Page 6 - Aerotech News and Review, January 22, 2021

VONO, from 5
stage for the ubiquitous home computer
industry.
My first assignment out of the Acad-
emy in 1976 was as a pilot. This was
also the point in time that Zilog intro-
duced the Z80 chip to the world. In that
assignment, fellow pilot Capt. Steve
Brown and I helped introduce Strategic
Air Command to small computers for
the cockpit. See my July 1982 Com-
bat Crew article “We Have the Tech-
nology,” at https://archive.org/details/
combatcrewstrate3271offu/page/16/
mode/2up
In 1982, I was posted to Los Angeles
Air Force Station and the Air Force’s
Space Division and was responsible
for the flight software used on the IUS.
The IUS was a kind of short Minute-
man missile (both are Boeing products)
that could fit in the back of the space
shuttle and loft spy satellites to high
orbits. During both those periods I was
an avid home computer hobbyist. For
instance, I was programing my TRS80
computer (1977 to 1981) in Z80 assem-
bly and machine language. (See Figure
4 for a block diagram of the Z80 chip.)
Well, you had to program in ma-
chine language since the original TRS-
80 only had 4KB of memory. I clearly
recall the day I upgraded to 16KB. I
really felt like I was somebody that day.
But it didn’t afford me much more el-
bow room. Especially since the storage
unit was a handheld tape recorder. In-
See VONO, Page 7 Figure 4: Thanks to Appaloosa, CC BY-SA 3.0 creativecommons, via Wikimedia Commons and GNU

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