24k #6 -- Cherry blossom
It's only March 11, but the Washington Post is reporting that peak cherry blossom season for the iconic Yoshino cherry trees ringing the District's tidal basin is arriving perhaps two weeks early this year.
No worries. The SciSys Kasparov Turbo S-24K chess computer can wait. We're moving up the Hitachi Basic Master Level 3 in our 24k for 24 series to match the meter of the season. The meter of the season is Haiku. I gave the assignment to ChatGPT, longtime Paper Tiger contributor.
Amidst pink petals,
Hitachi Basic Master shines,
Spring's code in full bloom.
I could do no better, and why mess with perfection anyway? The Hitachi machine has 24k of ROM, unlike others in this series that feature 24k of RAM. What difference does it really make if the memory is writeable if it already has exactly what you want in it? The Hitachi had about 16k more ROM than the contemporary Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer built around the same Motorola 6809 processor family. What did 16k of additional ROM perfection get the average user? Well, the average user of the Hitachi spoke Japanese. The Basic Master is said to be the first home machine that included character ROM for Japanese kana glyphs. The Tandy CoCo didn't even have lower-case letters.
I think it's safe to say that the Hitachi was better at displaying text, but I wonder whether the extra ROM was useful also as program text. The term 'return-oriented programming' wouldn't be coined for another 28 years after the introduction of the Hitachi Basic Master Level 3 but the idea of program overlays has been around since at least 1958. In the parlance of the late '70s and early '80s, the extra character ROM may have been programmable as an auto-overlay – the same information useful in two or more contexts. In one, a set of characters. In another, useful subroutines. The SNL 'Shimmer' of computing. Hmm. Let's see what Chat can do with that...
Pink blossoms shimmer,
Hitachi Basic Master glows,
Spring's dance in pixels.
This post pairs well with "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots", parts 1 and 2 / "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" / Flaming Lips / 2002
We're still looking for a contributing editor. Send me a 24k piece for this series and take home either an official Paper Tiger commemorative replica of the system you describe or an actual instance of the system – depending firstly on whichever would be easier for the Paper Tiger Expeditionary Logistics staff and secondly on your actual preference.