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To: Swordmaker

I took some compuer classes in junior high in the early 80’s. We had our choice of apple II’s, Commodore VIC 20’s, and IBM XT/AT computers. The things that you could do with less than 32k of memory.


6 posted on 04/03/2016 1:29:14 PM PDT by factoryrat (We are the producers, the creators. Grow it, mine it, build it.)
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To: factoryrat
I took some computer classes in junior high in the early 80’s. We had our choice of apple II’s, Commodore VIC 20’s, and IBM XT/AT computers. The things that you could do with less than 32k of memory.

I did some machine programming on a VIC-20 with a 16K expansion card by hand. My lodge was having a Casino Night for charity, so I wrote a Roulette Wheel Simulator which generated a faux random number for the results, created a whirling sound of the wheel, displayed the flashing red and black with an occasional green screen as the numbers rapidly showed on the screen, and a routine to slow the screen flash and number flash, indicating the ball bouncing until it would settle on the winning number. When I finished there was ONE BYTE of RAM left. I took it as a personal challenge to use up that one byte. . . but when I succeeded, the program would not run! It turned out that one byte had to be free for the program to run. LOL!

That computerized Roulette Wheel was the hit of the Casino night, bringing in triple the money the real roulette wheel did because of the novelty.

24 posted on 04/03/2016 4:03:04 PM PDT by Swordmaker (This tag line is a Microsoft insult free zone... but if the insults to Mac users continue..)
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