It must have been 1977 or 1978. I designed and built an RCA 1802 handheld, battery powered computer. 256 bytes of static CMOS RAM, 1 MHz, 2 hex digit LED display, 8 bit DIP switch input. It was an 8-bit chip but had 16-bit registers, any one of which could be the PC. I chose the 1802 because it was very low power and needed few support chips and I was working with some folks at JPL who were going to use it on flight projects. Not Viking, it was too late for that. Galileo had a bunch of them and I'm sure there are some still flying. It was totally static, I'll bet if I could find it in my garage, put batteries in, and turned it on it would be running whatever it was 30 or so years ago. No sissy assembler programming, just raw machine coded entered through the DIP switches. It was great fun.
Slashdot Mirror
It must have been 1977 or 1978. I designed and built an RCA 1802 handheld, battery powered computer. 256 bytes of static CMOS RAM, 1 MHz, 2 hex digit LED display, 8 bit DIP switch input. It was an 8-bit chip but had 16-bit registers, any one of which could be the PC. I chose the 1802 because it was very low power and needed few support chips and I was working with some folks at JPL who were going to use it on flight projects. Not Viking, it was too late for that. Galileo had a bunch of them and I'm sure there are some still flying. It was totally static, I'll bet if I could find it in my garage, put batteries in, and turned it on it would be running whatever it was 30 or so years ago. No sissy assembler programming, just raw machine coded entered through the DIP switches. It was great fun.