This was my rig in 1986, from Hong Kong, before it was available in the States through Rat Shack.

This was mine from the 84. EL-506A.



Still works, my son is now using it in college.

(August 24, 2023 at 8:49 am)brewer Wrote: This was mine from the 84. EL-506A.



Still works, my son is now using it in college.

My uncle gave me a couple of these along with his Commodore. Some are "programmable". You can hook them up to a tape recorder and "save" or enter the programing via a small utility module (don't remember what they are called). It's now in a box in the back of a closet.

I had a TI-85 for an astronomy class. It's disappeared sometime in the last 20 years.

Let's see if this works-

I still have it

(August 24, 2023 at 2:00 pm)Fireball Wrote: Let's see if this works-

I still have it

I suppose I should learn how to use that thingy some day.

Enter the following numbers. Then turn it over. "HELP"

I had one of these:



Hooked up to a wide-carriage DECwriter printer/terminal through the serial port on the CoCo, a third-party floppy disk controller and a bare 5¼" floppy drive enabled by some misappropriated Extended Color BASIC.  (Imagine, if you will, half a dozen twenty-something computer and/or D&D nerds assembled in Mom's garage, cackling maniacally over an EPROM burner...)

It was almost anticlimactic when one of the aforementioned nerds and I had to cobble together a rig with a CoCo and an Atari ST running an IBM emulator to get my word processing documents off the CoCo disks after my enterprising then-infant daughter decided the floppy drive would be a good place to store one of her toys, thereby scratching the hell out of my word processing software disk. IIRC, without the word processor we had to transmit the documents to the Atari via a terminal program.

I bought a PC clone in 1984.  

When I went to work at an aerospace company in '84, we had just started with some kind of CAD program. As a non-design engineer at the time, I wasn't on the list of people allowed to use those computers. I started out writing specifications and work instructions by hand, which the one secretary capable of doing so entered into a mid-frame DEC computer using some sort of text editor. Not long after that, we got IBM PCs with dual floppy drives and got WORDSTAR. What a find! 

That program lost funding and I ended up in a job using DEC VAX computers for antenna design. I ended up using IBM360 computers that were the front end for a CRAY, and VAXES that were the front end processers for some other array processing computers. I did some of that computing for many years, but only having a B Sc degree in a field of Phds, I left to pursue a mechanical job. Finished out my servitude after 25 years with that company and retired early. Worked my ass off, lots of overtime and investing, and fortunately the 401(k) portfolio I invested in worked out OK.