The Return of Urban Retail Deserts

City Journal ^ | 9/13/23 | Steven Malanga

[Myrddin]

My treasure from that timeframe is an Atari 1040ST serial number 2. The person who sold it to me has serial number 1. I love the 68000. In a similar time frame, I purchased the bottom end Radio Shack Color Computer with 4k RAM. For $50 and a few minute of my labor, it was upgraded to 64k. I removed the factory ROM from the floppy disk controller and put a boot loader in for OS/9. The 6809 is my favorite 8-bit MCU. In the early days of the "CoCo", I wrote fast 6809 machine language drivers to do screen prints to color (ink jet) printers. 15 seconds for my code to print the screen. The Radio Shack delivered software for the same capability took 20 MINUTES.

I never had a TI 99-4, but I admired their graphics. A trip to a silicon valley electronics store netted the graphics chip used in the 99-4. I hand built a daughter board for my Heathkit H8 to interface the chips, then wrote all the graphics primitive libraries to drive it. Inside a week, I was doing 3D graphics plots in color with full Z axis support. It was Summer 1982. I couldn't afford a Mac Lisa, but I could compete with the graphics running HDOS or CP/M on my Z80 with 64k RAM.

[FrankRizzo890]

This is an entire post of awesome!