So I thought, why not!

I've been in this business of computers for quite a while. Actually, anything programmable that I could put my hands on, I tried it. Since I've seen my share of strange devices, I thought, why not write it down.

I remember doing some heavy programming for both a TI-95 and HP-67 both programmable scientific calculators. The place I was working at had requested some financial calculations to their IT department, and they were schedulled to 'be listened to' in about five months, just 'listened to' nothing more. I had it working on the calculator in a couple of weeks, so they bought a bunch of them.

Mechanical word processor

Then, they showed me a mechanical word processor they had. It worked out of punched cards, but instead of loose ones, these cards were a single strip folded acordion-like along the smaller edge. So, the thing had two card stations, one for the 'program' which was the text to be written mixed with commands. This string of cards was glued as a loop, so when it was done with one letter it would start the next. The other station was for data cards. That's where you put the cards with the names and addresses of the people you wanted to send the letters to. This second station also had the card puncher and the bin with blank cards. The whole thing was designed to work along a card sorter, to pick the batch of cards you wanted to send letters to, or you could manage the cards yourself by hand. The machine was working quite Ok, considering how it had been neglected, but it needed some mechanical maintenance, mostly cleaning and oiling. As it was, some of the characters printed lighter than others, some almost invisible and others out of alignment. And it made lots of noise. So, I made program cards for some of the standard letters and some data cards for some of the suppliers. It was a part-time job I had while I was in college, and I left before it got any maintenance done. I never knew whether it went into production.

Now, you might be wondering why didn't they use a word processor. Simple, there weren't any. Wordstar wasn't there yet, and I'm not talking about the PC version of it, not even the original 8 bit CP/M version existed yet, since CP/M wasn't there either.

IBM 360 microcode

Another job I had while at college got me to a place where they were discarding an IBM 360. I got a piece of microcode from it. I couldn't believe it, microcode was a set of mylar cards, just like cardboard punch-cards, but mylar and with metal strips. You just punched all the intersections you wanted to put 'ones' in. You could actually change the microcode of the whole CPU just by having a deck of those special cards punched at a regular data entry puncher and sliding them into the slots.

Memory with a twist

Now, if that sounds strange for microcode memory, how about some strange regular memory. I got my hands on a teletype, mostly electromechanical stuff with very little electronics. A single 'flip-flop' was a whole 3" * 5" single sided PCB with two transistors, probably germanium. You wouldn't make a memory out of such large devices so, they needed something to hold the incoming characters while the printing carriage went back to the left margin. The memory, what you would usually call a 'shift register', was a metal box, about 5 * 5 inches and half an inch thick. Inside, a piano wire was held by four plastic posts so that it made four turns like a helix. Two of the corners held the twister and the sensor. Bits were shift into the wire by a solenoid that twisted the wire. It didn't bend it or pull it, it twisted it. At the other end, in another corner of the box, the sensor picked up the twists and fed them back to the twister. The device didn't hold just a single bit but several characters as a train of twists that carried over the wire. So, when the carriage was busy doing a carriage return, the stream of bits, just as it came from the serial line, were sent to the piano wire memory. When the carriage was ready to accept more characters, it took them from the piano wire memory and, since it was able to print faster than the stream of incoming characters, it was able to empty the buffer and take them straight from the serial input so, by the end of the line, the buffer would be empty and ready to accept characters. While it was hodling characters, they kept going round and round over the piano wire, out thru the sensor and fed back to the twister into the piano wire. It was interesting that you could shake the box and it wouldn't mess up. Since the bits were carried by twists, it didn't matter since by shaking you could bend or move the wire, but you couldn't twist it.

Sycor 445

After college I worked at a company that distributed computers made by a company called Sycor, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, that was later bought by Northern Telecom, now NorTel. The 445 was a beautiful machine.

You see, nowadays, the intricacies of the CPU chip are completly hidden from the user. It's very difficult to grasp all that mess of cache memory, prefetches, pipelines, cascaded execution and all that. The 445 was a machine I could understand, and it was a fun machine.

It could support up to 8 terminals with its Intel 8080 CPU, up to 256kb of RAM memory, and a 10MB disk in a single 14" platter.

For example, take the disk. You could actually fix it, I fixed several at the repair shop. It was so big that you could actually do something with your own hands and some delicate but not terribly sofisticated tools. If we had head crashes, we replaced the heads and the platter, and the disks we repaired didn't do any worst than the original ones.

The CPU set was actually made of 3 cards, about 8 inches square each. Two of them held the 8080 processor, it's support chips, the prefetch and memory mapping unit, and the third was the memory card that could hold 1, 2, 3 or 4 rows of 64kb each for a total of 256 k, and I really mean kilobytes, not megabytes.

The cards were inserted in a backplane that had about 20 slots which were wired for a different function each. Few slots were equivalent, the wiring on the backplane was specific for each slot to hold a specific card. The wiring was done by wire-wrap, it was not a PCB, and ocassionaly we had to upgrade a backplane to hold a new model of a certain card. So, the back of the backplane was a nice cushion of wires meshed in a bed of nails, that is, the posts over which you wrapped the wire-wrapping wire.

So, yes, it already had an Intel microprocesor, the first 8 bit microprocesor (there had been an 8008, but it wasn't general purpose but custom built for DataPoint, a terminal manufacturer, and the only reason to make it 8 bit was to handle ASCII characters, then Intel turned it into a general purpose chip, extending the instruction set). Now, the 8080 wasn't really a single chip CPU, it needed a couple of other chips, a clock generator and an 8 bit latch, so, the whole thing was a 40 pin chip and a couple of 22 or 24 pin chips.

The 8080 could address just 64kb of memory so this guys build a memory manager unit around it, that was able to map up to 512kb of main memory along with up to 16 2kB video memory pages and several 2kB ROM chips into those 64kb. It did, indeed, have a second slot for another 256kB memory card, that was never supported and it also had another slot for another CPU card, which was never added, and there was a good reason for that. CPU chips became so cheap that instead of having just two processors, one, the master doing the actual calculations, the other, the slave, taking care of all the input/output, they starting making intelligent cards that had an intel 8085 chip in each, so the slave processor never became to be. Also, just because of performance, only 8 terminals were supported, though the hardware could manage 16.

The main CPU, the two cards around the 8080 microprocessor were wonderful. Memory was organized 16 bits wide though the processor was only 8 bit wide. The hardware around the 8 bit microprocessor always did the memory fetches two bytes at a time, and kept the additional byte in some sort of cache just in case it might be needed. It always did that with program memory which, unless you find a jump and take it, would always read sequentially. Moreover, based on the assumption (which is quite true) that program flow has a good chance of being linear (even conditional jumps might not be taken), the little thing went ahead and pre-fetched up to 16 bytes (or 8 16 bit words) of program. Since several microprocessors (the main CPU as well as those in the intelligent cards) were competing for access to main memory, all these tricks (16 bit access and instruction pre-fetch) allowed more time for I/O controllers to access main memory while keeping the main CPU working on its local cache of instructions.

That's the beauty of these old designs. It had all the basic things that only years laters were introduced in microprocessors, and you could actually see the diagrams and understand how it worked. I remember when the 80386 came and they were talking about the independent bus unit, which did all those tricks that the 445 did so long before, and people thought it was a great invention. I admit, Intel never claimed to invent it, they just said they put them in, but a lot of people had never heard of them before and thought it was big news.

The 445 didn't have any BIOS, it just had a power-on self-test (POST) ROM and a bootstrap loader ROM that got everything initialized and tested and then it built what they called a DCB (Device Control Block) in memory. DCBs were data structures containing a command, some flags and optionally an associated buffer. When you wanted an intelligent card to do something, you prepared the DCB, and signaled the card to pay attention to it. When the intelligent card was finished with the command, it wrote the results in the DCB and signalled the CPU via an interrupt. More of it later. All intelligent IO cards understood DCBs. Since the disk controller and the data cartridge controller cards were both intelligent cards, and those were the boot devices, that was enough to get something started easily. So, the bootstrap loader loaded the first 2kb of either the data cartridge (it there was one inserted) or of the disk. Then it jumped to the first instruction found there. That was the bootstrap that then loaded the actual operating system.

The terminals were controlled by a controller for each two. The terminals were the most simple devices you could think of. They were connected via a shielded twisted pair cable, much like IBM Type 1 cable (the original Token Ring cable, thick as a finger) up to 2000 feet in length. Video memory was in the controller card, as well as the video controller chip. The cable actually carried the video signal, so the terminal was just an analog video monitor. Each card held 4kb of memory, 2kb for each terminal. Of those, 2000 bytes were actually mapped into the video screen (25 rows of 80 characters each for a total of 2000 characters) and there were 48 bytes left for scratchpad memory. The keyboard was just as simple. The monitor had a counter that incremented once for each horizontal sync and was reset by each vertical sync. That count was fed into a 4 to 16 bit decoder and an 8 bit multiplexer which made a matrix of 128 possible intersections. The keys occupied some of those intersections, and the other pair of the cable carried the single bit representing the depressed key. A similar counter did the same counting on the controller card so both, the keyboard counter and the controller card counter were in sync so that when the bit representing the keystroke came through the wire, the count was latched into an 8 bit latch. Now, the display cards were dumb, meaning, no 8085 there to buffer the characters or do any other tricks. Each keystroke generated an interrupt to the main CPU and you had to drop whatever you were doing, since the latch only buffered one keystroke. Fortunately, the keyboard was de-bounced by hardware. De-bouncing as well as auto-repeat was handled by monostables. So, when you got the keyboard interrupt, you had to check each of the up to 4 display cards to see which card generated the interrupt, and which terminal within the card, read the character, put it into the right input buffer in main memory and signal the card that the latch was free.

Now, of course, programmers didn't know all this since they just used either Cobol (Ryan McFarland) or a simple data entry macro language.

But us guys at the repair shop, got our hands on a damaged chassis (the steel frame was damaged but the electronics worked fine) and got some spare cards together, and then we started having fun!

The whole thing worked with a proprietary operating system. That wasn't fun enough. So, we put MP/M in it, which was the multi-user version of CP/M, the then popular 8 bit operating system. Just imagine, we had so much hardware and we were stuck with Cobol and that TAL2000 thing, no way! They had a BASIC but it was so pitiful nobody cared for it. Now, on CP/M you had cool things like Wordstar the word processor, (well, it was cool in those days), Supercalc a spreadsheet and games lilke PacMan (in a character display, the PacMan was represented by a letter C that alternated in between uppercase and lowercase so it looked like munching, and the ghosts were alternating Ms and Ws) and Space Wars and Zork (Zork ,just plain Zork, not Zork II or others).

So, I had a CP/M machine at home and started playing. First of all was how to download the program to the 445. There was an asynch card that someone got wrong (they meant a synch card for BSC3780, but ordered the wrong number), and my machine had a serial port. Of course, there was no software to handle the serial card on the 445, not any we cared for anyway, but at least it was easier to enter by hand a program to handle input thru the serial card than entering the whole CP/M by hand. The executable file format was very simple, like the .COM file format, just a binary image of the running program, compiled for a specific memory address. I had the 8080 macro assembler in my CP/M machine and it created a .HEX file which was much like what you go into Debug and ask for a memory dump, with a checksum added on a row per row basis.

So, I made the program for the 445 to read the HEX dump fed from my CP/M machine through the serial port and put it into disk. Since we couldn't download that into the 445, we had to enter it by hand, byte by byte with the disk editor. So, there we were, two of us, one reading the memory dump of the hex loader from my machine and the other typing it in the 445. Fortunately we were writing it right into disk, so it wasn't volatile and we weren't pressed by time. A couple of lunch hours did it and we could then load into disk any program we wished.

So, next step, download our BIOS. The 445 didn't have any BIOS ROM, some devices were accessed directly, like the terminals, others, like the disk, were accessed by those DCB. We had to map that hardware/firmware into the entry points expected by CP/M. First, we used the asynch card as our console, since that would enable us to use my CP/M machine as the terminal and that would make it even easier to download programs to the 445.

And the Bootstrap itself! Since the BIOS was in RAM, loaded from disk, we had to get the BIOS loaded. That was actually quite easy. The bootstrap loader, which was on a ROM loaded the first 2k sector of the disk into a specific memory location and blindly jumped right into it. The console part of the BIOS wasn't that long, so we put it there and a little program to try it. The thing worked nicely. Then we tried to use the actual 445 terminal. It seemed easy but, though the 2kb video memory of terminal 0 was already mapped into the 64kb of the 8080 CPU, the location it was mapped into was incompatible with CP/M so we first had to relocate it. We were going to have to deal with the memory mapper sooner or later, for example to get the POST and bootstrap loader ROM out of the way, soit wasn't a waste of time to do it at that point.

Disk access was even easier since we didn't need to deal with the disk controller details, it was all DCBs. Intelligent I/O cards didn't go through the memory mapper so they could only access the first 64kbytes of physical (not mapped) memory. That was fine, since CP/M accessed disk in 256 (or was it 512?) byte sectors, so we could use just physical page 0 for all our I/O. The DCBs had another feature that we didn't use. DCBs could be chained in a linked list. Each device had a preset memory location to look for the address of its first DCB. If that address was 0, then there was nothing pending. So, you first built your DCB anywhere in the first 64k of physical memory and then checked the preset location for the first DCB, if it was all zeros, you could put the address of your DCB right there. Now, if that location was not zero, it meant that there was already a DCB in the queue. A couple of bytes in the DCB were reserved for chaining DCBs so, if those were zero, you put the address of your DCB there, if not, then you followed that link to the next DCB in the chain until you found the last DCB in the chain. Then you wrote into the IO port of the disk controller just to tell it there was a new DCB to take care of. As soon as the disk controller was idle, it would follow the linked list to find any unprocessed command. A bit in the DCB signalled that it had already been taken care of by the disk controller, but it remained in memory so the main CPU could read the results. Then it was up to the CPU to take that element out of the list, patch the chain of addresses and free the memory. Of course, you better disabled interrupts while doing all this inserting and deleting from the chain of DCBs, or else ... Anyway, we didn't need to take care of the DCB chaining since CP/M was not reentrant, it only had one disk access active at any one time, but it was a nice mechanism and I thought it was worth mentioning.

Then, we started doing nice things with the memory mapper. Since the programs didn't actually need to know the physical memory locations of either the video memory or where we were building the DCBs for the disk controller, we ended up mapping those in and out of the memory reserved for user programs. Moreover, since we could map as much memory as we wanted, the first thing our BIOS did was to change memory mapping and map most of itself in, leaving as much of mapped memory for user program execution.

I forgot to mention transferring CP/M itself, but that was easy since you didn't do anything to it but just copy it over and get it loaded at a specific memory location after you got all the BIOS loaded and ready, and then jumped into it.

Now, the second big step was loading MP/M which was the multiuser version of CP/M. MP/M required a working CP/M up and running on the target machine. It added some more BIOS functions, to handle context swapping, and you had to signal it with the timer click, so we had to add those. As far as I recall, MP/M still didn't do multiple disk requests, it took care of queueing them itself, so we didn't need to modify the disk thing. We only needed to deal with context swapping, that is, keeping an eye on which memory was asigned to which user, including video memory, and make sure to page it in and out. Also, we had to keep several keystroke buffers, but we used the 48 bytes of video memory that were beyond the 2000 visible ones, so they got mapped in along the video memory. We also had to add a little terminal emulation, since CP/M didn't know about things such as cursor positioning, so I think we used the escape sequences of a Lear Siegler terminal, which was a very popular one on those days. Thus, we just had to configure Pacman for an LSI terminal and we had it done.

Well, the whole thing never went out as a product, since 'industry standard operating system' wasn't a part of any salesperson sales pitch and I'm sure there would have been licensing problems (Northern Telecom probably wouldn't have liked to see its hardware running MP/M), but we made a warm boot program that allowed the 445 to boot with its standard operating system but, if you run a certain program, it would kill it and replace it by MP/M. We never managed to (or dreamt of) creating virtual CP/M machines within the original 445 OS, nor were we able to go back from MP/M to 445 OS without rebooting. Going into MP/M was a one way thing and, by the way, it killed without warning anything that might have been running at the time.

Then came a tradeshow where several competitors had word processors (dedicated ones, like several Wang systems) or were starting to show CP/M machines. The 445 was designed for administrative data processing so it didn't have anything like that (and when it finally did, it was horrible!!!!). Anyway, this sales guy noticed we didn't have anything to attract the attention of the passerbies and he asked whether there was any word processing or spreadsheet we could show, which were the big hits of the show. I said, "yes, we do, but we can't sell it, it is not supported". Now, just tell a salesperson that something can't be sold and he's going to take it as a challenge so guess what he said. We already had Wordstar and Supercalc loaded in it, (and Pacman, and SpaceWars, and Pong, and Zork and all the goodies I had in my CP/M machine). Suddenly our booth was full of guys. We couldn't really have more than one game at a time running, since, after all, there was just one main CPU for all of it, but that was fine, since the kids, who wanted the games, weren't going to buy the system. People goes were there is already people, so some kids were fine, too many were not good. Anyway, everytime the spreadsheet did a recalculation, the little Pacman froze for a couple of seconds. And, when one of the owners of the company came in and this sales guy proudly told them his decision to show the unsuported stuff, he told us to go back to the standard boring thing.

A TTL 16 bit processor

Now, there was this other machine that didn't even have a microprocessor but it's CPU was built upon 4 4-bit ALUs .... plain TTL chips, medium scale integration. Each CPU was a couple of square boards about two feet on a side, perhaps one and a half. And the PCB itself was about 6 layers. It was packed really dense. We couldn't do much with it, since it had a proprietary instruction set. We did some assembler programming on it, but it wasn't worth it to try to port some other OS. We learned a lot from it, though. At first the original manufacturer didn't want to give us the diagrams, after all, this was a large mini, almost a mainframe, and they had themselves very few certified repair shops since it was really sophisticated.

Once, a CPU card broke. Those were the days when importing and exporting to or from Argentina was really difficult. Even though the card was about $5000, they were really thinking of dumping it before going through all the paperwork to send it and then bringing it back again without paying the 85% custom duty as if it was a new one. They normal process was to send a new one while they repaired the dead one. We had to make sure they shipped back the very same one (they had serial numbers), otherwise it would be charged duties. All this negotiating lasted for about a month. Suddenly, they heard nothing more of it. After a while they asked what about the dead CPU card. We told them we had fixed it. Indeed, we had and without any diagrams. I admit it, it wasn't hard, but the guys were impressed, and I wasn't going to admit how easy it had been so, finally, they accepted to send us the diagrams.

The microcode was on PROMS on sockets on the corner of the board. Half the sockets were empty, but some products required a microcode upgrade so, they came with a set of PROMS to put into the empty sockets. Of course we toyed with the idea of burning our own PROMs with our own instruction set, but it was a monumental task. It would have taken us a couple of years to just get in the instruction set of an 8086 processor and, though at start time it would have provided us with a CPU four times as fast as any 8086 in existence, by the time we had finished, the 80386 would have been an everyday thing.

Anyway, it was good learning to see how the CPU worked internally.

Assortment of processors

Another nice thing of those days was the variety of processors you had. The major families were the 8080 and Z80 which shared the same basic instruction set and both could run CP/M. Then you had the Motorola 68xx and the very similar 6502. The later was the one that run on the Apple IIs and Commodores. The 6502 came in several packages from 22 pin to full 40 pins. Each had differences in, for example, how much memory they could handle, since the smaller packages had the high address bits cut off. It also saved some pins if you didn't mind about a precise time base or interrupts. Thus, the same basic chip served, in the full 40 pin package, for a complete computer, while the smaller packages were suitable for small microcontrollers where you wouldn't have lots of memory anyway.

The 8080 architecture and its descendants (including current Pentiums) betray its origins. Since it was based on the 8008 which was meant as a display terminal controller, it had a bunch of special purpose registers highly suitable for its then intended purpose. The 6800 family, since it was meant as a general purpose chip from the start, had a more regular architecture. While the followers to the 8080, including Pentiums, still follow the same basic architecture, the 6800 descendants, the 68000 and above, are even more regular. The 6502, on the other hand, was designed to be small and cheap. It had only one internal accumulator, but it had a fast address mode for the first 256 bytes of external memory, which somehow allowed them to act as an extension of the internal registers, and the stack was just 256 in depth, pointed at by a 8 bit stack pointer, with the higher 8 bits hardwired to 1. So, from 0 to 255 you had the fast memory, from 256 to 511 you had the stack. Not a lot of it, I admit, it was easy to make it overflow, but nobody complained, Apple II success proves it. And it was a true single chip microprocessor, unlike the 8080 which was actually a three chip set.

Then you have things like the 8X300 which was not a microprocessor but a microcontroller, the difference being it was not a Von Neumann machine, that is, program and data memory were separate. It was a huge chip, about 64 pins. Anyone remembers the Irma cards, those used as 3270 terminal emulators? Remember they were blue instead of green? They had one of these huge chips in them. So, this thing had so many pins because it had a program address bus, a program data bus and a separate data bus. I think it had only one or two bits for data addressing, hardly what you would call an address bus, but you were supposed to send the address as data through the data bus and hold it into an external latch. Thus, your data address space could be as large or small as you wanted. Since it was a microcontroller, it wasn't supposed to address a lot of memory anyway. Now, why separate program and data memory? One thing was speed, that's why the Irma guys used it. You didn't have to share the same bus' bandwith amongst data and program. And why would you care for a Von Neumann architecture if the program was in ROM anyway. Von Neumann architecture allows you to treat a program as data and thus you can compile a program and later execute it. An Irma card only needed to execute the very same program endlessly fast enough to keep up with the 1.2 megabit per second serial stream of BSC or SDLC data coming through the coax.

Another interesting design was that of the LSI-11. It was a microprocessor version of Digital's own PDP-11 minicomputer. The chips were made by Western Digital, a subsidiary of AT&T. It wasn't single chip, it was in between 4 and 5 chips, I believe. One was the ALU, another the microsequencer, another one held the registers and a fourth the microcode. An optional fifth was a floating point unit or cache or memory management unit, I don't remember. I'm not sure of all this, but it's near enough. In those days, Borland was making Pascal very popular with its TurboPascal. Pascal had the concept of compiling into what is called p-code, which is a virtual machine code, and then executing that p-code under an interpreter. Now, if this sounds a lot like the concept of a Java Virtual Machine, you are absolutely right! So, the Western Digital guys designed a microcode chip that run p-code as native. Thus, they used the very same basic LSI-11 chipset, with just a different microcode and they had what they called the Pascal Micro Engine. I never saw one, but you could actually have an LSI-11 computer, change the microcode chip and have the fastest Pascal engine in those days. That was not a virtual machine but an actual p-code machine. Chips nowadays are so much faster than they were on those days that even if you managed to get a working LSI-11 and burn a Java microcode chip, it would be much slower than a software-based virtual machine.

Once I got an MS-DOS program called Z80-EMU, it was an emulator of a Z80 and CP/M. I found a diskette with it years later and run in on a Pentium and it still worked. Then I run a Z80 benchmark in it. I think it gave the equivalent of a 25MHz Z80, something that never existed since the fastest ever was an 8MHz chip. So, an emulated chip on a new processor was faster than the actual chip ever was.

Talking about slow, you had the TI-9900 series. They were the first 16bit chips I know of, but they were so painfully slow that a regular 8 bit Z80 could outrun it jumping on one leg. It was used on the popular TI-99 home computer and in some TI minicomputers, but the slowness of it killed it, few remember that it existed long before the i8086 and MC68000

Signetics also had an interesting 8 bit microprocessor, but I never saw it anywhere. What I saw from Signetics was its serial I/O chip, which was really good though the best of them all was the Z80-SIO. I wonder what happened with Zilog, they had a great set of chips, starting with the Z80 CPU and all the support chips. Most 8bit CP/M machines were built around those. They went into the 16bit processor business with the Z8000 but it never got any big customer. Apple took the 68000 from Motorola and IBM picked the 8088 from Intel. The Z8000, a nice chip with a good architecture and good support chips was left behind. Anyway, you can still see Z80-SIOs here and there, since it was the only serial chip that had two serial channels in a single chip, and you can program those for either Asynch, BSC or SDLC/HDLC. There was nothing as flexible as that one.

Emulation

When we got the first PCs we noticed they really weren't that much faster than the 8bit CP/M machines it replaced. So, I decided to do some benchmarking. I tried the same simple benchmark, the sieve of Erathostenes, with several languages. Only the assembler version of the sieve run faster on the IBM-PC since it had some more internal CPU registers so I could hold in it some more pointers and counters than in the 8 bit counterpart. We had several languages by different manufacturers, both for 8bit CP/M and 16 bit MS-DOS; Digital Research's CB-80 and CB-86, Ryan McFarland RM-Cobol for both 8 and 16 bits, Microsoft's Cobol, Basic Compiler and Assembler for both. The very same program run much slower on the IBM-PC than on the CP/M machine, and it was the same source compiled with the same brand of compiler. The Cobol version was so, so! slow that I thought it got into an endless loop. I finally had to make it do 100 loops instead of a thousand, and it still was much slower than the rest.

So, how come it is so slow? First of all, the original PC wasn't trully a 16bit machine. It had a processor with a 16bit CPU internally but its data bus was only 8 bits wide, so it had to multiplex those 16 bits into two halves every time it read from or wrote to memory. At 4.87..something MHz it was not much faster than regular 4MHz Z80 CP/M machine.

Then, it was how the programs were ported. Intel had published a guide on how to easily convert from 8080 code into 8086 code. Moreover, there was a utility that made that conversion on binaries. Most companies had to rush their products to the market so most of them followed those guidelines and some just used the conversion utility. The conversion utility was not meant to create fast code but safe code. Thus, it had a lot of redundant code, like setting or reseting flags that behaved differently in each processor, even though those flags were not tested afterwards. Most companies came with newer versions of the products shortly after, when they really ported their software, but at first, they were quick and dirty conversions, thus, most 8086 programs at first were actually 8080 code running as if they were on emulation.

No design software then

Protectionism made the Argentinian market quite peculiar. With an 85% duty on imports and a lot of restrictions, it made sense to design some things locally. One bank wanted to have terminals to validate credit cards. Nowadays they are a common things, not so then, since there weren't enough phone lines either. So, this bank wanted the terminal to have some local, independent authorization capability. The standard terminal didn't fit the bill. We had been building for them a lock activated by credit card to allow their customers access to the lobby with the ATMs so they asked us whether we could build it and we said yes. We build it around a Z80, with 8 sockets for memory that could carry either 2, 4 or 8kB ROM chips or 2kB static RAM chips, that was the most dense static RAM available. RAM memory could have battery backup, which was a requirement of the bank. Static RAM was much easier than Dynamic and allowed us to have the battery backup as well and, since it fitted the same socket as the ROM (each socket had a couple of jumpers to compensate for a few differences) it made the desing much simpler.

It required a numerical and functions keyboard for the operator, an auxiliary keyboard on a cord for the customer to enter the PIN, a display on the operator side and a little one (optional) on the customer side. It needed a printer for the voucher, a modem to communicate with the bank, a magnetic card reader and a DES encription/decription chip. We added an extra serial port (we used the Z80-SIO chip, so the second port was for free) and a parallel printer port for a regular external printer.

I still have my drafts and several of the drafts of the later refinements and fixes. The prototype was done with a prototyping board using wire-wrapping sockets. The electric wire-wrapping tool was impossibly expensive and, at first, we didn't really think there were that many wraps to do. Had we known! Anyway, by the time we found out, there weren't that many wraps left, or so we thought (or hoped).

The card reader became a problem. We already had plenty of experience with reading magnetic cards, but here we meant to do a mechanical reader so that you would drop the card on a slot and it would get read. Very fancy, but it didn't work. Our algorithm already read the card at any speed you swiped it by the reader, and was even able to compensate for changing speed and it read in both directions. The change of speed was not a big problem when you swiped it manually, since the momentum of the hand an arm holding the card didn't allow for really much of a change. We didn't have much space inside the terminal so we planned for a very light mechanism. It was, indeed, so light that it caught the vibrations of the whole mechanism itself, and it changed speed quite abruptly if it caught, say, a really greasy fingerprint or marmalade spot. The card has clock and data bits on it, and the clock bits let you find out the speed and decode it properly, but fast changes in speed gets you out of synch, and that's what happened with our mechanical reader. Consider that we had an order for just 100 of them on a contract for up to 1000 so we couldn't develop a lot of sofisticated mechanics, which is much more expensive than electronics, so we tried to do that reader with off the shelf hardware, but it proved impossible, so we ended up with manual card reader

I remember when we had the final drawing on the drawing table, the repair shop supervisor, who was also our top mechanical guy (the card reader was not his fault, he was really good) he asked if we didn't mind if he checked the drawing with his pendulum. It took us a little by surprise but everyone in the company (and that meant about 20 people) was very much involved in the project, emotionally if nothing else, and this guy was a nice guy and older than my Dad, so I wasn't going to say no. Actually, if someone brought a witch, I wouldn't have cared as long as it cast a good spell on it. So, we went to the drawing and the guy takes a pendulum, a nice quartz hanging form a golden chain and starts swinging it over the drawing. He said that while it went sideways, everything was fine, but if turned in circles, there was 'bad energy' there. So, he slowly went by all the drawing, and, indeed, at some point the pendulum started moving in circles and it was right on the place we most feared. We knew that part of the circuit was a little bit of a kludge. There were about five of us, the supervisor, the draftsman, my colleague and myself and some others perhaps. We were impressed on the accurracy of his diagnostics, but I couldn;t resists being a little critical abaout it and noticed that we were all very tense. He was still holding the pendulum over the trouble spot, and out of the 5 guys around, three of us knew of that trouble spot. The draftsman himself, though he didn't understand electronics, he had to redraw that section so many times and knew how things were going, so he was also tense. So, the whole experiment wasn't worth much since you could feel the tension in the air when the pendulum got to that point. Anyway, the pendulum guy was happy, he felt he added something to the project, some of the guys were impressed, even after I tried to talk a little sense into them, and we didn't learn anything that we didn't already know.

What nobody had planned for is that the president of the bank along with several high officials would steal money from the bank and almost make it bankrupt, 10 days before we were supposed to deliver the 100 machines. So we had 100 machines that nobody else would want in the shelf, a lot of debt to pay, and a possibly endless legal process much worst than a regular bankruptcy since we didn't have an actual debt from the bank to us since we hadn't delivered yet. Just 10 days afterward, then it would have been a regular debt, but then we had all our capital on those machines and no way to get it back. A very messy situation in a very critical moment. Since it was a large bank and it was in all the news, we were able to renegotiate with all our suppliers who were very undertanding though it took all the revenue, which wasn't much anyway, since we meant to make the money with the following orders. If designing it hadn't been so much fun, and if we had charged all the R&D costs to the project, we would have lost money, lots of it.

We programmed it in assembler, but it was clear that it wouldn't be easy for other developers, if there was any chance anyone else would use it. So, I added BASIC, not to the machine itself, because it wasn't meant as a developmnet platform. Actually, what I did was to add a CP/M emulator that would take the CP/M function calls and map them to the terminal's ones. Since it didn't have any disk, whenever you asked for a file, it said "File Not Found". If you asked anything about the disk, it would give non-fatal errors. Of course, it responded nicely to requests for keyboard input, display and printer output, which was basically all it could actually do. To develop a program you had to use a standard BASIC compiler from Microsoft and link the resulting object with some startup routines I built and then burn EPROMs with that. I guess that it would have worked more or less the same with any other CP/M compiler, as long as it didn't require overlays, since there was no disk to pull them from and no virtual memory. That ruled out COBOL since RM-Cobol was interpreted and the interpreter had several overlays, or Micro-Focus since it also needed some runtime libraries. There was no decent C compiler for CP/M and Turbo-Pascal didn't generate binaries but p-code so, indeed, there wasn't much but BASIC.