Actual time: the wee hours of this morning.
Dream time: sometime between the mid-1990s and present. Daytime, more or less.
Location: an upper-middle-class home in or near Silicon Valley.
So there I (dreamed I) was....
I was hanging out with some guy in maybe his 70s whose career hadn't been in computers, but he'd occasionally used them. I think he'd been some sort of engineer, probably in a highly-specialized field. Back in the day, he'd written some programs, maybe for analysis of engineering problems, in the most suitable language then available to him, which was either some proprietary language only available on the computer - mainframe? Mini? - his employer had, or some weird and long-forgotten dialect of FORTRAN.
Anyway! He figured these programs he'd developed long ago would still be useful to the youngsters now practicing in his field, if only they could be translated into some currently-supported language. He'd found himself one of these newfangled home computers: a compact model, though I'm not sure whether it was an Osborne 1 or a Kaypro...
... Yes, this was supposed to be at least the mid-1990s. But for some reason it didn't strike me as strange that he was dealing with a Z80, 64K of RAM, two floppy drives, and CP/M...
Anyway, he was looking for my advice on languages, cross-platform programming, and such. He was thinking of using BASIC, which last time I looked at it wasn't very cross-platform hardly at all, though I presume now there's got to be at least one open-source implementation that's supported on Windows/Mac/Linux/UN*X. But nor, er, CP/M. And none of the currently-popular cross-platform languages would run on his machine. (OK, maybe there was at one time a C compiler for Z80 and CP/M, but I didn't think C was a suitable language for this guy to be mucking about with - not really a computer type, remember?)
This all got very confusing, especially since I seemed to have vague knowledge from the present which would have made no sense back in the day when anyone but a hard-core collector would have gotten his hands on a Kaypro (or Osborne).
Then I woke up, and was having goofy thoughts of building an Osborne (or Kaypro) out of - no, not software emulation on a RasPi - a modest-sized FPGA, a RAM chip, a serial EEPROM, and a pair of SD-card sockets (emulating extreme-density floppies), plus something or other for a keyboard and of course an LCD panel. I'd have to look at the specs for the floppy controllers in those old boxes: two sides, times how many maximum sectors, times how many maximum tracks, times what sector size? I don't think it could, even with creative formatting, use very much of even a small SD card.
No, I don't think I'll do that. I have quite enough wacky projects in the queue already, and the dirigible, for example, has been in the queue since my freshman year of college.
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