S-100 Virtual Workbench

I remember reading Byte Magazine when I was 7 and not understanding why I couldn’t plug one of those cool S-100 bus graphics cards into my Heathkit H89.

So I made space invaders out of box drawing characters.

BASIC was slow so I tried using C. (Yes, there was a minimal C compiler for the H89!) But then C was too fast and “for (i=0; i<10000; i++);” didn’t seem to slow things down like it did in BASIC so then I was stumped. “C is too fast for games!” — me

The H89 had a built-in monitor and a 5 1/4” floppy drive. Its precursor, the H8, was much like this emulated S100/Altair, with LEDs and switches as your only I/O.

Wonderful! :-)

Was going to comment that this reminded me of the old S-100 bus, and looking at the ads in Byte, and reading Chaos Manor, but obviously that couldn't be it, it had to be something else entirely, clicked and was pleasantly surprised.

It has IMSAI-8080!

You don't get the satisfying tactile flick-click of the real thing, but still, for about 0.06% of us, this brings an enormous smile!

:)

Heh, not sure why but it makes me wonder if you could 'Ship of Theseus' something like that into a modern day desktop. By going thru the different eras of DIY compute.

I have a cassette copy of Microsoft Advanced Basic for the SOL-20 that I got in a box of "junk" (junk in quotes because it included a very rare early copy of Zork for the Apple II that paid for the box about 40x over) at an estate sale years ago. Need to figure out if I can get it to load in this somehow.

Oh my. I've spent waaay too much time trying to figure out how does the Ladder works. Still was unable to play that one.

And I won't even mention that I have no idea how to use ED.

How do I... use this? There's no help button or anything

Was the front end designed using Claude Design?

The UI is unreadable due to low contrast and tiny text.

Thanks! Now I will procrastinate the whole day.

Holy crap! When I was a child, my father got me my first computer, and it had a bunch of dongles and red LEDs. I looked at it for a few minutes, and was like, what the hell am I supposed to do with this? My dad was an electrical engineer at a steel plant, so I had assumed it was some sort of industrial automation computer. But no, it was an Altair 8800.

I couldn't figure it out so they just got rid of it. Wish I could go back in time and try again.

Once you got the S100 box too full, you'd send it to my late friend Lloyd Smith's shop, DigiTek, where he would split the power bus, and add a second power supply to handle the load.

Wish I could read the text but someone decided it was more important to use dark gray text on black and dark-green backgrounds because it looks all trendy and cool and shit.