Model T as a serial keyboard for a Kaypro II
[ Sixteenth in a series recreating the lost posts -- This was originally posted 18/08/10]
As i've mentioned before I am working on a case mod (working very slowly as i'm still researching rather than doing) for the ZipitZ2 using a Tandy Model 100 case and I want to use the Tandy Keyboard as the input device for the ZipitZ2 so i've been googling and binging alot and I stumbled across a page about Phillip Avery and his usage of a Model 100 as a Serial Keyboard for a Kaypro II. It isn't quite what I want but it is still quite interesting and might be useful for some other projects I am mulling.
http://classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2010-02-18-kaypro-m100-keyboard.htm
A blast from the past
[ Fifteenth in a series recreating the lost posts -- This was originally posted 15/08/10]
When I was younger and dinosaurs roamed the earth I started a new job that required a 109.37 mile, 105 by car but I didn't have a full driving license then, bus, train and tube journey twice a day (Oadby, Leicestershire to just south of Covent Garden, London) and I needed something to do other than play Bridge and drink coffee, whiskey & canada dry or gin and schweppes slimline tonic, I was watching my weight 
, or read the paper in the dining car. I wonder if you can get any of the decent schweppes mixers any more? i've never found the slimline tonic or bitter lemon here in the states, at least not in the stores i've checked. Anyway when I got my first paycheque after giving my parents a third for rent, buying my monthly bus, train and tube tickets and putting aside money for beer I had enough left to get myself a treat. As a longtime TRaSh-80 fan, I used Model 3's at college and I used to hangout in the Tandy Computer Center most weekends I decided to buy myself a Tandy Model 102 which at that time was about £600, give or take a few quid. I would have bought a Model 4p but I didn't have several thousand pounds 
so the Model 102 had to do.
I used the Model 102 everyday for about 6 years and it went with me to Amsterdam, France, Belgium, Italy a few times and to Germany every summer for 5 years as well as to the States a few times. It was very well traveled and I loved it.
When I moved to the States I left my other computers, which included a Sinclair Spectrum, Grundy NewBrain, Camputers Lynx and Harriet, my Olivetti M15 with my parents, but I brought the Tandy with me. I had been planning on having the others shipped to me but in the end that never worked out and over time my parents disposed of them
I used the Tandy for most of the first half of the 90s although only for messing about on and coding rather than online stuff as I didn't bring my acoustic coupler with me and from about 91 to 2001 we didn't have a home phone. I rejected phones as I was burnt out with regard to phones from all my activities in the 80s, I'm still not that keen on phones even now. My wife and son have smart phones but I prefer the most minimal phone I can get, which isn't very minimal unfortunatly as it's almost impossible to get a phone without a camera, mp3 player... builtin but i ignore those functions as much as possible, I don't even text and only use the phone for calls to/from the wife and kid and a couple of other people.
The Tandy chunked along quite nicely for years and then someone, i'm not sure who smushed it and the keyboard broke. By then I had put together several desktops using garbage day finds so I wasn't particularly bothered and put the Tandy on one side with plans to deal with it later. Later of course never occured and we moved 2 times and the Tandy followed. Then during our latest move a couple of years ago I assigned the "trouble and strife" to the room that the Tandy was in and I suspect she binned it as a few months ago I went looking for it with plans to reserrect it and couldn't find it . I thought that was it no more tandy's for me. Then i was trawling ebay, I never normally buy anything but i like to window shop and I saw a couple of Tandy Model 10X cases, one came with LCD and keyboard and the other a keyboard and I had a little brainwave. I have wanted to do a case mod for the Zipit Z2 for ages and thought "hang on a sec it might be possible to use a Model 100/102 case for the Zipit Z2 and it would be really cool if I could interface the Tandy keyboard to the Zipit Z2 and even cooler if I could use the LCD too", although that I suspect is not going to be doable, the keyboard is a possibility though. So I bid on the cases not expecting to win, but surprise surprise I did. The cases arrived and I put them to one side until I had time to sit down and work on the mod without distractions. Before that happened though I saw an auction for a working Tandy Model 102, the case was really manky though, looked like someone had buried it in peet and the peet had stained the case and the keyboard looked really bad but there were no bids on it and the postage looked reasonable so I bid on it and ye gods and little fishes I won that too, doing well on ebay i've gone 2 for 2 in 2 months
A couple of days ago the working 102 arrived and after getting the cats out of the way and kicking the wife off to work and the kid off to class I swapped the case and keyboard and cleaned up the battery bay and lo and behold I have a reasonably good looking working Model 102 again, this time I put it in a strong cardboard box so hopefully noone will squidge it and be tempted to throw it out thinking it is rubbish, i'm looking at you dear
Now what should I use the Tandy for? At minimum a serial terminal for one of my Zipits. I still have a Model 100 case and keyboard and a 102 LCD and the judicious use of retr0brite might clean up the manky 102 case so the Zipit case mod is still a possibility and/or a mini-itx pc case mod or if I can scrape together enough cash the VZ806P case mod. I'll have to see which I end up doing or see if I can get more Model 10X cases, keyboards and LCD's
CP/M on an AVR
[ Twelth in a series recreating the lost posts -- This was originally posted 27/04/10]
I think I might have seen this before, but it's still quite cool anyway. I love the Z80 and CP/M.
COBOL is not just for dinosaurs
[ Third in a series recreating the lost posts -- This was originally posted 02/08/10]
COBOL has always given me a nice warm fuzzy feeling whenever i've been required to program in it. This is probably because it was the first language that I learnt that wasn't self taught (BASIC and Z80 assembler) and I liked the lecturers that we had at the college, one was very stuffy but the technicians and other 2 lecturers were great and had very warped senses of humour.
We were taught Ryan-MacFarland COBOL on Tandy Model3's with 48k, dual floppies, networking and a Corvus Winchester drive that sat quietly in the corner of the room trying to pretend that it didn't look remarkably like a refrigerator. (I still have a soft spot for TRaSh-80 model 3s and 4s, so if anyone has one lying around unwanted and unused they know where to send it) . COBOL is probably made me what I am today programming-wise. A curmudgeonly grumpy old git, over 25 years later I still wake up with night sweats about finishing my course project on time (I ended up with a 95% and thus a distinction although I did cut it close as I kept getting banned from the computer lab for hacking the network so did most of the coding on coding sheets and then quickly typing it in and doing a couple of test runs when they let me back in until the next banning. It was actually a bit of a game as the techs, lecturers and I would often have a few pints riding on whether i could bypass whatever security they had installed that week -- oh fun days).
So a few weeks ago I was between projects for the ZipitZ2 and decided to see if I could run COBOL applications on it and started looking around on freshmeat.net and sourceforge.net and found two possibilities. The first one TinyCOBOL wasn't going to do me much good as it outputs IA32 assembler, but the other one, OpenCOBOL looked more promising as it outputs C source code and uses gcc as the compiler. After a bit of playing around with it and messing around with my ZipitZ2 development VM I managed to get a version that would produce executables that ran on a ZipitZ2 running Z2shell/IZ2S/IZ2Se/EZ2S which is good enough for what I personally want. But as alot of people seem to have moved away from the stock ZipitZ2 environment to mozzwald's Zubuntu which has gcc nativly running on the ZipitZ2 I decided to have a go at building the OpenCOBOL compiler to run on the ZipitZ2. After a few false starts setting up a new development vm for just OpenCOBOL and a couple of hours reading documentation I managed to build binaries of the OpenCOBOL compiler and libraries that pass all the tests in make check and seem to work as expected (at least inside my vm, I haven't tested actually on a ZipitZ2 running mozzwald's zubuntu as I don't currently have a ZipitZ2 configured to run that rootfs). You can find the tarball with the compiler, libs and conf files on this link. Extract and move to the right places and you should be able to write COBOL programs that will build and run on a ZipitZ2 running zubuntu. Because of the settings I used to build OpenCOBOL in theory it shoudl also work on any ARM based computer running Ubuntu as well although YMMV and also the same method of building OpenCOBOL should work for any Ubuntu distribution running on a processor that is supported by QEMU.
["COBOL Warriors" image Copyright © 2008 Robert Saczkowski. Banner courtesy of the GIMP, Copyright © 2010 Brian Tiffin and both are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ ]