| Gary Bateman [garybateman2000@netscapeonline.co.uk - 1/31/2001] |
| My Dad brought me a TRS-80 Model 2 From Work in 1980. I remember when I first switched it on I said something like "Does it print" of course at the time I was only 9 years old. Anyway, a few month's later I was looking through the referance manual. I found a command called TYPE, and so I used it. The computer was still sat on the living room table, my dad said in a panicking voice "what are you doing" I said, "It is listing a file on the screen. Don't worry It'll be all right". |
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| Eventually my dad did get a printer and to this day I have no idea were he got it from. It was a Microline. I can remember the first time I used it. I was amazed thinking "Wow! I made it do that". |
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| The computer also had it's own set of woe's. The screen was burned in with Hi-lighted images from Profile 2 Plus data base, the 8 inch disk drive permanently made a groaning sound whenever you used it, and if you were fortunate the letter A would actually work. Another woe it had, if you ran SELECT/EFC you were almost guaranteed a crash and have to flick reset switch because SELECT/EFC would not work (sometimes) so it was a case of cross fingers and hope for the best. |
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| One time I will never forget, I was using the computer which by this time had moved from the dining room table, into the pantry, and finally off into my bedroom. I loaded SELECT/EFC and the screen flickered, I herd a bang and saw sparks. But it still kept working. Later my dad came home and I told him what had happened so we took it for repair and he replaced 7 microprocessors. I still do not understand how a computer can still keep working with 7 faulty Micro chips. He also fixed the floppy drive, but been a TRS-80 model 2 of course. It still carried on groaning a month later. |
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| One day I decided it would be a good idea if I cleaned the inside of the computer. I went down stairs and took the vacume cleaner and removed the top off the computer, put the vacume on blow and blew all the dust out of it. My bedroom was about the size of a living room and it looked foggy for a whole day it took about 6 weeks for the dust to go. I told my mum that I was vacuming my room, but when she found out what I had done, she was not in the best of moods for the rest of the day. |
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| Somebody came round to try and fix the keyboard to no avail. But he showed me how to program in Basic, which I managed in the end. I wrote an operating system called Direct Filling System, I still have a version of it to this day on PC DOS Basic, plus a compiled version. |
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| The computer finally met its end when we moved house. Every time I switched it on the screen said 32k RAM instead of 64 so it would not run a thing. |
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| But before my TRS-80 died in 1987 and went to computer heaven. In 1985 my dad bought an Oric 1 computer. But I still used my TRS-80. I think Dad wanted me to be a little bit more up to date. The only thing the Oric did for me was "COLOUR" and the fact you could play games. I had no games on the TRS-80 but I still spent more time on it than the Oric. |
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| But when the Oric died and went to computer heaven, my Mum bought for 75 pounds a second hand MSX computer in 1988. I have to say it was the best home computer I had at that time. But not nearly as interesting as the TRS-80. This computer had very little software that actually worked because the cassette tapes were so well used before I purchased it. But all in all it was a very good computer although this computer started giving death throws, (it stopped loading software from tape) it was actually killed off in 1993. So in late 1993 I waved the white flags and surrendered to the IBM PC with windows version 3.00. I bought it second hand. I have been yearning for my TRS-80 ever since. But it is like a lot of things you have to move forward. |
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| I think computers today are not as interesting and exiting as they once were. Due to change in markets and technology as a whole. But I do think that this will change as time moves on. |
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| Though I think we will have to wait for Microsoft to become less dominant, a change in attitude, and an acceptance of new innovation. But I think that could be an awful long way down the road. |
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| I can say that in 2001 my mates are interested and people at work also have an interest in what I did all that time ago. Somebody calls it "The dark ages of computing". But he does seem to show a keen interest in what life on a computer used to be like. So on goes the TRS-80 emulator. |
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| I cannot help but think that today's generation is really missing out on computer education by not learning second or third generation language. You cannot learn how a computer works by using windows or any other graphic overlay. These programs are just a blanket over the computer system. |
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| I really do miss that great big silver gray thing I had as a child from 9 to 16. In those days computers had a personality all of there own. OK I mean what fun can you have with a PC and Windows 98 they may be better systems and computers. But you cannot have the fun you had in those days. It was fun going to somebody's house and using their system and what they had. You made friends with people who knew more than you did. You got a kick out of sorting memory configuration for programs that required just that bit more fine-tuning. |
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| In those days computers were friends, lovers, antagonists, and teachers. You cannot take computers apart today like you could then. In those days you had to do that to survive (Where the hell would you take it). You would take it to someone's house and you learned from them, and them form you. That's how it worked. You truly can be a user in today's computing environment. They spoil you with seemingly infinite disk space, sound, colour, high-powered microprocessors, and endless amounts of memory and software that can just about do anything you could ever wish for. |
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| The marvel of the TRS-80 was people could write programs that did what THEY wanted, that worked how THEY wanted it to work. People would do wonderful things with such a limited amount of memory. You could fit an entire magazine written in a word processor on half a Meg. Today you are fortunate if you can get 2 pages on a 1.44-Mb floppy disk. If you wanted a program you could not buy, you wrote one and passed it to your mate, then he would pass it to his mate, and so on. That's how it worked. Those people were real programmers. |
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| Computers today seem to have lost the magic and character that the old machines had. There is no spark in them anymore. The old ones had style and there were so many different kinds. You went to a computer shop and you saw Amtrad's, Apple Macintosh, Sinclair, Dragon, Commodore, and of course the TRS-80's. Now you go to a computer shop and you get IBM-PC running windows whatever and Apple's iMAC systems. |
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| The closest analog equipment I think exists today is device's like, the electronic notebooks. You cannot write large applications on these, you have to be tight and efficient. |
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| Ah yes, just like the old days. |
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| When my computer dies because windows has all these bugs in it. I just long for the days when computers used to be proper computers. How I miss those days when the only thing on the screen was: |
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| TRSDOS Ready |
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| I am writing this letter on a computer that can take you all over the world at just a press of a button. I get the same feeling opening this box of tricks as I do when I take the top of my horrible new outboard engine on my boat and wonder why they ever put electronic parts in to drive it. |
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| Anyway, enough of my moaning. I thought I would say my point, I do hope it came across. I do not want you to get the wrong idea; I am not an old fashioned fuddy duddy. I just would like to see some character and excitement back in the industry that I love, and have spent most of my life growing up with. A few good software companies like logical systems Inc would be a good thing. Also may be another one or two new computer manufacturing company's might be a good idea. |
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| I liked the TRS-80 because it was different to the mainstream of computing at that time. It had that little spark and character, like I say systems lack today. Mind you, it is not surprising if there are only 2 main competitors of computer manufacturing i.e. IBM and Apple. |
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| I thank Ira Goldklang for making this website possible and all the people who have contributed to it. Special thanks to Roy Soltoff for letting everybody use his software that Logical Systems produced. Since no longer in existence. |
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| This website is so important to the history of the TRS-80 computer and to the history of computing as a whole and I hope it will last for many years to come. The TRS-80 deserves a good website I am so glad you did it. |
| Kieron Murphy [kieron@reiwa.com.au - 10/27/1999] |
I got a bit nostalgic the other day and started looking back to my beginnings in computers, I still remember exactly what happend the day I purchased one - a TRS-80 Model 1, 4K and Level 1 basic.
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It was a few days before Christmas 1979, I had just finished school for ever (finally !!!) and wanted to buy a TV for my bedroom, next door to the TV store was a Tandy shop, I had been in a few times and saw these magical computer things but never touched them, I looked inside again and saw kids huddled around a computer, checked it out and incredibly, I saw them playing Space Invaders, as I was hooked on this game at the time, I had to have a computer, I ended up taking out an expensive loan for $699 Australian dollars and went home with my TRS-80, I didn't sleep for nights on end, I scoured the manuals and wrote my first program fairly quickly, I can't remember the exact syntax now, but it was rather advanced ;-) -
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10 INPUT "WHAT IS YOUR NAME", A$
20 PRINT "HI "A$
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(Note going to 20 for the line number so as to leave room for more code!!)
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I ran it and was blown away - it worked !!! I was hooked for life.
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I started buying magazines, I think I had the 2nd issue of a magazine called Australian Personal Computer which I seem to remember dubbed itself the TRS-80 magazine (Aussie readers will know the mag as it still exists today as a PC mag) and another Aussie mag called Your Computer, these had some great techo stuff in them like magic Peek and Poke codes, I needed L 2 basic immediately, back to Tandy and I seem to remember AU$200 later I had it, incredibly, it was reporting 16K of memory too, I though they had made a mistake in my favour!!! I purchased a basic games book from Tandy that had Star Trek in it and began feverishly typing it in only for the thing to die every time a reached a certain point, damm, what was wrong? eventually I take it back to Tandy and the problem is solved, normally when they did a L2 upgrade customers also went to 16K of RAM, the techo's had accidently broke the shunts as routine and this gave me the erroneous 16K message ;-( I needed something like another AU$160 or so for 16K.
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Luck came my way though, I saw a little ad in Your Computer mag advertising a 16K upgrade for AU$30 from a company called DeForest Software, I went to there store which turned out to be a little section of a dingy newsagent, the RAM was in one of those anti static tubes hanging in a plastic bag with hastily typed (and incorrect) instructions, all I had to do was go to Dick Smith Electronics (oh no, the enemy producer of the System 80) and buy 2 shunts. Got home opened her up threw the chips in, broke the shunts according to the instructions but still only 4K !!!!, I call DeForest software only to be told, sorry mate, we just sell the stuff can't help. I finally and sheepishly wen't back to my ever faithful Tandy man who worked it out in a flash, the shunt instructions where wrong, he soldered the incorrect bits so I didn't have to buy new shunts and sent me on my way with a loan copy of Space Invaders and of all things EditAsm, AU$60 worth of software all up, a week later I went back to return it but he was gone!!! so now I had 2 languages, basic and a Z80 assembler.
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Gee, I didn't plan on writing this much, its just all coming back to me!!! i'd better cut it short here, that Christmas break got me thinking of being a Computer Programmer - I was an aimless youth before my TRS-80 but now I had something, I found a course, completed it and am now a Computer Manager, I owe my current rather comfortable life all to that Model 1 TRS-80. Sadly, I sold it around 1981 and purchased the ill fated Hitachi Peach, which was given computer of the year by the above mentioned APC magazine.
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Oh yes - Space Invaders, did that to death, then discovered Scott Adams adventures and more sleepless nights, I had Pyramid 2000 which was a Tandy marketed version of the original Adventureland, Haunted House and Ghost Town, The latter 2 where AU$20 and came in a plastic bag with a photocopied sheet and of course the tape, I eventually had to buy a Hints Sheet, which cost $AU10 for a photocopied piece of paper, but it was worth it at the time!!! I then discovered Asylum 2000 - a graphical adventure and I seem to remember it understanding more than 2 words - put the round peg into the square hole rings a bell, remember the RoadRunner on the dragstrip in the maze ????
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I had some of the Big Five software too, I remember Robot Attack which from memory was a copy of the Arcade Game Bezerk, not my fave B/F game but it had speech, all I remember of that game is a lot of Game Over Player 1 in 2 different digitised voices!! I also had a Scramble like game who's name escapes me, but it had brilliant game play at the time.
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Oh yeah, Sub Logic's Flight Simulator came along too, which was of course the forerunner to todays Microsoft Flight Simulator, another photocopied manual, I remember it having a diagram of the programs structure inside too!!!
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Anyway, enough from me, thanks for having such a complete site on the computers that surely must have launched many a career, as you can tell from the above, it has brought back many fond memories!!
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| Pat Barron [macgyver@MailAndNews.com] |
I've really enjoyed reading all of the stories on the stories page, so I thought I would send in mine....
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When the TRS-80 hit the scene in 1977, I was in junior high school. I had already had some access to computers and BASIC programming - our school had three ASR-33 Teletypes, that we could use to dial up to an HP minicomputer at the School District headquarters, at a blazing 110 baud, with most programs saved and loaded to/from paper tape.... I had gotten seriously into programming on the HP's. Spent many hours each week sitting in front of those ASR-33's, dialed up - skipped lunch hours, stayed after school, came in early before school started - I was clearly hooked. But the TRS-80, and other microcomputers, seemed a quantum leap to me; you could have your own machine, and you could do graphics and all instead of this "hardcopy-only" output thing. On weekends, I would often go to the mall, and spend time playing with the TRS-80 in Radio Shack, until the salespeople would kick me out ... :-)
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Of course, the TRS-80 wasn't the only microcomputer in my life. :-) The local Heathkit store had the H-8, which seemed pretty cool (and sometime later - don't remember when - the H-11A came along, which was a Heathkit repackaging of the DEC LSI-11/2). But the H-8 was fairly expensive, especially considering all the extra stuff you needed to buy in order to make it useful, and you had to assemble it yourself, which I didn't want to do if I could avoid it. The one I really wanted, though, was this thing I'd seen in some of the computer magazines called an Ohio Scientific Challenger C1P. It was less expensive than the others, you could hook it up to an ordinary TV for display, and *gasp* it could do COLOR! That was what I wanted.
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I spent months and months of begging, whining, pouting, and generally being annoying, in an attempt to get my parents to buy me a C1P as a junior high school graduation present. They didn't want to do it, because they were convinced that I'd play with it for a few days, and then put it aside and never use it again. But I managed to be miserable enough that they finally agreed to get me a computer of my own, but there was one catch - they would not get me the C1P, because we could only get it by mail order; they wanted to get something from a store, so they had a place they could easily return it to if it arrived DOA, or bring it in for repairs if that were ever necessary.
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So, they asked if I would be happy with a TRS-80 instead. I somewhat reluctantly agreed - I *really* wanted the color graphics of the C1P, but I realized I probably wouldn't get anything at all if I held out for the Challenger. So shortly after the last day of my last year of junior high school, we went to Radio Shack and bought a TRS-80. Neither my parents nor I could have anticipated the kind of impact that black and silver/gray box would have on the rest of my life ...
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I tore the boxes open when we got home, and put it together; the desk in my bedroom was already cleared off, and the computer was set up on the desk, where it stayed for many years. It was a very baseline configuration - Level II BASIC, 4K RAM, no Expansion Interface, no printer, no modem, only the cassette tape for program storage. Except for the RAM, it would remain in that configuration for as long as I had it. As for software, I got the Casino Games Pack with it, as well as Invasion Force. For the next year, saved up my lunch money, and bought just about everything Radio Shack offered that would run in 4K - various adventure games, Microchess, Eliza, and others - and, of course, T-Bug. Just about every day after school, I would come home, turn on the TRS-80, load something from cassette (maybe a commercial program, maybe one of my own), and hack around with it until dinner time - and then come back and continue hacking after dinner, until either I went to bed, or until something came on TV that I wanted to watch (which was rare....). Many times I'd even skip dinner - I had been a chubby teenager, but I started to lose weight pretty quick after I got the computer. :-)
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After a while, I started to take a real interest in Z80 machine language programming - I already knew something about 8080 machine language before I had even gotten the TRS-80, and I too had Barden's Z80 book, and the small Mostek Z80 instruction set reference (which came with T-Bug, I think?). All of my early attempts were hand-assembled with paper and pencil, and poked in manually with T-Bug. Eventually, I learned the art of writing position independent code, and would have my hand-assembled programs in DATA statements in a BASIC program, allocate up a string constant, and loop over the opcodes in the DATA statements, POKEing them one by one into the space that was allocated for the sting constant (where I could get to them by just taking the VARPTR address of the string and POKEing it into the USR() function vector - a trick I learned from somewhere, I forget where ... much easier than having to reserve high memory at the MEMORY SIZE? prompt). But that all got pretty old after a while - hand assembling code was fun for a bit, but eventually I wanted the Editor/Assembler - and that meant upgrading to 16K RAM.
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I didn't think I could *ever* save enough money for the Radio Shack 16K upgrade (funny how you view money when you're 15 years old....), and my parents certainly weren't going to get it for me, so I decided to do it myself - bought an aftermarket 16K upgrade kit from the back of a magazine. It took quite a while to save up for the kit - as I recall, it was about $100.00, and came with eight 16Kx1 DRAMs and replacement DIP shunts. It arrived by parcel post about 3 weeks after I sent away for it, and when I received it, I couldn't wait to get it installed. I took the TRS-80 system unit into the bathroom, tied one end of a copper wire around my wrist for grounding, tied the other end to a cold water pipe, and then opened the machine up. I remember that I ripped out the old 4Kx1 DRAMs and the old DIP shunts, broke the right tabs out of the new shunts, installed them, and then started to put in the new DRAMs. Everything was going great until I got to the last of the memory chips; one of the legs wouldn't go into the DIP socket correctly, so I tried to force it - snapped most of the leg right off the chip. My heart sank - destroying that chip would almost certainly mean having to save up more money, buying a replacement (and they were something like $12.00 or so each - it would take a couple of weeks to come up with that money), and either having the computer non-functional in the meantime, or going back to the 4K configuration. However, after some thought, I opted for a different strategy - I found a spool of heavy-gauge, lacquer-insulated copper magnet wire, took the lacquer off the ends of a small piece of it, then wrapped one end tightly around the "stump" of the broken-off DIP leg, and shoved the other end into the DIP socket. Then I closed up the machine, and hoped for the best. And you know what? It worked! The machine came right up, and it knew it had 16K! "Now," I thought, "I have a really powerful machine!". ;-)
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We went out to the mall the next weekend, and stopped into Radio Shack, where I convinced Mom to get the Editor/Assember package for me (even though she had no idea what it even was for....). I also got a better debug monitor than T-Bug - I forget what it was called, but I got it out of the TSE catalog; the big feature it had, that I wanted, was that it did disassembly, which T-Bug did not. But as soon as I finally had all of these development tools available to me, a particularly difficult school year began, and my TRS-80 hacking time got dramatically reduced. I did pick up some of the "... and Other Mysteries" series of books during that year, and spent a bit of time reading them. I was particularly intrigued by the "TRS-80 BASIC Decoded and Other Mysteries" book (I think that was what it was called), and spent a reasonable amount of time going through the ROM with the disassembler and the book; this book got a few ideas cooking in my head about hacks I could do to BASIC, but I never seemed to have time to really do much about them.
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One of the things that was difficult about this particular school year, was that during this year that I started to discover girls in a really big way. :-) There was one particular Pretty Young Thing that I had my eye on, and I spent a lot of my spare time that year trying to get a date with her. In fact, she repeatedly told me that she wanted to, but she could apparently never work out the timing - on any given day, it seemed that we couldn't get together after school because she had her after-school job, and homework and chores to do, and she always had previous plans for the weekend, so she'd suggest that we could defer until the following weekend. So I kept waiting for the next weekend, the one after that, the one after that, etc., etc., etc. You've probably guessed by now, she never intended to go out with me at all, and on the last day of our junior year, we had a confrontation about it; she told me that she wasn't interested in going out with me, and never really had been, and that she basically thought that it was pretty funny that I put so much effort into trying to get a date with her, when I should have picked up the hint that it was never going to happen. I was crushed; I went home, went straight to my room, and pretty much didn't come out except for meals for the next three days. Didn't talk to anybody; pretty much didn't even get out of bed. But after about the third day of that, I couldn't do that anymore either, and decided to put some of my newly found teenage angst to productive use, before I got over it ... ;-) I fired up the computer, and started on a hacking binge that lasted most of the summer.
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Over that summer (between junior year and senior year of high school), I set out to create my Magnum Opus - a set of extensions to BASIC that implemented all of the stuff that Disk BASIC had, except for things that were disk-related; things like long error messages ("SYNTAX ERROR" instead of "?SN ERROR"...), string editing (MID$ on the left of the equation), binary/string number conversions (CVI/CVF/CVD/CVI$/CVF$/CVD$), multiple USR() functions - pretty much all of the non-disk features from Disk BASIC. Plus some other stuff - changing the cursor (block cursor, blinking cursor, no cursor at all), disabling/enabling the BREAK key from BASIC - little convenience things that I thought were neat. I worked on this project as if my life depended on it. I'd get up in the morning (well, more likely, in the afternoon...), got some food, and then started hacking on it immediately. Hack all day until dinner time, eat (sometimes....), then back to work until bed time. When I would go to bed, I'd turn off my monitor, but leave the system unit on, so I didn't have to reload my code from tape the next day. Mom got upset that I was leaving the machine on overnight, so I learned to put a piece of black electrical tape over the power LED before bed - she was none the wiser.... ;-) I used the "TRS-80 BASIC Decoded..." book to find things like vectors to the tables where the error messages were stored (my code replaced those vectors), tables with vectors to the BASIC intrinsic functions (I replaced all of the vectors that would have normally just jumped to a "?L3 ERROR"...), routines to do string operations and math, and all kinds of stuff.
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As I worked on this, the code got big - way bigger than I was prepared for. I got very paranoid about losing my work - every time I saved a new copy of the source, I saved two copies on each of two different tapes, and I had rotating sets of tapes - one save never wrote over the immediately previous save, so that in case a save failed, I never wrote a bad save over the previous good save. (You're probably thinking, "that's just common-sense system admin practice", but I didn't know that at the time - I just knew that TRS-80 tape saves failed to load a non-trivial percentage of the time, and I didn't want to lose all my work....)
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Because of the way the tape-based Editor/Assembler worked, your assembly source code, and the assembled object code, had to be able to fit into memory together (since all of the source code was permanently memory-resident, and the object code was assembled into memory, from which you would write it out on to a tape). Eventually, this was no longer possible - the source code had gotten too big. Initially, I started stripping out comments in order to make room, but that only worked for a while. In the end, I had to break the source code into two separate pieces, assemble them separately and write their object code to separate tapes, and then bring the two pieces of object code into memory under a debug monitor, which I would then use to write a new tape that had the entire object code in one file.
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The software was finished by the time school started again in the Fall. I will say, I was really proud of it - the resident piece only used about 2K of RAM (and it allocated and protected its own memory, just like Disk BASIC - no need to reserve space for it at the MEMORY SIZE? prompt), and it added all of this functionality to BASIC. And it worked - as far as I could tell, there weren't any signifigant bugs left in it when I finally set it aside - and I tested the heck out of it. I never used any of that functionality in any "real" programs, of course - I was more interested in the challenge of implementing the program than in actually using it. And, the whole project certainly kept my mind off of the girl who'd crushed my heart earlier that year. :-)
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During that last year of high school, I found out that the husband of one of my teachers had a TRS-80 at home. So, I asked her to ask her husband if he'd like to take a look at this little set of BASIC extensions I'd written. Eventually, the word came back that he really didn't need a program like that, since he already had a disk drive (and therefore, Disk BASIC), but sure, he'd be happy to take a glance at it. So I brought in a tape, gave it to the teacher, and she said she'd take it home to her husband. I didn't hear anything else about it for several weeks - until one day when the teacher sent for me during my last class. Her husband had come into school to pick her up, and while he was there, he wanted to meet me - it seems that he was totally blown away by the idea that such complicated software could be implemented by one 16-year-old, working alone. Unfortunately, he was the only other person who ever used this software - I had an idea that I wanted to publish it through TSE, or one of the other mail order places, but I never quite got around to it; plus, I wasn't sure there'd be much of a market for a programming tool for cassette-based users, since they wouldn't be able to run any of their extended programs without loading my BASIC extensions (from cassette) first - I wasn't sure anyone would go through the effort.
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Unfortunately, for most of the rest of that school year, my TRS-80 was at Radio Shack, being repaired - it had a flaky problem that would cause the machine to power up to a screen full of garbage (instead of "MEMORY SIZE?") when it was powered on. Except, of course, while it was at the repair center, when it worked perfectly.... I forget what the actual problem turned out to be, but we had to send it back three times before they got it working reliably again. So, I spent most of my senior year hacking a new platform - the Apple II+ that our school had just acquired. It had 32K of RAM, *and* a floppy drive. Many afternoons were spent going through the ROM on that machine, too (a bit easier than the TRS-80, because Apple provided more docs than Tandy), and examining and modifying Apple's DOS. Our (a couple of friends and I) main tool for DOS hacking was a sector editor I'd written, which I called "AppleZap", a very weak imitation of SuperZap on the TRS-80 - lame, yes, but it did the job... ;-) (not that I had ever actually used SuperZap, since I had no floppy drives - I'd only seen some of the docs.) But anyway, the rest of this Apple hacking is another story entirely, best left to another web site... :-)
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I graduated from high school that spring, and (having already signed up for my courses ahead of time), I knew that I would need to learn Pascal for my first semester at college. I had a passing familarity with Pascal already - I had a number of books about the language, but had never used it. So, I got myself a copy of Tiny Pascal for my TRS-80, and set about learning the language. I soon discovered that Tiny Pascal was not really adequate for learning "real" Pascal, but I started playing with the innards of Tiny Pascal as well - I figured, I was able to productively dink around with the innards of BASIC, so why not try it with another language. I only ever implemented one extension - a random number generator function (using the random number generator in the BASIC ROM). But it was an amusing project, and on a lark, I decided that it'd be interesting to write it up and submit it to a computer magazine to see if they'd publish it. So, I typed it up (on a manual typewriter, even for the program listings - remember, my machine never did have a printer), put it in a nice envelope, and sent it into BYTE magazine. A few weeks later, I started looking for the rejection letter to come in the mail, and lo and behold, there soon arrived an envelope from BYTE. When I opened it up, I was shocked to find a check for $50.00, and a letter stating that "your submission will be published in a future issue of BYTE". The check was what's known as a "binder check", and cashing it obligated me to not submit the article to any other magazines in the meantime (not that I'd saved a copy - silly me, I had not made a copy for myself before I sent the original in); the letter explained that further payment, in the amount of $50.00 per page, would be forthcoming when the article was finally printed. I *did* make a copy of the check, as a souvenir. After a few months, the article hadn't been published (and therefore, I didn't get the rest of my money), so I wrote them a note asking what was up. They sent back a nice response asking me to be patient, and my article would be published soon. Four months later (I had already started my freshman year in college by this time), I wrote them another letter asking the same question. After about another month, they sent back a reply - it didn't look like they'd be able to find space for my article anytime in the forseeable future, so they decided to kill it - but I could keep the original $50.00 as a "kill fee". And thus, I didn't *quite* get my 15 minutes of fame - at least, not from that. More than 15 years later, I'm still waiting for my 15 minutes ... :-)
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Once I started college, I had access to all kinds of truly cool hardware - class assignments were done on our Sperry/Univac mainframe, my work-study job was in a lab with a bunch of Apple II microcomputers, and there were various other minicomputers and microcomputers that I could use. Plus, we had some of those newfangled "IBM-PC" machines, and would soon start getting some of the "PC/XT" systems, too. Sad to say, it didn't take long before the TRS-80 was taken off of my desk and put on to the floor, replaced by a Heathhit H19 terminal (borrowed from my work-study job), and a 1200 baud Novation Cat modem (also borrowed from work), which I used to dial in to the mainframe at school, and eventually into a Digital PDP-11/40 (obtained by our lab from another department that was planning to throw it away) that I helped set up Unix on, and which provided me with my first system administration job.
|
Now, lets fast-forward to present day - 1999. These days, I work for the largest information technology company in the world (who's name I won't mention, but I will tell you that it has three letters...), and work with more computers, and more different types of computers, than I could have ever imagined back in high school. It's fun - a *lot* of fun, in fact. But I don't think it's quite as much fun as it was back then. Those of us working with the TRS-80, and other micros, were doing something bold, something pioneering - we were doing things that had never been done before. Sometimes I wish I'd been a few years older at that time - so I could have afforded more, and better, hardware, and maybe been able to produce things that others could use - to have been more of a player in the microcomputer revolution than just a spectator. But as it is, that machine, and the experiences I had with it, helped prepare me for the things I'm doing today. The TRS-80 ignited a true curiousity and enthusiasm about technology in me, which has not burned out to this day.
|
And as for that TRS-80 ... it's still there, in my mother's house. After I finally moved out on my own, she carefully packed up the machine, and all of the software, so they'd be ready for me to pick up - which I have never gotten a chance to do in the last 13 years (mostly because it's 300 miles away from me, and for the first 7 of those 13 years, I did not have a car....).
|
For 13 years, it has been awaiting its resurrection, in its little tomb of cardboard, with it's little cassette drive, and it's hacked-up 16K upgrade (never did replace that one chip...). But now that I've finally bought a house, I am planning to get it as soon as I can, as well as all of the books and the software (if the tapes will even still read) that go with it. I already have a place ready for it to be set up. It will be there when I have children of my own - children who will probably grow up with 750 MHz Pentium VI's running Windows 2010 - for me to show them, and tell them "let me show you something Daddy did when he was ... well, not much older than you are, really." (and they'll probably say "You used a language without objects, prototyping, and full polymorphism?? Jeez, how did you ever get anything done?" ;-) )
|
And once in a while, it'll be there to just fire it up, and look at that screen that says:
|
MEMORY SIZE?
RADIO SHACK LEVEL II BASIC
READY
>_
|
and think to myself, "Wow, wasn't that a time...."
|
| Bob Scopatz [bscopatz@kua.net] |
I was feeling nostalgic and decided to visit the TRS-80 website again. I read through the letters and was amazed at how the various contributors had come to worship at the font of TRS-80-dom. I was inspired to share my own story.
|
My first exposuure to computers was as an undergraduate in California. I worked in an animal behavior lab and one of the better funded labs was throwing away it's computer. I can't remember the name of this monster, but it was clearly little better than a calculator. You programmed it by putting wires into holes on the face plate. I think I broke it within 36 hours of its arrival. That experience, and listening to my brother (the physics major) complain about punch cards kept me away from computer courses for the rest of my years at U.S.C.
|
I got to Columbia University in 1980 and started working in a lab full of Skinner boxes. Half of the boxes were controlled by a Data General mid-range computer with an interface that my advisor had built from scratch himself! The other boxes were controlled by three TRS-80 model 1 computers. I was informed that it was time to learn how to program and that, if I just gave it a chance, I'd learn to like it. Sure! Yeah right!
|
My introduction to computers was more hands on than I ever expected. Within a week of my arrival, the interface device that my boss had lovingly crafted while he was in grad school died a sudden and smokey death. He handed me a soldering iron, a scematic and the probes from a beat up Oscilloscope and said "I'm betting it's those output transistors." Sure! Yeah right!
|
We managed to get the thing working after a few false starts, and plugged that baby back in. It even worked for a year or so after that! I was impressed, and I was hooked. Suddenly these machines weren't some mysterious obelisks but actual devices that could do things! You have no idea how frightening it was to try to "align the disk drives" on the big DG -- unscrew the metal tab holding the drive's read/write head, move it as small a distance as humanly possible. Screw the tab back down hoping it doesn't move in the process. Repeat until the thing starts reading the reference disks again! Yikes!
|
The TRS-80 part of my story comes from having to fix them about 10x as often as the old Data General. As wonderful as they were -- hey, we could play games on them -- they weren't really up to the life in what amounted to a large pigeon coop. Feathers everywhere! Fine white powder everywhere! We had to work on those machines pretty much every week. And even when they were working, we had our headaches. Any little power glitch in the 100+ year old building and our little Opto-Isolated interfaces (Interfacer 80 -- a great little device for opening and closing switches in the Skinner boxes) would zap into the ALL ON position. Lights flashing! Birds receiving buckets-full of food! I learned to program with periodic refresh statements!
|
I learned to use the computer's heartbeat as a timer. What fun! Turn off all devices, time events, turn the devices back on, save the data! But it worked. It worked easily and quickly. I don't even remember the transition from non-programmer to running the programming for the lab. It was just that simple. (Not that my programs would have won any awards, mind you.)
|
We got Scripsit and started writing our papers for publication on the same TRS-80s we used to run the studies. So we lost whole reports sometimes. That's how you learn to back up your data, right? We wrote our own statistical analysis programs because there weren't any out there for us to buy.
|
Later came LDOS. I used it to write a data transfer program to the mainframe. A friend with more experience came by and showed me how to track my CPU time while this was cranking. I was using CPU time in real time!!! I ran through a $10,000 computer allowance in a weekend! Thank God it was University Funny Money! I learned how to write a better data transfer routine.
|
We later got a Model III in that lab and a Model IV portable in another lab. Frankly, I lost interest. Opening that big old box on the Model III to fix things was just a chore. I missed the easy time I had with the old Model 1s. I missed running a pencil eraser over the expansion port contacts to clean the oxidation off so the boxes could communicate with the outside world again. And the Model IV. I opened it once. It was the same feeling I get when I open the hood of my horribly complex new car. What the heck is all this stuff?
|
The next generation was all PC-based. Now there were interface boards with modular designs created by real computer companies. The TRS-80 was dead as a laboratory machine. But it ran every experiment I performed in the learning and memory labs. I got my degree based on the work I did with those machines. The Model 1's especially inspired a love of computing in me that persists to this day, where I sit writing notes on a laptop that could melt a Model 1 just by looking at it. But I love this machine not nearly as much. This one is just a tool. Those old Model 1's were friends, lovers, antagonists, and teachers. Nothing can replace that. I suppose people just learning computers today feel towards their high-powered PCs the way I feel towards the old Model 1s, but I can't help thinking that they are missing an essential part of the experience. Today's PCs don't force you to learn how to program just to make them useful -- you can truly be a user in today's environment. Today's PCs aren't really designed for casual users to go around opening them up and playing with their innards. On a Model 1, you had to do that to survive. Where the heck would you take it? You made friends with someone who knew more than you and they taught you. That's how it worked. Today's computers spoil you with seemingly infinite space and graphics and sound and color. The marvel of the TRS-80 was that people could write programs that would do marvelous things in such limited memory and disk space. Those were real programmers! The closest analog I think that exists today is in devices like the Palm Pilot. You can't write big aps there; you have to be tight and efficient. Ah, just like the old days.
|
Well that's it. Thanks for a chance to reminisce. The TRS-80 deserves a great web page. I'm so glad you did it!
|
| Mark D. Manes [mmanes@EARTHLINK.NET] |
I thought since I have received so much nice mail, that I would push my luck
and tell you all a little about me.. and well, what my affection for the
TRS-80 is.
|
I was a high school senior in 1980/81. I had my heart set on a career in
the Navy and was fully involved in the high school NJROTC. That was what I
wanted to do--be in the Navy. Now, you know how things are when you are
kid -- reality pills are often hard to swallow. I have an eye problem that
is not correctable to a high enough degree that would allow me to join the
service. My mom, wanting to be sure that I had some hope of a real career
made a deal with me that ultimately changed my life. The deal was that I
continue in the NJROTC program if I agreed to take a typing course. I
thought, hey no problem, I'll sit with the girls and take a nice typing
class--an Easy A! So I readily agreed.
|
Well, my mom never had any idea what she really had done. It was that year
that the business department which was run by my typing teacher got their
first word processor--an IBM Displaywriter.
|
Now, I have another thing I should reveal. I am a die hard "classic" Star
Trek fan and anything that looked or smelled like a computer I was
interested in. I thought computers were really this big massive tape drives
depicted in the movies at the time. The more lights the better!
|
Well I became fascinated with the Displaywriter so much so that I learned
the ins and outs of the machine like no other. I was pulled out of class to
"help" with the system. It was the first time that someone really
needed/wanted me for a skill that no one else had. I was hooked.
|
So.. how does this long boring story relate to the TRS-80?
|
Well, I rarely attended a math class and the book rarely was opened. I was
a master of creating situations where the teachers in other departments
would "need me" to be taken out of class. One day I must have dropped my
math book and the pages fell open to a page where a BASIC program was
listed.
|
Now.. if you think about it--even todays text books do not have BASIC
programs in the book. The chances of me running into a math class (it was
algebra) that had a text book that with examples computer programming in the
1980s is well, so unlikely that Spock would consider the odds astronomical!
|
I took the text book, avoiding class again, and headed for the
DisplayWriter! I sat down.. powered it up and started entering each line
exactly as it was in the book. I typed RUN, just as the book said... what
did I get? Nothing.. the big zero.
|
I complained to the teacher who was no help. She did not realize that I had
attained a new level of atonement in the hierarchy of computer mastery! I
relented and went to my math teacher hoping he would not notice my rare
attendance and focus on the real problem at hand--my programming career!
The stars were with me, and the math teacher answered the question with
sacred knowledge that must have been passed onto him by the computer gods.
He said that the word processor could not run programs and that I needed
access to a computer--something the school did not have. I asked where I
might find a computer--now I am thinking about that big tape drive with the
blinking lights and the chances of me actually getting to one of these
machines about the same as me finishing the construction of my real
starship. Sigh.. if only I could solve this matter/anti-matter problem.
|
I woke from my daydream to hear him say -- the college across the street and
Radio Shack had computers.
|
I rushed over to the college library and sat down behind this huge box with
a big keyboard and small white text. I started to enter my program again.
|
It said:
EXPECTED HELLO, JOB, DATA FOR LOGIN
|
It said that every time.
|
So I typed: HELLO
It said:
HELLO,
EXPECTED USERNAME/PASSWORD
|
I discovered that I could not use this machine either. This machine was my
dream but I had no username and no password. I kept trying until someone
from nowhere appeared and explained that the library computers were for
college students only and please.. don't let door hit you in the ass as you
leave.
|
Fine.. I said. There was still Radio Shack!
|
I got to Radio Shack after about an hour walk and entered the store. There
was a computer there with a bunch of folks playing some sort of game. I was
mildly interested in the game, but I desperately wanted to try my program
that was in the book. I went to the manager of the Radio Shack and said
"Please let me try this.. I really want to see what this does!"
|
After a while, the customers who were there just to annoy me, shuffled off
muttering something about damn kids. I sat down in front of the Radio Shack
Model I. It said
|
READY
|
and I typed:
|
10 FOR X=1 TO 10
20 PRINT "HELLO"
30 NEXT X
|
RUN
|
The rest was history. I was blown away. I became so addicted that my Navy
plan was out the door and I knew I had to go to college and learn this
stuff. My mom was terrified that I was going to break one of these $1000
toys, but she figured that the Radio Shack manager would toss me out if
there was a problem. And so, this teenager who should have been trying to
chase girls and get the pregnant was instead going crazy trying to learn and
hog the computers at Radio Shack.
|
The Radio Shack manager took pity on me and let me hang in there every
Friday/Saturday night until closing. I sat there for hours learning the ins
and outs of TRSDOS and BASIC. The Model I's were replaced with Model IIIs
and the rest is history.
|
I used to live at the local Radio Shack and then the users group that met at
Thomas Nelson Community College. I drove the user group crazy as I did not
own a computer, yet I came spewing facts and data and had a boatload of
questions.
|
I never did end up owning my own TRS-80 Model 1/3, but did end up with a
computer job after some time in college where I ran a Model II/16 Xenix box,
but that is another story.
|
So my affection for the TRS-80 runs long and deep. It was my first real
computer and more importantly the first computer that WORKED.
|
Today, I am a software product manager for Scala Inc. We make high-impact
multimedia software for the PC. I spent time as a software developer within
Scala as well. The TRS-80 changed my life and I type close to 100wpm. :)
|
If you made it through this entire post, well thank you.
|
I don't suppose there is a guy on this list named Duane Sailor? He wrote a
program for the TRS-80 called ComWhiz. He ran the users group back in the
olden days, though he didn't particularly like me.. I always admired him.
It would be cool if he showed up on this list.
|
| Dr. Terry Stewart [TStewart@massey.ac.nz] |
My first experience with any microcomputer was in 1980 when my soon-to-be wife showed me a "micro-computer" her Uni. Department had purchased, with the aim of running some psychological tests. It was a cassette based TRS80 Model 1 running a blackjack game, written in Level 2 Basic. Having only 4 years ago, done a computing course where you had to submit your programs on FORTRAN punch cards and go and pick the printed output up the next day, I was amazed.
|
Anyway, a few weeks (or maybe months) later, I was walking past an office stationary shop, when I noticed a few microcomputers in the window. There was a Commodore Pet, an Apple II, a TRS80 and an elegant looking computer called a "System 80" being marketed by Australian entrepreneur and eccentric Dick Smith (I believe this model was sold in the US as the PCM 80 and in the UK as the Video Genie). The System 80 was wired up and lo and behold, it was playing the same games my wife showed me on the TRS80. The unit looked a lot more robust than the TRS-80 and had a nice full stroke keyboard with a build in cassette drive and TV RF interface. What's more, it was only 2/3 the price of the latter!
|
In the greatest example of impulse buying I have ever experienced in my life, I duly arrived home with the sparkling System-80 under my arm, to the chagrin of my wife, who felt the money would have been far better spent on the deposit for our first home.
|
Life was never the same. I duly discovered Scriptsit, Big Five Software, 80-Micro Mag, Micro-80 Mag (an Australasian one), 80-US and Scott Adams Adventure games and a host of other wonderful things. I even dabbled in assembly language, a necessity as the System 80 wasn't completely compatible with the TRS-80 and I had to patch Scriptsit in order for the print command to work. The thrill when the patch actually worked was unforgettable.
|
The Scott Adams games were played amongst my whole family, with frequent long distance phone calls from brothers, sisters and parents which went along the lines of "Have you tried throwing the beef jerky at the iron pharaoh?" etc. The concepts behind those adventure games spilled over to my work (I'm actually a plant pathologist), and I adapted the approach into problem-solving adventure games to train students in the diagnosis of plant diseases and disorders (see http://www.diagnosis.co.nz).
|
As far as TRS-80 culture goes, the System-80 dominated the Australasian scene, mostly due to the fact that the TRS80 models were so damm expensive "down under", and TANDY did not have a very big presence. I used the System 80 for work and pleasure right up to 1987 or so. By the time it was retired it had 48K, two DS 80 track disk drives and an especially constructed RS 232 Box. In 1985 I even wrote my Masters thesis on it, a chapter at a time, then uploaded it through the phone lines (at 300baud) to our university PRIME, for formatting and final copy. I used the System 80 for editing as LazyWriter was FAR superior to any text editor I could find on the PRIME mainframe!
|
After I purchased an IBM compatible XT, the System 80 was gracefully retired. Our University was wired to the internet in 1989, and I discovered the newsgroups. I missed the old System 80, so I found an emulator newsgroup and posted a message asking if anyone had thought of emulating the TRS80 in MSDOS. I received a reply back from one person, who said they had been working on an emulator, but had become discouraged with the slow speed it ran at, on the then state of the art AT's. That person was Jeff Vavasour.
|
Jeff and I corresponded off and on, and in the early 1990's Jeff started working on the emulator again, this time to finish it. Machines were becoming faster and faster, and this made the whole idea viable. I had LOADS of TRS-80 software, and Jeff explained how to transfer this from the System-80 to an MSDOS machine and into his virtual disk format. For a few months, I was beta-testing Jeff's emulator with all the software I had, as were some of the others in this group I'm sure. The rest you know.
|
I still drag the emulator out for a bit of nostalgia now and again. It's great! The System 80 remains in the attic, like so many other people's units. It will probably stay there forever. How can one part with such an influential icon in ones life? *s*
|
If you check out my web page (you might have trouble getting it just now..our server is playing up at the moment), you will see computers now play a large part in my working life. It's been an incredible journey so far and as I type this letter on my sleek 4 GB, 32MB Compaq Amarda Laptop, you have to wonder what the future holds.
|
| Christopher Currie [ccurrie@bloxwich.demon.co.uk] |
Well, another 'first time' story...
|
More than 20 years ago I was thinking of a career change (which didn't happen)
and someone suggested computing to me. Had never touched a computer, but
after getting a book out of the library became fascinated with the idea
of programming. Perhaps I could make a machine do what I wanted instead
of what it wanted! A few months later I moved to London, where the first
micros (mainly PETs and various curious British machines like the NASCOM 1)
were appearing in the shops. I wanted a system to analyse a large
collection of data I'd accumulated a few years earlier, but also wanted
to learn programming.
|
I was advised 'not to waste money on a micro, they can't do anything' and
instead went to the university computer centre, where despite the aid of
a very kind adviser and a pile of 'beginner' documentation as big
as two Model II manuals (remember those?)
it turned out that I could only use their system for
at most half an hour a week six weeks a year, because their opening hours
pretty well coincided with my working hours. At that rate it would
take several years to enter the data on punched cards,
by which time micros might have got cheaper and more useful,
so I started looking again.
|
I eventually realized that, despite the way it was slagged off in
the British computer press, a TRS-80 Model I would be best for the job but
I couldn't afford one (the happy custom of selling US imports at a pound
for a dollar--when the pound was worth $2.40!--was already established).
Should I buy a cheaper micro just to learn programming?
|
After nearly two years of visiting micro shops
and fairs and agonizing over the prices, including a visit to an obscure
suburb of South London called Wallington which was the only place where you
could buy the Video Genie (that's the Dick Smith System 80,,,) I screwed up
my courage to order a Sinclair ZX81, believing that Sinclair would have
overcome the vapourware problems he'd had with the ZX80. Not a bit of it.
It would be wrong, of course, to suggest in public that the vapourware
aspect was intentional.
|
After weeks of waiting for a parcel that didn't arrive I got my money back,
plucked up my courage, and went to look at the new Model IIIs that were being
advertised. They were American stock that the importer had fitted with
(massive) transformers, since Tandy wasn't yet selling
the Model III in this country. IBM did the same thing with the
PC a year or two later: the idea was presumably
that by restricting the launch to the US for six months or
a year, they'd help American software houses
to get a commanding lead. Perhaps it was imposed on them by the Reagan
administration.
|
So I came home with a Model III. The first thing it was used for was
to write a tape database for my wedding-present list; I'd
never have got the computer if I'd got married first! It was very
educational, because only Model I programs were available and they
taught me useful lessons about software authors' and vendors' claims about
compatibility. (The machine-language programs of course mostly
loaded too low, or somewhere or other used Model I printer
routines, or other addresses that didn't work on a Model III.
Compatibility has to be 100 per cent; 99.9999 per cent won't do for
inexperienced users. Of course eventually I found out how to
tweak a lot of them to work on the III, in ways that most people
on this list will know all about).
|
I soon bought a LPVII and got into word processing with non-lining
characters, finding out how to use Scripsit
with tape at 1500 baud instead of the default 500...I eventually
got the research database work, which was the excuse for buying
the 'puter in the first place, done three years later using Aids-III,
after upgrading to add disk drives and many other things, and
a small fortune spent on 80-Micro! (I still have a long run of them).
The Model III was in use for seven years, and
was then transferred to some colleagues to use as a terminal to JANET.
After a few months it was sidelined and junked, alas; I'd have sent
it to the Science Museum, sicne those early imports were rare specimens.
|
But I continued to use a succession of Model
4s and 4Ps until 1992; still have two in working order; and in 1988 I bought
the Hypersoft Model III emulator so could run many of my programs on a PC.
Jeff's Model I emulator came to the rescue later, for the games, including
some I'd never been able to run on the III...
|
I can't match the guy who is still using a Model I to run his business,
but the London Computer Centre in Grafton Way was still using one for
stock control and accounts in the late 1980s, years after it had become
a PC dealer. And the UK's national TRS-80 user group is still going, just.
|
| Robert [lord-of-hell@quanta.paypc.com] |
Hello there! I saw your letters page, and couldn't help but share my own
impressions about the TRS-80 and how it introduced me to the wonderful world
of computers.
|
Let's rewind the calendar to summer 1979, shall we? I just turned thirteen.
Computers with 16k RAM and cassette storage were $1,000, and 48K Apple ][
systems were over $3,000 with all of the components (monitor, disk drives,
etc, were all sold separately).
|
Hard disks were ridiculously expensive and were generally only available for
fantastically expensive systems, and even then, they were such behemoth
sizes like 5 and 10MB and were 8" (or more) in diameter. My only
impressions of computers were from brochures I'd acquire by writing to these
giant companies like HP, IBM, CDC, etc. I'd dud up my name and make a
big-sounding company to maximise the chances they'd take me seriously enough
to mail back something. About 2/3rds of them actually did.
|
Being a child of a single mom and not even middle class at that, the idea of
getting a computer was as remote to me as those machines in the brochures -
I could only dream of what promise they offered.
|
Later on, a wonderful private school (Avon Old Farms in Avon Connecticut)
gave me a full scholarship to attend their prestigious institution. And lo!
They had these computers! A PDP-8/e with 2 DECWriters, a smart term, a
blue pig (Lear Siegler ADM-3A), and one paper tape punch machine and 2
TRS-80 Model I Level II (16k) w/cassette storage. With vivid clarity, I
remember touring the school and when we got to the computer room, I couldn't
resist! At last!
|
What an introduction I had, though!
|
MEMORY SIZE?10
MEMORY SIZE?9999
MEMORY SIZE?HELLO
?SN ERROR
MEMORY SIZE?
RADIO SHACK LEVEL II BASIC
READY
>HELLO
?SN ERROR
READY
>_
|
WOW! A real live computer! Halting first steps, but damn, I could TALK to
this MACHINE!! Well, I loved the school (which is an all boys school built
out of red sandstone with slate rooves - the place looks like a Mediaeval
English Castle -- if you're ever near Avon, it's worth a visit).
|
Anyway... fast forwarding a bit. I had this insatiable curiosity to learn
how to talk to this thing! My advisor, the Dean of Students actually (H. B.
Pennell), was also a computer nut and had hundreds of pages of hand-written
materials he used as a textbook for his computer classes. He was a very
patient older man, who must have sensed my massive hunger to understand
these things. Every day, he'd hand me another dozen or two photocopied
pages of his "textbook" -- even though I was just a freshman kid, and not in
any of his classes... He fed me all of his textbook, day by day until it was
exhausted... It concluded on some pretty advanced stuff, and stopped just
shy of assembly language.
|
WOW! I remember my first program... of course it was the probably universal
two-liner that everyone must write...
|
10 PRINT "Hello there!"
20 GOTO 10
|
and then variations to make cutesy patterns like....
|
10 FOR I = 1 TO 50
20 FOR J = 1 TO I
30 PRINT " ";
40 NEXT J
50 PRINT "HELLO"
60 NEXT I
70 FOR I = 1 TO 49
80 FOR J = 1 TO 50-I
90 PRINT " ";
100 NEXT J
110 PRINT "HELLO"
120 NEXT I
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(golly, such naive code, eh? later on I learned that you didn't need to
specify variables for the NEXT statements, and you could chain more than one
statement in a line).
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Then... through my kind Dean's "textbook" I learned the computers had
GRAPHICS!!!! Simple, chunky, really hacky.... but I could make pictures! I
could draw things! All of you reading this now who weren't there, probably
can't imagine what could possibly be exciting about 128x48 monochrome
graphics (3:2 aspect ratio no less - it wasn't until the Macintosh that
computer graphics had square pixels [in the consumer market]). You're all
(now) using megapixel displays with 24 bpp, sporting CPUs hundreds of times
faster than this humble computer's. But I assure you, this was magic. It
was awesome - and it was a VERY short time before I used up my birthday
savings on William Barden Jr's Z-80 assembly language book + Tandy's
assembler (software delivered via CASSETTE tapes). I was in heaven. My
very first assembler program was also probably everyone's first:
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LOOP:
LD A,$BF
CALL BLIT
LD A,$80
CALL BLIT
JR LOOP
BLIT:
LD HL,$3C00
LD (HL),A
LD DE,$3C01
LD BC,$03FE
LDIR
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Yeha! I could blink the screen faster than the eye could register it!! I
still remember the opcodes for LDIR (EDB0) and LD HL,xxxx (21 xx xx)....
And then I wrote a scrolling routine to whip the screen around... and then a
scanline scroller (TRS-80 heads can appreciate what's involved with that --
since the graphics were really special characters (six-pixel matrix 2x3)
high-ascii from 128...191).
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I was in pigshit heaven. My first programs were hand-assembled (I kept a
tiny white booklet always nearby for opcodes -- MOSTEK Z-80 thing) and POKEd
in and run. (I now appreciated what Memory Size? was really asking me for
here! :))) )
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Now Avon Old Farms was very good to me... at the end of that year, they
actually let me borrow the computer over the summer and use it. When I
think back now, that was a truly amazing thing they did for a kid like me.
After having had some dealings with the neurotic school administrations of
the school a young friend of mine, I couldn't imagine this happening in
today's world.
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Anyhow - later on after the first year in high school, that summer... I met
a friend who happened to have a Scott Adams Adventure game (Pyramid of Doom,
#8) WOW! His copy was a bit worn, and there was a dead-even chance the
program wouldn't load - I had fiddled with the tape recorder's volume to
maximise chances of success... folks, these 8 or 9K programs would take 2
or 3 minutes to load - at any time, a CRC error could kill your load
attempt, forcing you to rewind the tape and try again. The TRS-80 put up
status during a SYSTEM / load (**) and would blink the right * as records
were read off tape. I'd cross my figures and sit there hoping I'd not see
the dreaded C show up indicating a failed load.
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Seeing the *? prompt was like seeing the Holy Grail... a quick slap of /
(enter) and I was up and running - I'd leave the thing on for DAYS and DAYS
while I played it. (yes, folks, computers back then rarely crashed - in
fact, the only time I ever "rebooted" was when I turned it off or lost power
- amazing, and hard to believe I know). Also, remember... these things were
absolutely SILENT. No fans. The Macintosh Plus and Amiga A500 were the
last machines really to be made without fans. Funny, as I sit in a room of
3 computers and many hard drives, the din all of those fans is not trivial.
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Anyhow... that little text game riveted me... and I remember spending
dozens and dozens of hours trying to find the Pharoah's Heart (it was a red
herring in the game - not a treasure per se, but often hinted about).
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My next game was Morloc's Tower from Automated Simulations. A sort of D&D /
arcade game with very blocky graphics, but was still a lot of fun. Rush's
"Tom Sawyer" is linked with this game for me, because I remember hearing it
on the radio which would be playing in the background... Weird - whenever I
hear the song even now, my mind imagines Morlock's Tower and the TRS-80
screen "shaking" (by sending an OUT command to the right port, you could
switch the character set to a double-sized one -- by flipping it to
double-size and back you could "shake" the screen -- a cheap hack, but it
was actually pretty cool).
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Anyway.... by this time I was MASSIVELY hooked. I spent my life in my room
(which I convinced my mom to move to the basement where it was cool and
dark)... I'd tear apart program listings - I remember hacking the crap out
of Gomoku and translating it to assembly language and improving the AI to
the point where it would beat me more than I beat it. Names like Yves
Lempreurer, Leo Cristopherson, Scott Adams, etc were legends to me.
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Games like Asylum.... (don't look UP!), etc - all very cool, and
groundbreaking in their way even though by today's standards, they might not
rate a second look. And that would be a shame - because what those old
games had was creativity and playability. But of course, I may just be
guilty of old man's halcyon disease! :)
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Incidentally, I was starting to consume more and more information and data
about computers... I had begun to cast a not-so-mildly jealous eye at the
Apple ][ with its colour graphics, sound, hardware expansion, etc. But
there was no way in hell I'd be able to afford one for myself.
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That summer of 1980... I'll always remember with fondness. Atari VCS2600
gaming, hacking on my TRS-80 (experimenting with animation, sound, all sorts
of mischief)... I was in my own world - and through the computer, it
seemed so vast and wonderful. There didn't seem to be any limits. I never
looked at the thing and said "aww, only 16k, can't do anything with that" I
always looked past it. When I started to exceed the symbol table limits for
my programs, I'd assemble them in stages and write "multi-loaders" to piece
them together. I'd always find a way to make it work. It wasn't sexy -
debugging was often tedious - at times, as simple as poking stuff onto the
screen during the gnarly stuff, especially during interrupt routines.
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I always ran across people who were willing to help me out or share their
programs with me. The environment back then was totally wide-open and free.
Tons of source code... tons of programming tips and tricks... It was
awesome.
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My love affair with the TRS-80 lasted a few years... well into the Model 4
era and LDOS. I remember finding all of the documentation on LDOS's
internal to be utterly fascinating reading (filter drivers, all sorts of
things) -- I was a natural OS junkie - getting into writing device drivers
and key filters the works. My first hack to TRSDOS was to yank all of the
stupid delay loops in it during bootup to make it load in a second, rather
than 8. Of course, the next one was to eliminate the security stuff to make
copying anything I wanted a breeze... :) :) The PATCH * command was my
friend.
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But sooner or later... the Apple ][ proved too seductive. Colour graphics
(160x192 colour, 320x192 mono (with lots of gotchas and tricks), sound,
etc... I managed to eventually get one, and Wizardry hooked me really badly
(I was into AD&D in a big way then as well)... My love for the TRS-80
wasn't gone totally... I had actually gone QUITE far in bringing Wizardry to
the TRS-80... (Using the Legacy of Llylgamyn "windowing" interface style) --
I was just about ready with the dungeon module, before giving up interest.
(All the character generation and "management" was done, most of the
graphics, etc -- I probably still have my TRS-80 graphics layout sheets
somewhere -- those funny graph paper like sheets Tandy sold to help design
graphics, etc :) ).
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Anyhow... there's so much more to tell, but I can't imagine it has that much
value to you all... I ran into a very friendly Tandy store manager who let
me use his very nice setup (3 floppies, 48k, WOW), in exchange we entered
all of his daily report stuff at night and took card of his SOS (Store
Operating System) stuff - kept it backed up and running smoothly. He wasn't
a computer guy at all - and the other store guys were very cool too. We
were all friends, and we had a very casual relationship going... we'd hack
on their machines by day, and when the store closed, we'd enter the
receipts, transmit the data to the homeoffice via their 1200 baud modem
connecting through Tymnet, and they'd drive us home).
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It was really ... a different era. I couldn't possibly convey what it was
all like... I can only hope I shed a tiny bit of light why remembering and
using emulators like TRS80 and Stella (VCS2600) are so emotional for me.
These computer don't look impressive now. They're 1.77Mhz... no graphics,
really... 1 bit PWM sound, if you can call it that. But they inspired a
whole generation's dreams, and for us digital kids it fostered a respect for
technology and an uncompromising desire to make the "impossible" real. We
could fashion our reality in the manner we imagined - and for once, perhaps,
the artist could really bring his imagination into existence. No more
shadows on the cave walls here.
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I'm still tracking down some of my friends and some authors from the age
(William Barden Jr is California and has a website, for instance)... but
it's a warm and fond recollection of what was so much of my life as a young
lad.
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