Now where was I...?

I forget. :)

Seriously I came up with an interesting lil' vintage computing hack tonight.

I got an original IBM PC from a local surplus sale (why a 5150 was put out for surplus *now* I'll never know). An original IBM PC is, sadly, not terribly useful at all, leaving me with "now what?"

So, I started thinking - I could add a protoboard to it, maybe a serial port and some terminal software. That would rely on the ancient 5.25" drives actually working, and I'd be a tad shocked if that happened.

I then remembered the 5150 (not even the XT. Just the original PC) has a casette port.

My evil idea/plan is this: Wire up an AVRopendous to the casette port, pre-load it with a "basic" program to write out to the PC to then use the port as a simple terminal interface. I'm having a little doubt that I could actually fit a useful terminal into the 16K memory of the AVRopendous, but eh, I can figure something out.

Now to put aside the time to write this... there are a lot of things more practical. But this'd be a neat hack!