I remember reading Byte Magazine when I was 7 and not understanding why I couldn’t plug one of those cool S-100 bus graphics cards into my Heathkit H89.

So I made space invaders out of box drawing characters.

BASIC was slow so I tried using C. (Yes, there was a minimal C compiler for the H89!) But then C was too fast and “for (i=0; i<10000; i++);” didn’t seem to slow things down like it did in BASIC so then I was stumped. “C is too fast for games!” — me

The H89 had a built-in monitor and a 5 1/4” floppy drive. Its precursor, the H8, was much like this emulated S100/Altair, with LEDs and switches as your only I/O.

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kjs3 an hour ago | parent [-]

You could put a terminal on an H8 and not have to use the hexpad. Lot's of people built one from the TV Typewriter Cookbook by Don Lancaster (or one of the similar designs floating around then). Knew several folks with that setup.

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dmbaggett an hour ago | parent [-]

WUT, I had no idea. That’s cool!

	▲	kjs3 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It wasn't hugely useful unless you also bought/built some sort of mass storage. Fortunately, Heathkit sold a paper tape reader! And a cassette tape interface! And something new and expensive called a 'floppy disk', but who could ever use that much storage?