://twinery.org/)

------
madengr
So why was the Altair front panel grouped into octal, but the Imsai in hex?

I find octal totally confusing.

~~~
coldpie
It's a balance between compactness and ease of converting to binary. The
switches on the front panel are in binary. It's a lot easier to convert octal
to binary than hexadecimal. For example:

    
    
        0o13 -> 0b1_011
    

versus

    
    
        0xB -> 0b1011

