Some BASICODE Background
There is a background story to my previous post on BASICODE that should not be left unshared. It's about the time and place I was introduced to BASICODE, and about the people who gave me that introduction.
Back in September, I took a train trip to the valiant city of Wolfhagen in Northern Hesse. The purpose was for me to attend the annual gathering of a union of people named "Joyce-User-AG" who use a certain kind of 8-bit hardware from the Seventies and Eighties of the past century. Read: nerd meeting.
And that’s what it was. Lots of like-minded people with interesting ideas and approaches to technology. The whole thing was an experience in sustainability and ingenuity: 40-year-old hardware that still works, and instead of relying on floppy disks now boots from USB sticks and other hardware because, you know, tinkering. One even had a WiFi card.
I didn’t bring any of my ancient hardware because I came by train. Those machines are heavy and bulky. I brought my laptop, and learned a lot about emulators that exist for this kind of hardware. I built several of them from the source, and made another run thanks to installing Wine.
Here’s some imag’ry. First, a contraption including a Z80 CPU and an FPGA, as well as a row of memory circuits … this is an ongoing project by one of the gathering participants, and will one day be a usable Z80 based computer.
Next, here’s a certain text processor named LocoScript (the first one I ever used) running on my MacBook Pro in a simulated Windows running the CP/M Box emulator acting as an Amstrad PCW 8512.
Finally, on the right-hand side of the image, an actual Amstrad PCW. This is the kind of machine I learned programming on. The machine to the left is a Russian Z80 clone based computer.
The gathering also involved talks and presentations. One of the Joyce-User-AG members gave a deep introduction to, you guessed it, BASICODE. The details about how that fascinated me are in my previous post. One detail I hadn't given was that he maintains a (mostly German) BASICODE web page at basicode.de, which I highly recommend as a starting point for taking a deep dive.
I’ve been a member in Joyce-User-AG for some ten years now, and had never before made it to the annual gathering. So this was a first, and it was great. I’ll definitely see about being back.
Tags: the-nerdy-bit