
The Sac State 8008: The First Full-Fledged Microcomputer (2008) - flyinghamster
http://www.digibarn.com/stories/bill-pentz-story/index.html
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WoodenChair
> John and I went to one of the early microcomputer shows in San Francisco.
> Steve Jobs was sitting on a wooden peach crate telling all his design in
> another box of wires that did not work was the computer of the future. He
> said that mass of wires was not working because something was bumped getting
> that mess to the show. John, who later became an IBM hardware design
> engineer, took pity on Steve and designed the Apple II system board which
> was the first version that actually worked no matter what is claimed today.

This comment makes me doubt some of the veracity of the rest of the article
and its extraordinary claims. But maybe I’m biased by reading a lot of the
accepted history.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Yeah, that's kind of weird, really. It basically ignores the existence of the
Apple I, and I've never seen anyone talk about Steve Jobs claiming to have
designed either the Apple I and II -- that's always been credited, even by
Jobs, to Wozniak.

Maybe this is supposed to be a claim about the Apple I and Wozniak, but that
still doesn't fully line up.

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snapetom
Hah. I never thought I'd see CSUS here on HN. I briefly went there, but wasn't
in CS. In the early 2000's, I worked in a large finance company in Sacramento.
Our tech lead spent a not insignificant portion of his time interviewing
people. He always complained how Sac State grads never knew anything software
relevant coming out of that program. They didn't know any web technologies or
Java, a little C, but they were all whizzes at hardware, COBOL, and assembly.

Looks like I underestimated that program in the 90's. This article gives me a
bit of a hint of where they were focused.

~~~
EdgarVerona
Sac State grad here, from 2002-2006! After the turn of the century they
started teaching more Java classes, but the most interesting classes were
definitely the Assembly and Computer Architecture classes. I never ended up
using them in my career, but they were a blast.

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SomeoneFromCA
The article uses wrong terminology. VLSI is just a generic to describe IC with
very high degree of integration, like a CPU or a real-time MPEG compressor.
What he described is actually an early attempt to produce FPGAs.

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peter_d_sherman
>"Because IBM dominated the computer market all Sac State computer science
students had to learn BAL (Basic Assembly Language) used on the IBM
System/360, 370 and later mainframes.

 _Students had to prove their mastery of BAL by writing a working assembler,
BASIC interpreter, simple compiler, operating system and data base._

To stop cheating completed student program listings, card decks and outputs
were collected and stored in a locked area that faculty members reviewed to
ensure students did not copy prior programs."

>"Bill recognized that all he needed was for the Intel 8008 to run the same
BAL instructions. Bill had just finished a large graduate student project that
created the firmware to make an IBM System 3 minicomputer run on a 4K based
VLSI based computer.

 _Bill simply changed that code so BAL also ran on the Intel 8008._

This ability to run BAL let Bill's team pick and choose between the best
student programs. They soon had the Sac State 8008 running DOS (Disk Operating
System) which allowed loading and starting programs stored on paper tape,
cassette tape, cartridge tape, and even their mobile pluggable 3/2 (three
megabytes fixed, two removable) hard disk system. They had it running a simple
BASIC interpreter. Because the BAL firmware ran so slow, Bill’s team also
built a BAL assembler which instead of putting out one machine code
instruction per human readable instruction put out all the code needed to run
in 8008 machine code."

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MichaelZuo
If the article is correct and Intel really could have made “a commercial
microcomputer with BAL/DOS from Sac State”, then it’s quite mind boggling to
think of how different things could have turned out. For want of a nail and so
on.

~~~
MurMan
Doubt if an 8008 uC would have been a commercial success. It ran at 125 KHz
with instructions taking around 20 clocks. Instruction set was very primitive
compared to the 8080 and the address bus was only 14 bits wide. It was best
suited for calculators and controllers.

I built an 8008 machine in 1974 with a whopping 256 bytes of memory and toggle
switches for program entry in binary machine language. You could watch it
execute subroutines in the address bus LEDs!

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
That's around five times slower than a PDP-8/S, which was possibly the slowest
mini around at the time - already obsolete by 1970.

So it's doubtful it would have been successful as a computing product,
although it might have had some applications at the more undemanding end of
process control.

It would have been more interesting to use the skills, techniques, and
marketing contacts collected during the 8008 project to jump-start an 8080
project as soon as the new CPU appeared.

But the S100 era happened because the Altair had a standard bus that made the
system trivially expandable.

Corporate/industrial/academic systems had expensive and relatively complicated
proprietary bus and backplane systems, which limited the market and kept
prices high.

So... an alternative 8080 system wouldn't have been a game changer unless it
was sold with the same open hardware model. At best it would have been an
expensive micromini for a niche academic and industrial market.

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ncmncm
I remember photos of a robot arm, with fingers and thumb, controlled by an
8008. "CORMAC"? Something like that...

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rbanffy
Gary Kildall was the Bill Gates we needed.

~~~
tpmx
I think he was probably too humble/Scandinavian to stand a chance.

> Gary Kildall was born and grew up in Seattle, Washington, where his family
> operated a seamanship school. His father, Joseph Kildall, was a captain of
> Norwegian heritage. His mother Emma was of half Swedish descent, as Gary's
> grandmother was born in Långbäck, Sweden, in Skellefteå Municipality, but
> emigrated to Canada at 23 years of age.

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

