CosmacCalc

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This was part of my exhibit of VisiCalc and the Spreadsheet Explosion for VCF East 10.0
What would it have looked like to have made a demonstration of a new concept- the spreadsheet- in 1977 on single board computers of the day? That's what CosmaCalc is about. It is running in the available 4k RAM of a Cosmac computer.
It was written in Octo, which generates ascii hex Chip8 byte code, the hex data then taken from there to a text file, converted to binary with the C program (included in comments at the end of the Octo code). The binary Chip8 program was loaded into Emma2, the RCA 1802 computer emulator where it is combined with a 200 byte memory image of the Chip8 interpreter, and tested. The entire memory map from 0000 to 0E00 was then written out to a memory dump file and run through a .wav file converter and loaded into Audacity to play to the cassette interface of the VIP.
Here is the link to the shared Octo source code in the Octo
web facility. Just hit run on the title bar.
johnearnest.git...
A full write-up is available at:
abitoutofplace...

Опубликовано:

16 сен 2024

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Комментарии : 9

@saturn5tony 2 года назад

Very cool Doug!! I would have been amazed (and still am) to see this in 1978 when I had my VIP. I still have a VIP but rebuild it on my own redesign called Voyager using Bobs COSMAC Elf 2000 as its engine. I will try this soon, thank you for the link to Octo.

@RetroComputerist 9 лет назад

I saw this exhibit at VCF. The interactive mode where you can edit cells and update the totals was fantastic. Love the details on the memory upgrade to the machine. Keep in mind there were like 10 computers all running different spreadsheet programs. I have to be an excel junkie at work, well, not so much anymore, but certainly enough. The impact that the simple spreadsheet has had on humanity is impossible to quantify. It was great to see the generational relationships. I really had wished that all of them had a graph on them. :)

@bwave57 9 лет назад

Very fun. Nice job too! I remember getting introduced to the speadsheet concept (either VisiCalc or Quattro) was one of those; "why did't i think of that?" moments. I have been using them for practically everything ever since. Your project also gives me somthing to think about - I never tried any high-level language on the COSMAC.

@douglascrawford2563 9 лет назад

bwave57 OCTO is very cool given it is a web based "IDE" but you are generally limited to the abilities of CHIP-8 functionally. You at least one "C" option too. Do you have a hardware COSMAC?

@bzert281 2 года назад

could be a bigger platform, and you could launch one into space, too! nice! RIP to all our STTOS players passed.

@babybearkill1 8 лет назад

Excellent

@douglascrawford2563 9 лет назад

Thanks Chris! Were you the one that left a graph on the MAC running EXCEL? Yes I could have done a graph sample on all of them. I was late setting up a test bench of all of the machines at home... once I did a lot of ideas came to mind. I would have had a better sample spreadsheet for each one- which might have included a graph. As it was, I used the sample spreadsheet on most of the machines to tell a little about the company who made it and present a few of the pluses, minus, and quirks that the product had. I didn't see a lot of people look at them that close though.