Many folks may be unaware of the oddball WorkSlate from Convergent Technologies, a 1983 slab portable with a 6800-family CPU where everything is a spreadsheet. It was a commercial failure after seven months and Convergent took millions of dollars in losses on it. A printer/plotter (with the usual Alps mechanism of the time) and a serial/parallel expansion box were made for it, but the expansion box in particular is rather rare.
I've managed to worm my way into the WorkSlate's by using a modified "narrow modular" cord that fits its Peripherals port, where the printer/plotter and expansion box hook up. This is a GPIO port and despite appearances an Ethernet/RJ-45 jack won't fit. We can then hook up serial lines to it and using them send and receive data at 9600 baud using the WorkSlate's built-in terminal. It turns out there are some obnoxious and a couple critical bugs in the firmware ...
On this page are three example applications, a Rock-Paper-Scissors game, a pie charter, and a proxy for a Gopher client. These all work through spreadsheet cells and formulas, the Gopher client in particular by turning Gopher menus into spreadsheets.
The code is on Github, along with a "crossassembler" for the spreadsheet that takes cell data and emits a sheet ready for upload.
Finally, although Bitsavers does have a partial copy of the service manual, there are no digital copies of the reference guide that I'm aware of and the reference guide is incomplete anyway. I documented all of the spreadsheet built-in functions here with more detailed descriptions, as well as how to hook it up and troubleshooting suggestions.
I've managed to worm my way into the WorkSlate's by using a modified "narrow modular" cord that fits its Peripherals port, where the printer/plotter and expansion box hook up. This is a GPIO port and despite appearances an Ethernet/RJ-45 jack won't fit. We can then hook up serial lines to it and using them send and receive data at 9600 baud using the WorkSlate's built-in terminal. It turns out there are some obnoxious and a couple critical bugs in the firmware ...
On this page are three example applications, a Rock-Paper-Scissors game, a pie charter, and a proxy for a Gopher client. These all work through spreadsheet cells and formulas, the Gopher client in particular by turning Gopher menus into spreadsheets.
The code is on Github, along with a "crossassembler" for the spreadsheet that takes cell data and emits a sheet ready for upload.
Finally, although Bitsavers does have a partial copy of the service manual, there are no digital copies of the reference guide that I'm aware of and the reference guide is incomplete anyway. I documented all of the spreadsheet built-in functions here with more detailed descriptions, as well as how to hook it up and troubleshooting suggestions.