The SuperPET Gazette Years

For a couple of years from 1981 till about 1985 I was an Associate Editor of the SuperPET Gazette. This newsletter was edited by Dick Barnes in Hatteras , North Carolina.

I wrote a column called: Bits Bytes and Bugs. This delt with using 68-9 assembly language to write programs. Aslo as Associate Editoe I would review articles having to do with using the assembly language features of the SuperPET.

I have left an issue of the magazine from 1985. There are no archives of this magazine. However, once in a while a person will write in and post that some of the issues are available.

The most interesting feature of the computer was its several languages developed at the University of Waterloo. There was a switch at the side of the machine which changed it from 6502 mode to 6809 mode. Then the laanguage disk would be placed in the floppy drive and one would be able to load any of the languages for the computer. Also ther was an editor ysed for entering programs.

The Year of kilobaud 1981 Part Two

Three months after the previous article was in print another article appeared in the June 1981 issue. However, the title of the article was not mentioned on the cover.

This article too was located in the library stacks of the University of Southern Mississippi. And as far as I know there are no archives of the old issues of this excellent magazine.

Finding old computer magazines does reveal that the old timers paid much more for their computers than the current generation of computer users does. For example the Super PET computer I purchased in 1981 cost $1495 for the printer. $1895 for a dual floppy drive and another $1995 for the computer itself. Today one can purchase a much better printer for just a little more than the costs of the ink cartridges!!

The naame of the article was: Expand PET Memory and it ran from pages 177 to 183 in the June 1981 issue. This concerns a feature of the old systems which set up the size of the BASIC program in certain registers. By altering the registers it was possible to have one program be replaced by another. Now this allowed much larger programs to be created. This is the day of 8k and not 8 gig memory systems. The PC when it first appeared would only allow memory up th 640k.

Also for just a few dollars one my purchase multi gig usb sticks for expanding the memory of their systems.

The Year of kilobaud 1981 Part One

In the year 1981 I had two articles published in the magazine
kilobaud MICROCOMPUTING. This was also the last year that
I would be Gary Ratliff as on October 8 of that year my wife and I finally had a son and he was named Gary. I had for years thought that all my children would be girls. However, with the arrival of my first son that idea proved false.

This is a thumbnail of the cover of the March 1981 issue. If you have eagle eyes you can read the title of the article PET Shorthand Compleat. Unlike the COMPUTE! article there seem to be no archives available of the old issues of kiloaud. The article covers a little known feature of the early Commodore PET in that if you enter the first lettter of a token and then enter the shifted second letter the word will expand in to the full token. This makes entering programs slightly faster especially for touch typists. This was really a blessing given the tiny nature of the keyboard on the original PET's.

My supply of old computer magazines had long ago been thrown out. However, I came across a set of the magazine in the stacks of the computer department of the University of Southern Mississippi. This is located on the fifth floor of the Cook Library. I soon obtained a card to allow making copies and proceeded to make copies of this article as well as the second article to be published by me which appeared in the June 1981 issue just three months later.

We will leave the details of that article for another time.

My First Computer Article

The very first article I published appeared in issue 39 in October 1979 Volume 4 Issue 9 of: Dr. Dobb's Journal of COMPUTER Calisthenics & Orthodontia. It was callled: Just Poking Around with my PET.

The articles mentioned on the front cover of this issue were: tiny BASIC for the F8 by Jerry D. Fox; Page List for the Apple by Robert D. Diaz; Just Poking Around with my PET by Gary Ratliff; Producing Pictures on Your Computer with a Diable Printer by Jay C. Bowden and Anna K. Scharschmidt;Quick and Dirty Routines for the Sweet-16 by Steve Wheeler; and Main Software Teletype Terminal Interface by Donald Faulkner.

The article appears on pages 22 and 23 of this issue. It concerns poking various registers on the PET computer. It also shows how to list the secret locations on the early PET. For some reason Commodore decided to block access to the BASIC ROM's of the early machine. When one attempted to peek in these locations all they received for their effort was the reply of zero. So one had to learn to program in 6502 assembler to crack into this area.

Also firms offered a set of disassembled listings for this area. However, Commodore soon changed their policy as the release of the 6502 Assembler packages and the many articles showing how to explore this area showed them that this area was not such a dark secret.

When Suzane Rodrigues then editor of the magazine wrote me that my article had been accepted I was thrilled. Also I thought I was a born computer journalist and soon began submitting many other articles to kilobaud and COMPUTE!. All was well and all articles were accepted until IBM released their computer in 1981. They thought they invented the Personal Computer and soon people clamored to read about the PC and no longer desired to read about the old PET computer.

I soon received my first rejection slip for what I thought was one of my best articles. This was called Studies in Computer Philology and dealt with using the
chrget routine to obtain a real time chart of the commands used and frequency of use of the BASIC commands in a running program.

In a few days this article will be over 30 years old. There were no links to this article found. However, Dr. Dobbs survived the longest of the early computer magazines. I do still have a copy of this entire magazine.

A Computer Monitor You can Bank on

Many of the magazines for which I wrote articles are no longer around. One of the reasons for purchasing a SuperPET computer was to be able to learn its many languages which were part of the system.

These included APL, Basic, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, as well as 6809 Assembly Language. Of course the 6502 side included its BASIC and 6502 Assembler. An Article I wrote on the using the monitor to view the code for the 6809 appeared in COMPUTE! Magazine.

Here is a link to that article:

http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/index/index.php?author=Gary+L+Ratliff

Another link to the same article:

http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue/34/107_1_A_SUPERPET_MONITOR_
YOU_CAN_BANK_ON.php

However, when these links were tried the system reported that it could not find www.atarimagazines.com. So another way is to do a google search for Gary L. Ratliff and find the item called index of magazine articles and click that which will take you to the article. Meanwhicle the webmaster has been written
to correct the matter.

Current Computer languages

At the present I am writing a series of articles on computer languages. This series was to be called An Alphabet of Computer Languages as was to contain at least 26 articles. These are published monthly so the entire series would take just over two years to complete. Currently I am several months ahead and am now working on articles on the Korn Shell and Lisp.

Here are some links to the articles already in the magazine. These are in two formats an html format and a pdf issue of the magazine. Listing the most recent issue first they are:

http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/200909/page12.html Article on C/C++
http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/200810/page04.html Article on Basic
http://mag.mypclinuxos.com/html/Issues/200807/page06.html Article on APL