Around forty something years ago I found myself in my employer's technical training school teaching the Intel 8080 using SDK-80's and SDK-85's. Then later moving up to the SDK-86 to support Intel 8086 16 bit kit. Along the way my boss bought me a complete MDS Series II development system so that I could better support our training hardware and I built better training aides with it and had lot of fun on the way.
The MDS Series II was at the time one of the early real micro computer based computer systems. It used a 'fast' 2MHz clock, had a MASSIVE 64kb of Ram and two 8" floppy drives. Each floppy could hold an unthinkable half a megabytes of data.
It could take approaching half an hour to compile some of my stuff, even the classic 'Hello World' written in PLM would take minutes to compile and you want to go back there?
Well, cards on table, back this Christmas I had the same impulse and started looking for Intel 8080 stuff and found disc images for the MDS computers. Six months on I have a working MDS Series II equivalent that'll compile and run on a Pi. It supports four half megabyte floppy drives and seems to do stuff that took ages back then but now in the blink of an eye and none of that clunking and weiring from the drives nonsense.
Yes you can still experience those old 8 bit computers but you won't really get how bloody slow they were nor how rubbish the text editors were. Spent nearly a day typing in a big program from hand written source only to find I'd forgotten to prefix it all with the "Insert New Text" command "I".
(901)
The MDS Series II was at the time one of the early real micro computer based computer systems. It used a 'fast' 2MHz clock, had a MASSIVE 64kb of Ram and two 8" floppy drives. Each floppy could hold an unthinkable half a megabytes of data.
It could take approaching half an hour to compile some of my stuff, even the classic 'Hello World' written in PLM would take minutes to compile and you want to go back there?
Well, cards on table, back this Christmas I had the same impulse and started looking for Intel 8080 stuff and found disc images for the MDS computers. Six months on I have a working MDS Series II equivalent that'll compile and run on a Pi. It supports four half megabyte floppy drives and seems to do stuff that took ages back then but now in the blink of an eye and none of that clunking and weiring from the drives nonsense.
Yes you can still experience those old 8 bit computers but you won't really get how bloody slow they were nor how rubbish the text editors were. Spent nearly a day typing in a big program from hand written source only to find I'd forgotten to prefix it all with the "Insert New Text" command "I".
(901)
Statistics: Posted by RaspISteve — Sun Aug 03, 2025 11:11 am