Demonstrating the SuperPET 6809 mode

[dmemphis]

I'm looking for recommendations on what might be a good demonstration
of the 6809 mode of the SuperPET.
I have all of the easily web searchable stuff, which amounts to the Waterloo
tools and some of the improved versions of the utilities.
These materials are great and I'm very glad they are available and they were marvels of the
day but they don't necessarily make for a flashy show of the 6809's capability on the PET.
I've scoured the TPUG disks and googled and come up fairly dry.
Perhaps the user written apps never got very mature before the SuperPET was phased out?
Other than loading an editor or showing a source file getting processed,
I figure I might have to resort to actually writing something or porting to either
the Waterloo tools, or to the other environments available - OS9 or FORTH.
Ideas?

 

[crock]

I'm looking for recommendations on what might be a good demonstration
of the 6809 mode of the SuperPET.
I have all of the easily web searchable stuff, which amounts to the Waterloo
tools and some of the improved versions of the utilities.
These materials are great and I'm very glad they are available and they were marvels of the
day but they don't necessarily make for a flashy show of the 6809's capability on the PET.
I've scoured the TPUG disks and googled and come up fairly dry.
Perhaps the user written apps never got very mature before the SuperPET was phased out?
Other than loading an editor or showing a source file getting processed,
I figure I might have to resort to actually writing something or porting to either
the Waterloo tools, or to the other environments available - OS9 or FORTH.
Ideas?

Back in November, at the Vintage Computer Festival Zurich, I had a display called "The Secret Life of PET's", at which I had my SuperPET running.

I've always been a believer in letting people play with this stuff, so all I did was to put the manuals on display, of which I had all except the MicroCOBOL, and just let people amuse themselves. One pair of guys (who were actually sceners on the SNES) picked up the MicroFortran manual, pulled up some chairs, and spent a couple of hours writing a simple scroller demo in Fortran.

Just to add to the spectacle I had the software running from an 8280 8" PET drive.

Rob

 

[dmemphis]

That's really cool and gives me a different perspective on "demo-ing".
I may have the wrong idea for the audience- they may not need to see what I
thought I wanted to show (what flashy stuff could be done with it) but instead
just want to experience the tools for themselves.
The 8280 drive is amazing! I may not have seen one before.
The screen shot in your picture gives me some ideas too.
Thanks for sharing that.

What I have learned after having sampled programming in Waterloo basic and pascal,
so far is that there may not be any "jazzy" apps written for
because the performance is rather slow and... uninspiring.
But the intent of the Waterloo system, I gather, was learning, not production performance.
I don't mean to take away from how impressive the system was. I think it was fully
innovative for the time, with the environment hinting at the IDE's to come.
I haven't looked deeply under the hood but I gather these language systems were
written in an intermediate language that wasn't terribly efficient.

However, 6809 assembler is there, and is plenty fast of course.
I might try to write something in that for fun.