I still have my Poly-88 that I bought in 1978 from Hoboken Computer Works, Hoboken, NJ. Bob Radcliffe was the proprietor.
Nice small box, orange cover, 5 “Altair” slots (The S-100 name came later.) And a 16K dynamic ram. Bob couldn’t provide keyboards or moniter. The hobby was leaning at that time on AT&T teletypes, model 33. But he had a video card that did 16 lines of text, about 40 or 50 characters per line which fed a TV via coax. I bought a specific Hitachi (??) TV & added a $25 mod kit that Bob could provide. It worked fine. To test all this I built a small box with 7 toggles & a pushbutton to send ascii into the keyboard jack. AND IT ALL WORKED! My goal was a specific software I built, the interpreter: tiny-C. I had a partner by then, Scott Guthery, and we together wrote a 200 page ring-binder book: ‘Tiny C Owners Manual’. Three printings. Sold 2500 over the next 4 or 5 years at $40. So here is my question: Does anybody out there remember any this? And I have more story if you would like some.
Tom Gibson
(This “reply” is a continuation of my tiny-C post.)
I finally got a keyboard at the 1976 Trenton Computer Festival. And by then I learned of 3 others at work (Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ) that had Poly-88s, and we met at lunch frequently. In fact as I completed each card (they came as kits) I would visit one of these new buddies who would substitute my card for his in his already working system. And my Poly-88 box needed assembly, too. And to enter assembler code I had Processor Technology System #1 on a 300 baud mag tape. It took 20 minutes to load.
Finally I could actually write code: 8080 assembler.
How do you write an interpreter? First you need a design. I did not want a full C language. What I wanted was something that is best summarized as a first programming training language, but not Basic. I applaud the work of Kemeny and Kurtz. They gave non-programmers access to computing. And that is good. My thinking was aimed at as simple as basic but a proper step towards becoming professional. C is an inspiring goal, how about a simplified C. My 10 year old was coding in Basic, but he would also look at my programming at home while munching a cookie right beside my ear. I was using a portable dial-up terminal connected to my Bell Labs department computer. I had Fortran experience (10 years) and was learning C and finding it very pleasant.
But the build process of Basic is so simple compared to Fortran or C. Type some code, then run it, then opps! fix it and run again. When the bit of code seems ok give it a name and save it. That’s simple. But with Fortran or C or any other ‘full’ language you can’t just run it. You must name, save, and compile it, clear compile errors, import stuff and link it properly, etc.
Cruft! Basic hides that cruft behind a simple command: ‘run.’ My tiny-C hides the cruft. The chip was an 8080, so just char, int and arrays/pointers for either. It was tiny whether or not I called it that. It took me an hour to design, and a few days to get running. Soon my son had his code running with this simple training-wheels software.
But now my watching his coding disclosed two difficulties. He had troubles with curly braces simply because they required use of the shift key. It felt natural for him to type code blocks in square brackets. So I broke from C syntax: square braces for code blocks, and arrays used parentheses for both declaration and element access. But what about function names? No change, they kept their use of parentheses. Unlike C a tiny-c name followed by left parenthesis can be a function or an array element name. The parser can handle that.
So tiny-c is no longer a subset of C. Every array name is a pointer. So the syntax is simplified: char|int () defines ‘name’ as a character or integer pointer respectively. Its value can be set to any integer value.
Very interesting to hear about your design decisions as things progressed!
Thank you, Ed. I have still more story. Should I continue with a chain of replies, or is there a better way?
This is a good way - there is precedent!
(continuation of continuation)
But my goal was still not reached. To write a tiny-c program requires an editor. Most editors were the line-number type. Every line was prefixed with a 5 digit number and a space, and they could not be removed. At work I was using Unix vi; it was so much nicer. I preferred a pure text editor.
So in assembler I wrote a very simple one: I could scroll a pointer (dot arrow), type text, delete a whole line (dot-d).
Any text not starting with dot was entered. It was still hard to use. I needed search & replace & other stuff. Using the assembler version I rewrote this barely useful editor in tiny-c. So the PPS was born: program preparation system. From then on I used the PPS to improve the PPS. When done it had 10 commands, but several of these had variations depending on their arguments. Counting all the variations upped the count to 24.
Thanks, Ed. Here is my 2nd continuation…
(And another (3rd)…
Friends, including new friends we met at festivals, had different computers, The 6502 and 6800 were getting popular for example. I encouraged others to port my 8080 code to different chips. In fact Scott Guthery was the first to do so, porting to his DEC LSI-11. We advertised in Byte magazine for awhile, but our best results came from ads in Dr. Dobb’s Journal. We also got pretty good returns from Kilobaud and David Ahl’s Creative Computing.
I found a news release in a 1978 issue of Dr Dobbs:
‘TINY-C’ INTERPRETER FOR 8080 AND PDP-11
News Release Received: 78 June 22
An interpreter for a subset of the C structured programming language which runs on both DEC PDP-11 and Intel 8080 processors is available from Tiny-c Associates. The tiny-c Owner’s Manual includes a complete reference description of the language, a tutorial walkthrough of a training program, lots of sample programs including comments on their programming style, and a description of the Program Preparation System. It also includes commented source code listings of both the 8080 and the PDP-11 interpreters, and a chapter on how the interpreter works.
Tiny-c is intended primarily for the education and hobbyist markets. The tiny-c language handles integer and character data, and arrays of either type. Other features include compound statements, if-else and while statements, global and local variables, pointer variables, and functions. Functions may have arguments and may return results. Recursion is allowed. The interpreter also recognizes calls to functions written in machine language. These, too, may have arguments and return results. A minimum of 16K bytes of memory is recommended to run tiny-c.
The package includes a Program Preparation System with which the user can write, edit, run, debug, store, recall, and link tiny-c programs. The PPS includes a standard library of tiny-c software tools. The PPS is written in tiny-c. Thus it serves as an example of a significant use of tiny-c, and is also easily adapted to a user’s or operating system’s requirements.
The Owner’s Manual is available for $40 from Tiny-c Associates, P.O. Box 269, Holmdel, New Jersey 07733. Machine readable copies of the interpreter are available separately on several formats of tape and disk.
Edit: other findings, in a 1980 issue:
A Small C Compiler for the 8080’s by Ron Cain
and
Structured Programming, C and tiny c by Tom Gibson and Scott Guthery
Wow, there are a surprising number of print references for this.
I’ll have a Wiki article up shortly…
Tom, what was it actually written on? I see the initial date of 22 June 1978, which is the same year you mention for the Poly-88, but then in your next post above you noted "got a keyboard at the 1976 ". Is that a typo perhaps?
It was a printed 3-ring binder document, 300 pages including listings. The binder was 3 inches thick! Three printings, 2500 copies total. Price = $40. We also sold 300 baud cassettes at $20. Sales were steady for about 2 years, then slowed. Our wives took orders & shipped, and so slowing down was not bad. We needed it to happen. After the last shipping I ended up with about 2 dozen remaining copies. I still have one.
Nice to see the software lasting longer than the hardware.
Ahh, yes. The keyboard thing. I was coding pencil on paper. Keyboards were just not available until 1976. Bought one, a kit, and got it working. And FINALLY I could enter code and debug. We finally had product in 1977.
I remember my first test program, a one-liner… MC(MC(2),1)
Tom
Opps! Typo. Bought my Poly-88 in 1976, not 78.
Tom
Yes, typo. Sorry. In fact 1978 was first of 3 printings of the Owners Manual. I still have serial # 0029, labeled “First Printing: June 1978.” 1976 was completion of my hardware with a keyboard kit close to years end, I believe. By then I had pencil draft of tiny-c in C-like pseudo code, not 8080 assembler yet. To do: write and enter 8080 asm code, debug, write, easily a years work by myself and Scott. So first printing had to be a year later, 1977. I still have a '78 listing. I also still have: “intel 8080 Microcomputer Systems User’s Manual September 1975,” a paper-back bound book.
Wow!! Thank you for these postings. Tom, do you happen to recall a Rob Bohn or Bob Bybee? They were probably customers of yours. I inherited one of your tiny-c 3-ring binders from Rob Bohn.
I’ve been preparing to do a full detailed video about the POLY-88. I’ve got mine restored and working, and your story explains some confusion about the keyboard – the one I have isn’t from PolyMorphic. It seems to us that PolyMorphic never made an “official” keyboard for the POLY-88. Rather, they only got their own brand named keyboards after the POLY-8813 (just the keyboard for the 8813 also happened to work with the prior POLY-88).
I’ve gotten both Byte and PolyPhase format loading working on this POLY-88. We haven’t yet gotten PolyPhase working in the emulator. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the POLY-88, I made a game for it just in time for VCF a couple months ago. A video preview of it is here:
“Habitat” - Graphic Adventure Game for the Poly-88 Microcomputer
(kind of curious about your “if this had been available in 1978” impression on this; there are a few aspects not presented in the video, he didn’t want to spoil everything about it)
From that video started a debate on whether the “standard” POLY-88 keyboard supported a repeat key feature or not. The person in that video realized later his keyboard actually has a REPEAT toggle in the corner. The POLY-88 keyboard I have (which I’m told was retrofitted from actually a SWTPC 6800 S-100 system) does support repeat keys (i.e. hold down and they repeat).
But back on tiny-c, I did get a little confused about PPS. I somewhat understand it better now. I’ve had so much else to explore about the system (of the 30-40 tapes I have for it, figuring out which side has polyPhase, which is BYTE), tiny-c was an aspect I was going to save for later.
For those that don’t know, switching between Byte and PolyPhase isn’t easy - you have to swap two jumpers on the tape card. One adjust the baud rate, the other selects the Polarity of the PolyPhase (so there were really two polyPhase formats). Most users picked one polarity, but sometimes if you have to swap it.
Excited to meet up with you here! I’m hoping to have my video done by the end of this year, still drafting out the content-sequence. Probably won’t really start video’ing until Thanksgiving. I’m nervous though, because the VTI video card almost died once already - so I’m nervous about the hardware not holding up. I fixed the VTI once now. Fingers crossed!
Here is an Unlisted video of my system running. This was after the 8 minutes needed to load BASIC A00 (which has the PLOT command). The Pentium3 laptop next to it was used as a proxy to load files (the tape player still works, but once we have WAV file recordings, I prefer to play it back from a PC).
1976 POLY-88 Intel 8080 CPU BASIC A00 “PLOT” Command Example
Cheers and will write more later! (wrapping up on an X16 project first)
To expand a bit on the “dying POLY-88 VTI” here is an Unlisted video of what that looked like:
POLY-88 With a Dying VTI Display Card - recorded in case it doesn’t make it!
There is one chip on the VTI dated from 1972, that I haven’t found a replacement for yet. From an IR camera, it gets fairly hot. And by basically pressing around that chip (with gloves, but while system is running) it influenced the display font – so we thought a trace had come loose.
Turns out the issue wasn’t the chip at all - or at least, for now, I was able to clear things up by adjusting one of the pots at the top of the VTI (I think I read about this browsing through PolyMorphics VTI manual, so that’s what gave me the idea to try it). It might only be a temp fix though. Luckily the POLY-88 emulator is very good, so I can dev and test on that and minimize wear and tear on the physical system.
I’m also curious on your opinions about the orange painted case cover. Did everyone “hate them”? Not the color, but the fact that the system overheated? Did everyone eventually cut holes into the case? I’m told I’m lucky that the orange case I have is still fully original and intact, with no cut holes. The only main issue we didn’t fix on my POLY-88 is that the bulb for the power button has gone out – and I think I’ll leave it alone, the system otherwise works fine, I’m not gonna risk fixing that light (since it’s a bugger to get to; I think I have to remove the entire S-100 bus hardware out from the chassis).
I don’t recall either name. My only customer I can recall is George Eberhardt who formed Computer Innovations here in New Jersey. His product was an 80386 C compiler, C86. Back in the '70s there were 8 C compilers for that chip. Tough competition. George asked my permission to convert tiny-c to a compiler. He used tiny-c itself as bootstrap. When I retired from Bell Labs (full pension!) my retirement lasted one weekend, and on Monday morning I joined Computer Innovations. By then George had 4 techies and his wife Barbara ran the business end of Computer Innovations. George is gone, now, but my wife and I see Barbara from time to time. Wow, you got me going here. Nostalgia is fun, thank you.