![]() They left it exactly the way it was, even though all the reasons for that were gone! Of course, keys don't jam or attach to levers at the top any more but computer manufacturers have been anything but innovative. QWERTY was developed in 1872 and the key layout was made to prevent keys from jamming essentially, the effect was to make the layout awkward and slow the typist down. Shortly after Interphase, in fall 1985, I came up with a layout for a much improved typing keyboard. That is covered below in the rest of the questions. I wasn't very enthusiastic about programming 6502, but after a couple of months I decided to do it. Then Norm from Interphase saw Planet Conquest in a local store ("Compu-whiz") and asked if I wanted to work for them and do a game for C64. I started work on Viking Raider with vector graphics and "paint" for scenery on the CoCo. The ad contract I "inherited" from someone and it just ran 3 months. I sold this trio of programs on cassette by mail through an ad in "Rainbow", a magazine for the CoCo. I thought Apple must have copied it when I saw their first "Macpaint" program on the first Macs a year later, but it may be more a case of similar functions having similar solutions. I later did a version 2 with way more features and double-screen-height virtual canvas so you could get a bigger print, but I never sold it. The CoCo text screen was only 32 characters across, so I wrote a utility to print on a graphics screen (whopping 256 x 192 pixels, mono) and get 42, 51, 64 or 85 characters depending how few pixels wide and how little space if any you wanted between letters.Īnd I wrote what may have been the first "Paint" program of all time: "TV Graphics Editor". I wrote a game called Planet Conquest or something with a spaceship that had to soft-land on the surface to refuel and things that flew around to shoot at while you were airborne. Somebody saw my stuff and said if I could write software like that I'd make more money than he ever would! The obvious thing to do was to buy a CoCo. I got my cassette interface to read and save CoCo format, but it was never my favourite! Then I wrote an article on "Software Sprites" for a magazine, "68-Micro journal" and they paid me some money for it! (It was hard earned!) In doing that, I borrowed somebody's CoCo and used their assembler because I figured nobody would be able to figure out the code from my assembler and actually get anything to work on a computer nobody had but me. Then I did another one with a dragon, a castle and something but I never finished it. 4-button controllers gave L & R spin, thrust, and laser. Turned out it was so similar to the Radio Shack "Color Computer" that I adapted Microsoft Color BASIC (hacking a few bytes of object code from the CoCo's ROMs) to run on it! Wrote a "Space Wars" game with 2 ships with thrusters and lasers, orbiting a star in the center. The third one was a 6809 (the ultimate 8/16-bit CPU!) with a video display chip. Designed and built 3 computers from 1977 to 1982. Worked for federal ministry of transport in communications electronics (air services then coast guard) from 1975 until 1979. The 8080 came out just before I graduated in 1975. Got one course in assembly language programming in the final quarter - on a 12-bit PDP-8. Took electronics at BCIT and specialized in digital electronics. Family moved to Vancouver Island (Fanny Bay) the week after I finished high school, June 1972. up to you how much you want to divulge!īorn in Edmonton Alberta, so I must be 50. ![]() Bit of a jack-of-all-trades here! Craig happened to email me out of the blue regarding the review of Viking Raider I have on my site, and I took the opportunity of asking him some more questions, especially ones regarding Interphase themselves as, let's face it, they weren't that well known a company.įirst of all, a bit about yourself such as location, age (if it's not impolite!), job etc. Not necessarily because of his programming skills, but for some of the other things he has done in his life. If you live in Canada, you may have heard of Craig Carmichael. Craig's product in the time he was with Interphase
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