Einstein revisited - 30 + years on

[papahippo]

Hi,

I was an early adopter of the Tatung Einstein, fairly soon after its release. Back in those days, I had my ideas about what I should be looking be looking for in a home computer, Tatung had their ideas about what the market wanted or should be wanting... and their was sufficient overlap for me to willingly part with 425 pounds and buy one.

Some years later, my (now late) father-in-law also bought an Einstein. Perhaps this was because he valued my judgement or perhaps it was because it was then being offered at a bargain price including two drives, 80 column card, and a colour monitor, with loads of software thrown in.

Both these machines are now in my possession. One had an original Tatung monitor which alas seems to be stuck in green mode (reported in another thread), the other only ever had a cheap Philips monochrome monitor. I have recently equipped them both with RGB color monitors from my own personal 'hardware museum. (...and in the process confirmed that after all these years, I still couldn't solder neatly to save my life!)

When I bought my Einstein, I received, as a present from a friend , Kuma's port of the "ZEN editor/assembler": a wonderful little piece of software that I I amusing again now.

Looking back, I'm surprised by how much I actually got up and running on Einstein; also by how I seem to have dropped my Einstein activities like a heavy stone when became a freelance software Engineer back in 1989.

I am now 66 years old. I'm still full of big ideas but my memory and mental agility have gone downhill a little - as has my patience. Hence, when developing/modifying software for Einstein now, the limited capacity of the 3" diskettes is a real grind. I have got around this to some extent by using a connection via RS232C with a PC to load and save files.

I also use the serial port to transfer "*.DSK" images to Einstein's diskettes , using a python program on the PC and a small assembly language program running on Einstein. Given that I write the data to diskette sector by sector, this actually works quicker than i had dared to imagine!

I have added a project relating some of my Einstein-related activities to my gitlab account: https://gitlab.com/papahippo/einstein

I shall add to this post - probably irregularly! - as a kind of blog of my rekindled Einstein activity. it would be really good to receive feedback from other Einstein enthusiasts.

Larry Myerscough (aka 'papahippo')

[Lardo Boffin]

Great to see someone posting on here! I am still waiting to get my TC01 back from being repaired before I can do much with it.

[vanpeebles]

Warm welcome! It’s just a fairly new forum so we are slowly building up a head of steam!

[sirmorris]

Great to have another enthusiast on board!

I'll be happy to discuss matters of development

[papahippo]

Hey, good to receive feedback! more and quicker than I had dared hope for.

I've probably been spending too much time on Einstein in the last few weeks (still crazy after all these years), but I've just turned him off the day.

My little projects for the new future are:
1. Interfacing an old trackball (which I have just mended) via the serial port.
2. making an I2C interface on the parallel port so I can use a host of old cd-I peripherals from back in the day.

greetings,
Larry