It’s not obnoxious. Who said you can’t use the macro assembler, C compiler, whatever?
Bill Gates music program? There are all sorts of hacks on all sorts of computers to make the CPU or floppy drive or whatever play melodies, so I wouldn’t be surprised, though I don’t know how “useful” it is
ETA Bill Gates did not invent the computer program… he’s no Ada Byron and he was not even born yet when the OG hackers were doing their thing in the 1940s and 1950s… (The Art of Computer Programming was not published until the '60s, though)
Just a note that this generation of microcomputers was quickly followed by those with a slightly improved user interface…I’m thinking of the commodore KIM-1 or the Intel SDK-85 here.
Those machines had 7 segment LED displays that showed the information in hexadecimal instead of binary (4 bits per digit) and a hexadecimal keypad for entering addresses and data. This was far less tedious and less error-prone than the older toggle switches. It did require enough code in ROM to scan the keypad and multiplex the displays, so it wasn’t a straight forward upgrade. By the time I was programming a SDK-85, PCs were starting to appear, so the first '85 program I wrote was to download intel .hex files via RS-232, so you could cross-assemble your code on the PC and dump it to the '85 instead of having to key in the hex by hand. With careful coding, there was enough left-over room in the standard PROM that we were able to burn this into all the SDK-85’s in the lab, so other students could use it.
I will also note that I have an actual vintage case for an Altair. It was saved from the dumpster during a cleanup at a former employer. It contains a binary switch controlled DAC, and supporting circuitry. I fear that an actual Altair may have died to make this, but it came from Albuquerque,NM where the the Altairs were kitted, so it is not unlikely that extra cases or failed experiments ended up in a surplus store after the Altair had it’s day.
Ditto to looking at eBay for selling collectable electronics. Calculators were coming of age during the same time period and have a similar history and sell for good money on eBay as well; that’s what I’ve been collecting.
As to the OP: was your Motorola training kit the MEK6800? I that when I was in college, and wish I hadn’t thrown it away. It’s on eBay for about $580!
My school lab had several MEK6800 trainers. Most of the class was lecture and IIRC one of our textbooks was the Motorola Programming Guide. We had to complete several lab projects on the trainer.
It was an odd semester. I was coding PL1 on a DEC VT220 terminal connected to a Vax 11/780 cluster. Then go to the table with these bare bones trainers.
