This was the beginning...Buy Books!

Looking back on my developments, I was always proud of my software. 

Starting with a programmable calculator and Eumel on a ELAN System in 1981, I got my first computer a Sharp MZ-700 in 1982.

First of all - With learning Basic from the MZ-700 manual, I was able to sell my first software - a graphic editor - to a local dealer to get my first floppy drive.

My first book: Rodnay Zaks programming the Z80. 

My next Computer was the MZ-800! With the MZ-800 graphics, 80 Chars per line were possible and with this, CP/M could be used for development. The Editor - of course - Wordstar, assembler M80, linker L80. At the same time: Learning UCSD-Pascal on Apple II in school and with Turbo-Pascal for CP/M at home.

I decided to write my second program in pure assembler:

The FLDOS  (Frank Lauter's Disk Operation System) 

Thanks to a very kind employee of  Motorola - I got an original manual of the floppy-controller-chip. But this journey is another story. 

This "operating system" only take 1000 bytes of memory and was able to handle two parts. One for file-operation and the other was a Disk-Hex-Editor. Both parts could be reloaded from a floppy without violating the 1000 bytes limit.

The Z80-Book "paid" the start of my development equipment. A dual floppy drive! One with 40 Tracks, one with 80 Tracks. ~2400 DM at this time.

After that, I never tried to develop a whole program in pure assembler, because everything else was written in Turbo-Pascal. (Until today - I ignore my tries in C)

I have bought many books these days, but nearly all the books did not satisfy my needs. 700 or more Pages but only 60 pages of useful information - or less... So I had to buy 10 Books to get all the necessary information. (Perhaps that's why I stopped buying books)

And this leads to my next blog post ;-) or back to my Bookwriters post.