Yep, the RCA 1802. I got the 1802 kit from Popular Electronics or radio Electronics. You could disconnect the keyboard when your done. I did a crane for a model railroad. Hand coded. Later I did it in BASIC using a Vitrax 9 SBC.

The first routines I wrote were to emulate gosub and return. I think I can find my paper copies of those.

Prior to that I had written programs for the PDP-8 and PDP-11 in assembly and FOCAL and BASIC respectively.

Same here. I cut my teeth on a PDP-8/S and PDP-15 in assembly and FOCAL in the early '70s.
I still have my COSMAC 1802.

 

Raising my hand! Another user who cut his teeth on a 1802.
I had all the opcodes pasted to my office wall.
Of course, the easiest one to remember was Set Register X.

 

"pass the program counter" was down right wierd. Missing gosub and return statements was like missing bread and butter.
So, with some finagling, I manged to create a gosub and return routine.

May have been something like. Put the address to return to on the stack. Pass the program counter.
and return would pop it off the stack and pass the program counter.

 

Yep, the RCA 1802. I got the 1802 kit from Popular Electronics or radio Electronics. You could disconnect the keyboard when your done. I did a crane for a model railroad. Hand coded. Later I did it in BASIC using a Vitrax 9 SBC.

The first routines I wrote were to emulate gosub and return. I think I can find my paper copies of those.

Prior to that I had written programs for the PDP-8 and PDP-11 in assembly and FOCAL and BASIC respectively.

Wow. Another person who used Focal!

You never forget your first.

 

You want a really obscure language - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_graphics

I HATE LISP. APL was wierd.

 

You want a really obscure language - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_graphics

I HATE LISP. APL was wierd.

LOL! ... one of the first languages that I learned was LISP for AutoCAD... I didn't like it at first, but with time I realized why it was chosen for that environment. Back then, superstructured languages didn't exist and LISP was the closest thing to a database oriented flexible structured language.

 

The first interpreter I wrote for my diy machine was for PILOT.

 

You want a really obscure language - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_graphics

I HATE LISP. APL was wierd.

Funny, I expected to just sit here and enjoy this awesome thread...but I 'learned' Logo in grade school, around '83 or so. My buddy and I swiped the manual from the teacher so we could get some advanced commands. We were making an oil drilling game.

Love reading these old anecdotes! Thanks for sharing.