Roger Amidon spoke at a Vintage Computing Festival - East 7.0 panel on "VCF East 7.0 - lectures: Early microcomputing in New Jersey and Beyond". Panel moderated by Bill Degan, with David Ahl (creative Computing), Roger Amidon (TDL), Dick Moberg (Phila Area Comp Soc), Larry Stein (Computer Mart of NJ), John Dilks (PCC '76). Seated stage left to right are dilks, stein, amidon, ahl, moberg; Degan out of shot behind podium on far right. This panel was video recorded and a version is available on YouTube , posted by Dan Roganti as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eogVAd1qB1I Evan Koblentz of VCF Inc. notes "the official version", recorded by MARCH at the time, is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P_I5H_9uvU&feature=youtu.be This transcription is by Herb Johnson, May 23 2016. (c) Herb Johnson. Roger Amidon ------------- I got involved with computers from the hardware standpoint. I was always involved with electronics, ever since I was a kid, built a lot of electronic stuff. In 1972ish there was a Scelbi, with an 8008. I got involved with that, a little bit, playing with it. But then there was an issue of Pop Elect that came out in Dec 74, although it didn't really have an impact until Jan. but it came out in Dec. It had a picture of the Altair. It sounded really cool so I ordered one. I couldn't afford it with the case, so I ordered it without the case, it was a kit. But it was pretty cool. That summer, I was going around to different hamfests, with a guy that selling 7400 logic IC's. You remember 7400? It was a great thing that TI did. As a mtter of fact The TI book on 7400's was like a Bible, and very well done, compared to today's books which are terrible. That summer, I put up a sign at the booth, saying "Anyone have an Altair? See me." I had an Altair. And I got a lot of response from that. Also there was the ACCNJ, with Sol Libes, ... he had started a club. So I went to the very first meeting they had. As a matter of fact I was the first person to ever give a talk at the ACGNJ. And the talk was "how to interface a teletype to your Altiar", you know, with a UART. It was very popular talk, a lot of people built it, and they were able to talk to their altair, which was pretty cool. I remmeber when I first got the Altair, I had 256 bytes of memory, and was able to talk to it with my Teletype. but I had to bit-switch that program in. And then of course once I did that, I didn't have a lot of bytes left, to do anything with it. I could run a little program, that flahsed the lightes in the front, but that was about it. So I took my next paycheck, and blew the whole thing on more memory ... more chips .. I went from 256 [bytes] to 1K. And it was like, to go from 256, to 1K, was like amazing. Look at all the room I had! [laughs] I was actually able to write a program, that could do something, in my 1K of memory. Then eventually I did get a 4K board, [MITS] came out with a 4k board. If you remember that 4K board was horrible, it was dynamic. It would forget all the time, dropped bits left and right. At any rate, but that's how I got involved with the computer side of things, and software. I got involved with software, because I had hardware experience, but in order to make the hardware do what I wanted, I had to learn software. So I started right at the bit-switch mode, I learned octal, anyone remember octal? The original Altair used octal. And then I learned hex, hexidecimal. At any rate, I realized that with all this interest in the Altair, what was needed was not a hamfest, but we needed a computer-fest. So I had this idea to having a computer fest. So at the time, i was living in a place in Skillman NJ. I had a house, that had a huge field, that was not being used, big open field. So I had this great idea, to having this computer fest at my house, in this field. I had this friend over, named Al Katz, from Trenton College, somebody I've known ever since I was a kid. He said "You can't have it in the field. What happens if it rains? It will get all muddy. Why don't we have it at Trenton State College?" I said, yeah, that was probably a good idea. From that point on, suddenly Sol Libes gets involved with Al. Al calls Sol and says, "we are going to have a computer fest at the college - want to be a part of it?" And the next thing I know, is that Al and Sol are credited for the first computer festival. I said "Wait a minute - that was my idea!" [chuckles] I never got credit for it which has always been a bug up my butt. [crowd laughs] And so the first computer festival happened at the college, is what led to other things happening. It was at the beginning of a lot of this stuff. And it was pretty cool. I went on to do a lot of other things. The Epson QX-10? anybody remember that? That was the peunltimate 8-bit compter at the time. It could hold up to 256K of RAM, most computers were 64K, if you remember. We had a bank switching mechanism, so you could have four banks of 64K. And you could do a lot in that. We came up with something called "Valdocs", which was actually like Microsoft Office, but before there was an Office. We had a calculator, spread sheet kind-of-thing, we had drawing programs, a word processor that was amazing....There are things that you can do with that word processor, that you still can't do with Word. LIke you could take a bunch of text here, movee it here, column-wise, circle it, move it. You could take a list of figures, and point at it here, total it, move the result there. It was an amazing word processor. The only problem was it was running on an 8-bit machine, and it was using floppies. 5-1/4-inch floppies. Anyone remember 5-1/4" floppies? [chuckles] So it was a little on the slow side. Otherwise it was a great product. That lasted until 85-86. It was steam-rollered by the IBM PC, mainly because it was IBM, the 800-pound gorilla. And Epson was a small Japanese company, and they really didn't know how to compete well. So the IBM kinda took over that space. At one point, we wanted to move Valdocs over to the IBM, but it was considered that IBM was the "competitor". Why would you want to do that - put yOur product, on the competitor's hardwqare? But eventually Epson decided to do that, outside of us...[asked to wrap up] But just to let you know, I think the QX-10 was one of my major contributions. [hands mike to Larry Stine] Amidon's Apple and Zapple monitors ---------------------------------- [At about minute 36, Roger Amidon talks about his "Apple monitor", a Z80 ROM monitor.] [Roger is speaking] This is another classic event of my life... "I had been selling somethin called, the Apple monitor, at [the NJ Computer Mart] store. What it was, it was for the Altair 8080, and it was a 2K PROM, and it resided at the upper end of the address space. It was mainly an I/O monitor and a debugger. ["And it meant the end of bit-switching" said a participant, a reference to front panel operation.] Right. When you first turned on the machine, if you ran this Apple monitor, you could use your memory, you could load load memory with stuff, you could put it in byte-byte-byte, you could fill a range of memory with stuff...YOu could also read a [punched] paper tape, the tape was in hexidecimal in the Intel format... or binary, that way too. The whole idea was that it took a lot of the I/O out of the picture, so it made it invisible to the programm. So when you wrote a program, which would reside in the lower end of memory, when you needed a character from the console, you called a vector [address] up in the Apple [monitor]. When you needed a character to the console, you did the same thing. When you needed a printer... all your I/O was handled by this monitor. [Comment by Moberg on how amazing this was "in those days", it helped him at Computer Martin selling computers for use.] The Apple monitor was a cool thing. Now, at this festival, at some point I'm sitting in the dining area, eating a hot dog. These two guys come up and say "are you Roger Amidon?" "Yeah". Well, they sat down, and it was Wazinac and Jobs. They said "Listen, we've heard about your Apple monitor. Could you do us a favor and change the name of your monitor? [crowd chuckles]" I said "Why would I want to do that?" "We've started a small company out in California called Apple Computer. We have this computer we are trying to sell, called the Apple computer." And I said "Wait a minute..is that the one I saw at that booth? [gestering]? Is that 6502 [microprocessor] based?" They go "yeah". I said "My Apple monitor is an 8080 based program. So, there's obviously, there's no confusion there. [crowd chuckles]" I said "I'll tell you what. If people call you up, ask them if they have an 8080 or a 6502. If they have an 8080, give them my phone number, or Larry's; and if it's a 6502, fine. I'll do the same. Anybody calls me about a 6502, I'll give them your number." And we made this agreement, to not change the name of my Apple monitor. Now, if I had had some foresight [crowd laughs].. [Question about the Zapple monitor] That came later, with the Z80, when we did the Z80 [TDL ZPU S-100] board. The Apple monitor existed before the Z80, that was for the Altair, it worked great for that. But when we did the Z80 board, I wanted to redo my monitor, and add some of the extra power of the Z80. I was able to add a lot more features into the monitor, as well as doing breakpoints, with all the additional registers of the Z80. But I wanted to make sure there was no confusion, so I stuck a Z in front of "Apple" and called it "Zapple". Then we came out with the Zapple monitor, which was sold by my company, Technical Design Labs, in Princeton. So that's where Zapple came from. But Apple was the monitor, that made a lot of improvements, as [Moberg] was saying, in people's ability to using a computer. Because, there was a whole variety of ways of talking to it. People had stand-alone keyboards, there had Teletypes - model 33's, Baudot machines, 5-bit... But whatever your I/O device was: if you made it work with the Zapple monitor, or the Apple monitor, then you could write a program, and it would work on anybody's machine. Because once they had Apple, it would have ran. [unintelligible last few words]. [Later in the panel, the Apple I is mentioned, and Roger asks for the microphone.] Roger says: At this meeting with Jobs and Wazinac, I had seen the Apple 1, at their booth. When they told me they were starting this computer company in California called Apple, I figured 'they're not going to go anywhere with that'. It was a piece of *junk*, compared to what we were doing, y'know? Compared to the IMSAI and the Altair, it was 'nuffin, really. And I thought, if they would be successful - who cares? Apple - bah! - big deal. [crowd laughs] And then they came out with the Apple II. And I went "oh-oh". [more laughter] What a big difference....[Roger hands mike back to Dilkes, but Bill grabs microphone and changes subject.] S-100 origins ------------- [Question from Bill Degan, about when Roger and TDL started calling the Altair bus, "the S-100 bus". Microphone passed to John Dilkes, but Roger answers.] Roger: Basically it was because, we had a lot of products, that fit the same bus. But we didn't want to call it the "Altair bus", because that was our competitor. [Roger motions for Dilks to speak.] Dilks: Leading up to PCC 76, we were having trouble getting the West Coast guys to come to the show. It was espensive to fly back then, we didn't have those cheap flights like we do today....Most of these guys were working in garages, sellers who didn't have a lot of extra money [additional financial comments skipped].. There was a guy in California, who started a magazine called Interface Age [holds up a magazine, describes items for sale and donation]. Bob Jones, put together with somebody he knew in the travel business, a flight from California to Philadelphia, to bring everybody over. It was a cheap flight, they leased an airplane or something like that...[details skipped] So we got quite a few people signed up: Processor Tech, and some of those other companies out there, JOhn French [discussion unclear, 16-bit DEC clone]. So we got a bunch of people lined up to come, and a lot of that was the responsibility of Carl Helmers. I had given him a lot of information, and he'd would to talk to these people for Byte magazine, to sell advertizing, he would tell them about it. We found out that Jobs and Wazniac wanted to come, but they were really tapped out finacially, every penny tied up in their business. What we didn't know is that they were developing the Apple II. They were selling the Apple I... [Roger asks for and gets the microphone, and Roger comments on the Apple I and the Apple II as noted above. - Herb] [Roger hands mike back to Dilkes, but Degan grabs microphone and changes subject. What Dilks was not able to describe about the term S-100, is that Dilks and others believe the term S-100 for the Altair/IMSAI bus, was discussed on that airplane. It probably was initiated by Roger Mellon of Cromemco. Cromemco was likely the first to publish "S-100" in their paid advertizing. - Herb Johnson ] Text above as transcribed by Herb Johnson. Commentary by Herb Johnson in []'s.