Cosmac Grandpa

This is one of the rarest machines in my collection, a CADO CAT made by CADOSYSTEMS in Torrance CA in the 1980’s. It supported 4 simultaneous users on an 8 bit 8085A processor and 16KB (not MB or GB, 16 Kilobytes) of RAM using a proprietary operating system. If you have ever seen or worked on a CADOSYSTEMS machine, please drop a comment!

Connecting with your feed has introduced me to lots of other awesome inventor feeds, and also a lot of PCB knowledge I wish I had when it still mattered. It'll still help my personal projects, but it won't change the world like it might have a few years ago. But maybe it will for someone out there. 🫶

The X Platform is a different animal from Twitch. But something I learned about spending time there is the !lurk people are the life blood of the community. If you follow along just to listen but have little to say, now is you chance. I am calling out lurkers I see you! thanks

@cqcqcqdx Ha! Nice.

@alphafox 110 Baud, attached to a TTY ASR33

How fast was your first modem? Mine was a 2400 baud Hayes:

@trumplicans2024 Old enough that mine had a word followed by 5 digits on the dial. 😀

you this old?

@AbeiV @blind_via And whatever you do, do NOT be tempted to pop the balloons. Very bad things will result.

@blind_via @CosmacG yep, so you know why the battieres do that and its real. and real terrible

Wow, do thin laptops actually do this? How many batteries is that? All the tablets I have opened up lately just have one large flat cell, nothing like this. fake?

@blind_via My ex from the 1980's to this day still refers to thru-hole IC's as centipedes. 🤣

How many legs do the creepy bugs have? Yes

@blind_via The Surface Book was a literal nightmare in every way, lol. 3000 x 2000 px. screen resolution, GPU located in the detachable keyboard, which had even *more* batteries... And don't even get me started on the Thunderbolt video 🤣 For a whopping 3 grand in 2016.

@CosmacG Like, how do you manage all those different cell sizes and evenly distribute power consumption well? It's a nightmare LOL

I guess accidentally pausing over a catfu video was a bad move... Now the "for you" feed is nothing but catfu...

@i2cjak ROFL. Best @i2cjak to @yacineMTB reply ever... As a retired EE/CS guy who DOES draw schematics, but never once drew a flow chart.

we're going to crush these software engineers with large stones

@cqcqcqdx And if you got one of them AND one of these, like I was blessed enough to, you are probably capable of building circuits AND writing software. (In your retirement 🤣)

150 in one Radio Shack Electronics Kit. Many youngsters in the day found these under the Christmas tree which created many memories.

@davepl1968 Who coud afford an assembler for a COSMAC ELF back in 1976 when I built mine? Not me for sure. Hand assembled bits keyed in via the front panel FTW!

If you used a compiler, you did not, in fact, "personally build" it. Heck, if you used an assembler, you're benefiting from the labor of the assembler author. Get busy flipping switches!

@cqcqcqdx Sorry, couldn't resist

⁉️

@cqcqcqdx Somehow it's *never* that easy for me, lol. I cannot use that much paste across pads without winding up with bridges.

@cqcqcqdx If there's a penny jammed in under a blown fuse, I'm that old. 🤣

R U This Old ?

@ElecNotes A Commodore! Nice! Alas my first pocket calculator got scrapped to sacrifice the keypad for a COSMAC ELF. So I still have the keypad from my first pocket caculator. 😀

Who still has the first calculator they owned. This is mine: an old 4 function device with an LED display. It seems archaic now, but it worked well in its day. The big issue was the keys did not always register or they could double enter a digit so you had to be very careful. What are the memories of your first calculator and when did you buy it?

@yacineMTB I gave up on electrical engineering because it was too much math and went into software, never regretted it. Of course that was in the early 1980's, things were different then. 😉My advice now would be tough it out and minor in AI.

i might give up on becoming an electrical engineer. this shit is extremely tedious

Grok Imagine 😆

Toyfair 3D: The Revenge - Join us tonight for the third installment of Bruce on the Loose at NY Toy Fair 2026. 7pm E / 4pm P right here on X or join the cool kids @PilledNet

Thank you for posting this! It just might provide some insight into why I cannot for the life of me get a Waveshare ST7789 clone to work properly in ESP-IDF, when the Adafruit demo works perfectly in Arduino IDE. Now I wonder if the Adafruit library handles these clones but a strict interpretation of the ST7789 spec fails because it's really an ILI9341. Many thanks!

TIL I haven't been driving an ST7789, and instead have been driving an ILI9341 *pretending* to be an ST7789. You couldn't make this up, it's printed on the board at least 5 times 'ST7789'. And more to the point is I have no idea how I managed to drive it using the wrong drivers.