Re: Past Blast - "Wonder Woman 1984" - Corp Guy Using PET

On Thu, 3 Apr 2025 16:34:04 -0400, c186282 wrote:

   I'll have to check ... I think S-100 was solid up to four or five
   MHz. The Z80s were the most common CPU but I'd seen them with lots of
   others. The main reason to stick with S-100 was all the ready-made
   periph cards back in the days when the CPU board did NOT have built-
   in everything. Had to have a sep serial board, sep printer card(s),
   sep drive interface card(s) ..... indeed I think on some even the CPU
   was not all on one board.

The later Z80s were good for 6 MHz but 3.57 MHz was good enough for me and
color burst crystals were dirt cheap. For the one I did the SRAM was a
separate card. The price wasn't a problem and it s a lot easier to deal
with than the DRAM refresh cycles.

   Hey, the earlier versions of Turbo Pascal came with a CP/M variant
   ... don't remember if that was just CP/M-86 or actually for Z80s.

The version I bought was for CP/M. TBH I wasn't all that interested in
Pascal but I wanted to see what you could possibly get for $49.95.  The
BDS C compiler I was using was $110.

http://gaby.de/ftp/pub/cpm/znode51/articles/int4.htm

The article talks about how fast it was but it wasn't all that speedy for
non-trivial code. However that was my experience with the first Hello
World TP app. "Damn thing doesn't work; nothing happened. Oops, that looks
like an executable. Let's see what it does."

I never warmed up to Pascal but the TP experience biased me towards
Borland's OWL when I got around to Windows. Then the 500 pound gorilla
stomped it into the ground.