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| 10th June 2004 | KEN
ABOUT... SMALL RELICS |
Ken Ross |
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this article requires netscape or similar for
frames and colours ~ sorry
Eat Up Martha. Following a bit of luck recently, an Apple Newton MK1 has been added to my collection. The Apple Newton has a 240 * 336 pressure-sensitive monochrome display for use with a stylus and was one of the first handheld systems to attempt to recognize normal handwriting. Newtons are technically not 'Macs', as they don't use the MacOS but use the Apple developed NewtonOS. Sadly Apple dumped the Newton development for various reasons.
The Newton Connection Kit is a standard printer cable, (there's a
standard Mac serial port on the side next to the 'DC Power In' socket), with
a couple of floppys. This can be downloaded from:
Some thinking & checking made it obvious.
Double checking my Epson 700 ~ yes ~it was happy with either type A or B directly from the Mac without the slightest fuss. On the Newton I found that replacing the styles prefs panel with "Nstyles' preferences panel, (also to be found at http://www.unna.org, improved handwriting recognition to better levels - after making the 'pen' width narrower on screen. The handwriting recognition can be improved, it seems, with patches/upgrades, but they're all for Newtons newer than the one I've got ~ some days it'll get 90% right, but other days it veers into surrealist territory. The Newton uses PCMCIA Flash cards, (not the compact variety), to store things onto ~ some use a watch battery and the Newton will tell you if it needs replacing.
Unable to get an exact replacement without a bus journey, a bit of bodging
was needed. The card battery clips must be at the bottom of the slot, so
sort of wedging the nearest sized one down into place worked fine.
HANDHELD IN BLACK AND WHITE Lurking in my collection for quite a few years has been a selection of Casio programmable calculators.
CASIO FX-730P
A 24 digit LCD Scientific Calculator from 1986 which can use BASIC programs typed in on a, (small sized!), full QWERTY keyboard which are then stored in program areas. It also has a short term Function Memory, which makes possible temporary storage of calculation results by inputting the necessary numbers, as well as a Data Bank. This was my first "computer" in 1990 ~ I was happy using the data bank to store difficult maths info in, until one day the maths teacher wrote a simple BASIC prg up on the blackboard. I was a mature student in 1990! ~ when I went to school the first time round computers were still mostly in the realms of Science Fiction. I saw that it was the same stuff that was in the back of the manual that looked puzzling ~ and now I could understand what it meant. The memory has been expanded to 16K via a RAM pack. There's a range of peripherals for this machine such as cassette interface and a small thermal printer, (1" wide), and there was a picture of a 40 Col printer in the manual. The cassette interface enabled it to save and load from tape giving it a bit more muscle for my purposes.
CASIO FX-850P
A big brother to the 730, from 1987, with a useful feature: a comprehensive built in equation/function library. A larger display and a comfortable amount of memory, (mine is expanded to 36K), make it a very useful machine. Again, I got this in 1990. It has an LCD display screen of 2*32 characters and an I/O port for an interface box that offered the cassette interface, as before, but also a centronics printer output along with an RS232 port for intefacing with PCs, (so the manual says!). It can use the programs from the 730's tape library, modifying the programs to it's own standard as they load. In adverts on the back of magazines aimed at light aircraft people during the early 90s, the 850 was being sold as a tool for navigation etc. I once saw one in the TV news ~ being used by the navigator on a RAF Hercules flying a relief mission ~ so light could be relative!
TANDY / RADIO SHACK PC-4 ,
At one point Tandy, (AKA Radio Shack in the USA), were having a clearance sale, (again 1990), and I managed to get this ex demo machine very cheaply ~ mainly because it had a cassette interface and the narrow thermal printer with it. With a bit of luck, I found that the external bits worked nicely with the Casio 730, which could also load the Tandy's saved programs. I presumed this was a rebadged Casio. (Tandy managed to work TRS-80 into the label to imply some sort of connection with that computer series). Later, I found out that it was the early Casio PB-100/FX-700 model. When it first came into my hands the memory was 490 bytes. A visit to a different Tandy shop turned up the expansion module, bringing it up to all of 1568 bytes, (yes ~ 1.5K!), which wasn't bad for a handheld design dating from 1983. Creating programs on it was not easy, due to the very restricted version of BASIC built into it. If you saw the film 'Ghostbusters' this was part of their ghost busting kit, and if you watched 'Dallas' the Ewing Oil office block was actually the back view of the Radio Shack HQ. At one point I had quite a few Casio programs saved onto tapes, but after I no longer needed to use them on a frequent basis they got stowed away. Sadly, quite a few of the tapes were unusable when they came to be checked recently, so it was time to upgrade the media! The basic tape interface for the Casio 730 uses standard mono microphone/earphone plugs. The fancier version, as does the lead from the 850's box, has a remote on/off plug for cassettes that have that feature. As a test, the FX730 was connected to the Mac audio in and a Casio program was recorded at (mono) CD quality. The resulting high pitched squeal was then made into an audio CD, after tidying up the signal prior to the carrier wave it uses by replacing the 'tape noise' with a silent lead in (& out) to give me a more accurate start point for test purposes. At odd points in the carrier wave there were sections of different pitched blips that must contain the actual data info. Programs had been loaded into the 730 and the Tandy from a tape Walkman so I knew that it'd be happy without using the remote on/off. Connecting a CD walkman to the Casio tape interface produced a perfect load of the test program. The remaining working tapes belonged to the FX850 and they were just played into the Mac with a tape Walkman. I thought the lack of the pause feature might have been a problem with the 850, as the tape machine that the 850 had been used with was long gone and it used to pause during the loading process. As before the end result was tidied up before transfer into the CD walkman, but this time with the 850 and its interface box connected ~ success!~ the tapes were consigned to the bin.
AND FINALLY......
Aircraft design is a highly skilled affair as can be seen here:
A look around this site turns up some freebie PDF files for print out of card kits:
An example of the card kit genre can be found here, (D-Day invasion glider
):
About this particular Mac isn't just a menu item ~ it's an e~zine,
http://www.atpm.com/ |
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