Partner

(Machine, Yugoslavia)

The 8-bit Z80 CP/M box on which I started my professional* carreer as a programmer, in the storage container converted into offices in stambena, 26-V-1986..

It had a 5.25 floppy with a weird 640K format which I managed to read on a PC only once. Had a 10M disk with 16 folders named "", 1, 2, ..., 15, the one named "" being always visible ("included in the path" was the expression under DOS etc, later). The screen was green but non-glare and actually wasn't bad at all, it's only that the characters were made of tiny green dots, so it was as if on a dot-matrix printer, only green on black. Could be tiresome if set too bright. The keyboard was among the best (with a 6mm banana plug on a coil cable, never seen that again).

The Z80 couldn't address more than 64K of memory, yet this box had 128. It would keep some stuff in one half and the rest in the other, using some tricks to decide which was when. Never understood how that worked.

It was made by Iskra Delta, with at least some parts of it being their own design. They also had AGP, "avtomatski generator programov", which had what we later got used to - metadata and form generator. Saw it demoed once, and of course it looked complicated yet limited, like any generator is.

In stour, it was installed in field units (separate oours each) - one near romanian border, one in Njujork, one in Trbnjevo.

For text editing it used Wordstar, and everyone had to learn the difference between its text mode and document mode, specially if both kinds are text. Well, document mode is text with some binary bits inserted for formatting, looks nicer when printed, but doesn't compile at all. Everyone had a fuckup when forgetting to switch to just text, at least twice.

----

* what I did before was as an amateur, this was for money... and so I joined the ranks of professionals and professionals [the latter being feminine, and mostly meaning a prostitute]

---

Mentions: 26-V-1986., 01-IX-1986., 11-X-1986., november 1986., 22-V-1987., june 1987., september 1987., 10-II-1989., Plate gets hot, november 1992., juski, Njujork, oour, stambena zadruga, stour, Trbnjevo, triglav, in serbian