Happy Memorial Day weekend - with a hearty thanks to all the freeware Usenet server admins & clients around the world!

Mike Easter wrote:

Stefan Claas wrote:
Before Al Gore 'invented' the Internet
we had such fine (global) services like CompuServe etc.

My first communication online was an Atari ST equipped w/ its TOS on
an eprom, 1 meg of ram, a 3.5" floppy for anything you needed to
save, no hdd, a Motorola 68000 cpu, and a 1200 baud dialup modem (I
think), later my modem got faster.

The service was GEnie, which by daytime was providing mainframe
services to commercial interests, but during 'non-prime time'
(6pm-6am) was available for $6/h to regular citizen subscribers.

The forum for me was the ST Roundtables and sysops were able to get
their service free. The telecom program was called Flash and it
could run macros which enabled one to quickly auto dialup connect
login capture messages into the capture buffer and logoff in a very
short time. Then the messages captured were 'addressed' or commented
on in that same capture buffer and Flash's macros were again
activated to auto dialup logon and post the composed msg/s into the
appropriate forum of the discussion and disconnect.

Those short bursts of usages didn't actually cost very much at 10
cents a min; it was all text based and 1 meg of ram was plenty to run
the graphical OS on the hi-rez B&W monitor 640 × 400 w/ some subset
of that ram dedicated to the capture buffer.

There were also local dialup BBS, but there wasn't as much going on
there as GEnie. I had some transient contact w/ CompuServe but for
the Atari folks, GEnie was where it was at. 1985 onward some.

Atari also had a graphical word processor and printouts were done w/
dot matrix.

That were great times back then! I collected also Antic and Analog
Magazine. I started however with an Atari 800 XL when it came out
and with a 300 baud Tandy acoustic modem, hence my domain name.

Regards
Stefan

Carl Kaufmann writes:

I think you're misremembering some details. C64 had a 6502. C128 had
that + Z80. Original IBM PC was 8086. Admittedly that was a long time
ago.

Sure but he didn't claim any such thing, just that he had a 8086 cross
assembler for the C128. Admittedly I'm not aware of any 8086 cross
assembler for the C128 but that doesn't mean it couldn't have existed
and in fact the cross compiler entry on Wikipedia confirms it (or
confirms a C cross compiler available for Commodore 64,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_compiler). Commodore themselves
developed 6502 stuff on a VAX machine as I recall.

In article
Anssi Saari wrote:

Carl Kaufmann writes:

I think you're misremembering some details. C64 had a 6502. C128 had
that + Z80. Original IBM PC was 8086. Admittedly that was a long time
ago.

Sure but he didn't claim any such thing, just that he had a 8086 cross
assembler for the C128. Admittedly I'm not aware of any 8086 cross
assembler for the C128 but that doesn't mean it couldn't have existed
and in fact the cross compiler entry on Wikipedia confirms it (or
confirms a C cross compiler available for Commodore 64,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_compiler). Commodore themselves
developed 6502 stuff on a VAX machine as I recall.