| Amateur Programmers' Line: Amateur Programming as a Niche |
Essay examining whether amateur computer programming has become a niche hobby, comparing it to the historical arc of amateur radio building—mass-market in the 1920s, niche by the 1950s. Harmer surveys the ecosystem supporting amateur programmers: schools and universities (citing the origins of Pascal, FORTRAN, COBOL, UCSD Pascal p-code system, and Japanese LHARC compression utility in |
Timex/Sinclair 1000, Timex/Sinclair 2068 |
| Mark Yost TS1000/TS2068 Software Tape Stock |
Brief notice that Mark Yost of Canton CT may be acquiring a stock of TS1000/TS2068 software tapes from a closed retail store, including M-SCRIPT, Vu-Cal, Vu-File, Timemachine BASIC compiler, Vu-3D, Aerco Print Master, Chess, 32/64 columns, and M-Term, at approximately $5.50 each. |
Timex/Sinclair 1000, Timex/Sinclair 2068 |
| TS Bulletin News Supplement #3-1990 |
News roundup covering several topics: Harmer’s experiments with an MS-DOS word processor and dot-matrix printer for producing TS Bulletin; his work on a short machine code text compression algorithm for orphan computers (ZX-81/TS1000, TS2068, C64) that achieves ~52% compression using an approach short enough to fit in ~400 bytes, unlike standard Huffman/LZ algorithms that require |
Sinclair QL, Sinclair ZX81, Timex/Sinclair 1000, Timex/Sinclair 2068 |
