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wowczarekyesterday at 10:23 PM2 repliesview on HN

Small machines eh?

How about a Casio PB-2000C, in all its pocketable 910 kHz glory, up to 64k RAM shared between heap, stack, code and RAM filesystem. 192 x 32 LCD and a piezo buzzer. Serial and parallel ports available and a FDD. It also has a ROM card slot. And a card was developed, the only third-party ROM for this platform, by one Hans Larsson in Sweden, in the late 1980s.

A 64k ROM with:

- a mostly TP 5.5 compatible Pascal compiler, crt and friends

- inline assembly

- units, loadable libraries and all

- debugger

- full-screen editor, global search and replace, etc.

- visual file manager

- CLI with redirection and rudimentary shell scripting - variables, conditionals, arguments

While the hardware platform is somewhat available and there is a very good emulator, due to "issues", the DL-Pascal ROM is not at this time publicly available and only a chosen few have access to it. Luckily there is a preservation effort underway.


Replies

pjmlptoday at 7:29 AM

Interesting, given the prominence of Casio calculators in Portugal to this day.

However it was always BASIC in the models we had access to.

RodgerTheGreattoday at 12:10 AM

Sounds fascinating. Is there anywhere we can read more about this preservation effort? Does the PB-2000C have an active user community today?