Ira Goldklang's TRS-80 Revived Site: Stories

1983: One of our electives in junior high was a “Computing” class, which was held in high regard by many students as a “total kick back class.” Not everybody was interested in computers, but I was, so I signed up for it.

It was situated in a small “Computer lab,” which was basically a regular-sized classroom with long tables set up to accomodate the 30 or so computers. It was chock full of TRS-80s, which were, at that time, the most convenient and easy-to-use machines for anyone looking to learn BASIC programming. It was also ruled by a small clique of the Nerd Elite—8th grade kids who not only knew BASIC programming, but were adept at it. They actually understood how to use the TRS-80s.

Nevertheless, this class was cake. The teacher was a total laid-back, mellow guy, who spent most of his time hanging out at his desk, feet propped up, chatting away with the Nerd Elite of the 8th grade and budding nerds of the 7th. Oh yeah, this class was nerd central. C’mon. Computers were gaining rep as a viable technological breakthrough, and these brainiacs were allll into them. Meanwhile, a couple of my friends and I were basically just hanging out ourselves, trying to make sense of these TRS-80s.

There was no class instruction, no class lectures, no homework. The only term assignment we had was a box full of a thousand or so Scantron-looking cards, on which we had to fill in certain bubbles with a pencil—there was no explanation as to what these were, nor what they did; the teacher just wrote some code on the board each day and we were supposed to fill in our bubbles accordingly.

Everyone had a box, everyone had to do it. That was that. Oh man and this was so easy. It’s like, all we did was fill out those bubbles for like 15 minutes, and the rest of the class time was spent however you wanted. It turned out that later, at the end of the semester, we had to feed these boxes full of cards into some electronic reader, and voila! Some boring “fun” program fizzled onto the screen. If your program ran, you got an A in the class. I guess, through the filling in of thousands of binary bubbles, we were supposed to be impressed with the magic of computers. I was not.

So how did we regular kids spend our days in this class, if we couldn’t be part of the Nerd Elite? We tried to make use of the TRS-80s. How? Most of the time, it was just staring at a blank screen, that white cursor blinking in the void, as we came up with interesting junior high topics of conversation. Or, we could do the ultra-popular name scrolling program, which meant that we learned an inkling of BASIC. The code went like so:

10 CLS
20 PRINT “GREG”;
30 GOTO 20
RUN

This would scroll your name, or favorite band’s name (i.e., Duran Duran, Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, or Def Leppard), or expletive (whichever you chose), down the screen forever, until you hit ESC.

Now if one knew their BASIC shortcuts, they could substitute a “?” for the PRINT command in line 20, thus shortening cutting their coding time by a whopping 20%. Whoopee.

10 CLS
20 ? “GREG”
30 GOTO 20
RUN

This too, would also scroll your name, favorite band name (i.e., Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Men At Work, Flock Of Seagulls), or expletive (whichever you chose) down the screen forever, until you hit ESC.

Now if one knew their BASIC shortcuts and a little BASIC tweaking (usually learned from looking over budding 7th grade nerds’ shoulders), you could tweak the space within the quotation marks and add a semi-colon, something like this:

10 CLS
20 ? “GREG “;
30 GOTO 20
RUN

Now this would scroll your name, favorite band name, school crush’s name, or expletive (whichever you chose) in infinite diagonal columns across the screen forever, until you hit ESC. The amount of space you put between your name and the end quotation mark equalled the amount of space between the diagonal columns. It was mindless, hilarious fun, especially if you chose an expletive and ran the program right when class ended, so that the next student who sat at your computer saw a screen full of some VERY bad words.

Of course, all this got ultra-boring after awhile, so we had to find new ways to entertain ourselves. So I went to the local library and picked up some handy little books on TRS-80 BASIC programming, and learned a few cool tricks, which I shared with my friends.

One thing we picked up on was String Variables, which allowed some genuine, mind-bending interactivity for us thirteen-year-olds. It was like, Oh my God! The computer is talking to me! A quick conversation with the computer was coded as easily as such:

10 CLS
20 INPUT “WHAT IS YOUR NAME”;A$
30 PRINT A$;”, YOU ARE THE RADDEST GUY IN THE WORLD!”
RUN

This would have the computer appear as if it was asking you a question:

WHAT IS YOUR NAME?_

You would type in your name, and it would “answer” you, like so:

GREG, YOU ARE THE RADDEST GUY IN THE WORLD!

Oh, the hilarity. Oh, the wild entertainment. Depending on how cruel, cynical, conceited, or just plain stupid you were, you could have the computer tell you (or your friend / victim) all kinds of things.

GREG, CYNDI THINKS YOU’RE CUTE!
AARON, YOU RULE AT DEFENDER!
CHRIS, YOUR MOM IS PAC MAN!
ERIC, YOU SUCK!
CYNDI, GREG THINKS YOU’RE CUTE!

Yes, we would laugh our asses off at the creative nonsense. But the Nerd Elite just weren’t impressed. They would walk by and see our on-screen antics, and just push their noses up in arrogance. Especially one kid, Alex, who was indeed the almighty emperor of programming nerdness, and knew it. “Oh please,” he’d say, rolling his eyes. “That’s so old.”

My friend Aaron and I had to find some way to show him that we could do something as good as he could, so once again I ventured to the secret resource, the local library. This time I delved even deeper into the books, hitting the advanced chapters that had some real hardcore lines of coding, stuff which I just didn’t understand. Then I hit the magic chapter. GAMES. Yes!! Now I could write an actual game program, to challenge the emperor’s rule!

We could hardly contain ourselves as I fetched a little library hardback from my backpack a few days later. I told Aaron I’d found a cool game called “Dog Race,” where 8 dogs raced across the screen, and you could bet which dog would win. It was the ultimate entertainment, and sure to cause some commotion amongst the Nerd Elite ranks.

Oh but it took forever to code. There were pages and pages of coding, and I lost track several times. Once you entered a line, you couldn’t go back and edit it if you made a mistake; you had to type the whole line over again. And then when I tried to run it, it would have a bug, and I would have to proofread my lines of code to see if I misspelled or misplaced anything. Keep in mind that I was basically just cutting and pasting here. Those lines of code were as incomprehensible to me as the tears one of my female classmates was shedding over the wedding of Duran Duran’s John Taylor.

But finally, after a whole class period of coding, the game was finished. I pressed ENTER to race my own little pixelated dogs for the very first time, and the dog I bet on lost. But, I had won. I had accomplished the ultimate in BASIC programming interactivity—a GAME. I showed Aaron, and we both called out to Alex in unison. I made sure to hide the book.

Somewhat annoyed, he answered. “What?”
“Dood. Come over here. Look at this.”
“C’mon. Don’t show me some stupid stuff. I’m busy.”
“No, it’s not! C’mere.”

He came over, expecting to see the ever-so-familiar diagonal columns of expletives flowing across the screen. But no. This time the screen was blank, except for a rectangle, in which eight faithful pixel-dogs waited patiently for the starting gun.

He tried to hide his surprise. “What is that?” He asked.

“Pick a number.”
“Why? Ok, 7.”
“Watch.”

I pressed ENTER, and the dogs moved across the screen in varying speeds. Some fast, some deathly slow. The whole time, I knew Alex liked what he saw. He really liked what he saw. Nobody had done anything with graphics in the class. But he tried hard to hide his interest. The dogs ran… #7 ran moderately, but not quite fast enough. At the end of the race, number 3 broke the tape. He held his face stern, showing the slightest disappointment in the results, and fighting harder to not look excited at the graphics display.

7 LOST, the screen read bleakly.

“Hahahaa…you lost!!” We both said, slapping our knees in laughter. “Cool, huh?”

“Ah, whatever. I can do that,” he said, shooing the screen with a wave of his hands.

Despite his claim, he never could top my feat. I had, for once, faced up and defeated the Nerd Elite Captain. Yes, by dirty, scoundrely means, but it was still fun. But of course, this achievement went unnoticed, unannounced, as we once again returned to filling in those thousands of bubbles on those thousands of cards for that mystical, awe-inspiring “fun” program we all had to look forward to at the end of the semester. But that “Computing” class remained, and still remains, one of my favorite classes of all time.

7 LOST

Todd Howell [thowell at horizonview.net - 07/20/2004]

The TRS-80 Model 1, that old slow machine with large pixels, slow speed, and low memory was to me something much more. It's role in my life cannot be overstated, for it changed the entire course of my life for the better.

I was 13. I was not always the brightest kid in some things. I played chess, but not well. I beat my sister's 6th grade teacher in checkers, but beyond all that I seemed to struggle in the knowledge department. Life was about fun and toys, reading books and fishing. I didn't really have a direction, I was not focused on anything, and I seemed to have a hard time in school in many areas. Math was tough to me, history was just something that occurred a long time ago, and English was simply something which we inherited from the British.

My dad was an electronics engineer. Three to Four people worked at the Columbus branch of his office. I used to go there and hang out when I had time and look at things. They had a digital decwriter tied to a computer which they were working on for a client. I was able to play chess on it, though I did not win. I always dreamed of having a job like dad. A few guys, doing what they enjoyed, making new things, and getting paid to do it.

One day, my dad brought home a computer. A TRS-80 model 1 with cassette drive. It was for the family, but he and mostly I were the ones who used it. I cannot begin to tell you how this changed my life.

I played with it, I remember one afternoon during the summer I typed in a program from creative computing. A space war type game. It took me many hours as I had never really typed before. Hunt and peck. I thought I had saved the program correctly, but when I did a cload it was not there. I called dad and when he came home he typed it in for me in no time. He was the man. I remember too that he built an interface for the computer to the decwriter. I admired his abilities and hoped someday that I could be as smart as he was. Then something occured one night. He brought his friend over who worked at Rockwell (previously North American I believe). He talked about war game simulations. I was intrigued but not sure I understood how he programmed them. He talked about ships, angle of firing, and so forth. He kept telling me math was the key to it all.

I now had a blueprint for myself. Math and computers. I started going to the library and reading up on Math, and I tried hard to learn more about programming. I expanded my reading to science, psychology, and more. Life became more than fun and games. Behind all this learning sat a little computer which was the fuel of my hopes and dreams. It was the canvas I painted on, it challenged me and made me think. You could not just turn it on and have it magically do what you needed. You had to program it, you were the artist. If I wanted it to do something, I had to make it. That old PC made me think, it forced me to tap into myself and learn. And the beauty of it - it gave me results back.

It gave me dreams I never thought about having before. My mind was a swirl of things now, from ufo's and in-search-of on TV, to the library and it's wealth of info. The TRS-80 was the glue which bonded it all together for me. While other kids I knew were out doing drugs, playing football, and other such teen things I was reading, playing chess, and programming. I had become the proverbial geek. Knowledge which has seemed so trivial to me at one point in my life now seemed like the most important thing.

Allow me to give but one example. I saw a star trek game for sale, I think it was $19.95. I did not have the money for it at the time, but I did have the screen shots from an add. Over a few days time I wrote my own version of it. I had to dig deep. How did I get the graphics on the screen? How did I make it move and fire? How to keep track of it all for scoring? I found myself working hard to do something. I found myself thinking about something real, something I could touch and see. I had to think and analyze problems and their solutions.

I think back to those days now, and I wonder what other kids were thinking about. Had I not got that computer, at that time in my life, I often wonder what would have become of me. What I learned from it followed me my whole life. Every job I got I found myself applying my skills, not programming per se, but analytic analysis and solutions. When I worked in manufacturing, I excelled at all aspects of it (I was a temp, hired in, made a shift lead), It did not seem to matter what kind of job I held, I did good at it. I am not being arrogant, I am being honest - I was able to leverage all the things I learned into any job I held. This to me goes back to my days of the TRS-80.

Where am I now? I left the computer field (One of my early jobs was wish a company that sold software, I was 19 at the time) for many years. At 28 I started getting back into it. After a divorce and a move to California I found myself as a computer tech for a small company. I was catching up with the times (I worked there when I was 30-31). From there I grew in my current skills, the old days came back to me. That company went under, and several more I worked for. And today, well today I am the site leader of a data center for one of the largest banks in America. People need me, I work all the time, and more than anything else I love what I do. Those dreams I had way back when, well they are coming true. Dreams which were fueled by a little computer that could. The road has been hard, winding, and long. But all along that path one thing kept me going on track, one thing kept me doing my best. My little trs-80. Yes I can credit myself, my dad, and others (they all most certainly were a part of me always).

But at the base of it all was that computer. It took me until I was in my 30's to realize it. Now that I am older and wiser I look back and see the magic it worked in my life. It was my outlet, it was my guiding force. I forsake that computer as times went on, as the days of the computer changed. I left it behind, but what it gave me has stayed with me my whole life. For that I thank it and my dad.

Now I sit around with my engineers and we talk about those days. Scott adams adventures, games we played and wrote, the early days of computers, bbs'es and gaming consoles, those among my guys who are older shake our heads when the young guys talk about the internet and windows. We were the guys who came before it. Maybe we did not make a difference in the computer world then, but it made one on us. We saw it happen, we felt it happen, and for many of us it started with that little computer, that old slow blocky graphic TRS-80 model one. We were using computers before they were cool and in every house, before the days of point and click, before this thing called internet and email.

For all you have done for me, I thank you my friend. I could write all night about my TRS-80 and it's effect on my life. Someday I will own a few more of them, and I will try hard to help them earn their place in History. And I thank you Ira as well for all you have done to preserve that great machine, that wonderful dream machine that made me who I am today.

Ted Hackler Jr. [ted.hackler at cocoa.tybrin.com - 02/15/2004]

I remember is was in the early to mid 70's. I had entered the Air Force and didn't make that much money. I was a mainframe computer tech and one day I took my wife to the mall to just look around. To my amazement as the mall was just closing, the people in the radio shack store were setting up the display of their first computer in the window. I sat down on a bench and couldn't beleive they had a personal computer on sale. They finally got it set up and the mall had been closed about 25 minutes. I talked to my wife and she just couldn't beleive I wanted to buy the computer in the window. I had to work about ten minutes on her to finally get her to say ok. I then ran and knocked on the window of the closed radio shack store. The guys inside told me to come back tomorrow, they were closed.

I then pointed to the small TRS-80 Model I computer in the window and said I wanted to buy it. They laughed and sort of said "SURE YOU DO". When they realized I was serious, the keys came out and they shuffled me and my wife into the store. It took a couple hours to get everything together and for them to get me the credit to buy the expensive computer. But around 11:00 pm that night, I have my 4k of memory computer home and was loading up my first program, checkers, which loaded from a cassette player. From that point on, I was hooked on radio shack computers for the next couple years. I bought their model III, then their model IV, then finally the model 1000 which was really their version of an IBM clone.

I remember I had to buy the first hard drive they ever sold. It was a huge beast that was very heavy and held an incredible 5 MEG of storage. I was one of those guys that loved to run Bulletin Board systems and when I bought the 5 Meg Hard drive, I had one of the biggest TRS-80 bulletin board sites around. I remember every year I would switch to another BBS program. Remember the wildcat bbs systems, the TBBS systems, the lighthouse systems. There were so many different ones, I loose track of which ones I ran. It wasn't to the advent of the cheap clone systems that I left radio shack brands for good. But I will always remember my first TRS-80 model one and the many nights both me and my wife spent at the keyboard entering basic code from magazines such as the TRS80 magazine. In those days, the only way to really get good new software was to type it in yourself. I'm now a Network Manager for a large company and still owe many of my talents (like typing at the dos prompt) from my early days with my radio shack computers.

In fact, all my radio shack computers are gone but I could never get rid of the software. In my closet are over 500 5 1/4" disks full of software that will run on the old Model I/III/IV computers. I remember I bought the entire PCSIG shareware collection which was about 400 disks or so if I remember correctly. There will never be a time like that again with computers where anybody at home could use his imagination and write something so different, that it took the computer world by storm. For those that would like to chat about the old days, drop me an email. hacklert@hotmail.com My old bbs name use to be HACK'S BBS and I ran it out of Texas and Florida quite a long time ago......

Michael Dybus [mtybus at home.nl - 02/15/2004]

The very first computer I ever saw in my life was my brothers Trs-80 model1. I was visiting him in Maine , the first night he had to work so I was left alone with nothing to do. Being a Commercial pilot I was used to radios and electronica so was not too much of a problem to turn this funny looking machine on... What a fun night! I managed to load up Raaka-tu from a tape and got it started with the minimal instructions on the tape. Needless to say I was deeply immersed in the maze when my brother arrived at home in the morning and laughed at me sitting there with my first set of red computer eyes!. Hahahaha fond memories.. I have been searching long and sometimes hard for the first three games I played on that computer. Having long forgotten the names and only vaguely recalling the play one day while searching I accidently typed in the magic combination of words and your website was one of the first.

Donald Wycoff [dwycoff at maine.rr.com - 12/14/2003]

When I was 14 years old I used to ride my bike home from school and pass by a Radio Shack on Auburn Boulevard in my home town of Citrus Heights. This was in 1979/1980 in my freshman year of high school, and a TRS-80 MODEL I was prominently displayed on a table as you walked into the store. Every time I rode by I would stop and look at the blank screen and sigh: I wanted a computer more than anything else. One day I plucked up the courage to go inside and full well expected the fellow behind the counter to kick me out. After a few moments I asked him how much a TRS-80 would cost. Though I don't remember the exact price, I recall it was astronomical, an amount I could never come up with myself. I don't mean to give a sob-story here, but my father had run off on my family a couple years before and we were dirt-poor: Money for a computer for Junior definitely wasn't in the cards. The fellow behind the counter was a man named Richard. I asked Richard if I could play with the computer, and to my delight he said yes.

So I sat down at the computer, figured out how to turn it on, and started reading a book that went with it that listed the first few lines of a BASIC program which I happily typed in, followed it with the RUN command. I cannot put into words the joy I found in getting that first program to run. Heck, I can even remember it:

		10 PRINT "PLEASE ENTER THE SUBTOTAL"
		20 INPUT A
		30 PRINT "THE PRICE INCLUDING TAX IS"
		40 PRINT A * 1.05
		50 END

I don't know how many hours I sat there, but eventually I had to leave. I asked Richard if I could come back another day. He said, "Sure!"

After school the next day, I was back.
Ditto the next day.
And the next.
And the next...

Before Christmas I had written a little demo program that had a glowing reference to Richard's name, had the address of the Radio Shack in question, and was a pretty snazzy little demo if I say so myself. Richard would let me come in in the morning before school and load the program up and start it running, and he'd let it run all day until the store closed.

Though I never had a computer of my own while in high school, Richard at Radio Shack made up for it: So long as he was present I could play with the TRS-80 to my heart's content, and I definitely didn't squander the opportunity.

It should not come as much of a surprise that I am a software engineer now, and I have been since the 80's. For a couple years I was even a professor at a college where I taught Computer Science. My current job has me developing high-performance trading systems on WALLSTREET that mix neural networks with fuzzy logic and wavelet analysis, and I enjoy the work tremendously.

Wherever you are, Richard, I want to thank you, for I know I would not be the man I am today if it wasn't for your indulging me with the TRS-80. Thank goodness Radio Shack had a man like you working for them. Wish I knew how to contact you and tell you this.

Mark Sornson [sornson at leland.stanford.edu - 04/26/2003]

My parents bought a Model I level 2 with 32K expansion interface, two disk drives & printer right when it came out. At the time, we thought it was an incredibly powerful machine! Our parents had a party & my brother & I wrote a program to make a blocky stick figure "walk" across the screen as a text banner showed the names of the people that were at the party. People would watch for several minutes waiting for their name b/c it was such a novelty! People at the party also played Eliza & had a great time.

We also used to type in programs from Byte magazine, some of which were very good for the era.

Johnn Audritsh [jaudritsh@comcast.net - 03/13/2003]

I've been involved with computers since 1972 and have a bachelors and masters degree in computer fields. I spent 2 years at Burroughs (remember them?) getting really involved in software development and found I very much enjoyed programming.

I wound up in Ford Motor Company, developing application software, then on to IBM internals, COBOL, JCL and assembler, etc .. and *always* wishing I could have a computer in my home.

I believe it was 1983 when I first laid eyes on a TRS-80, Model I at a school-sponsored computer fair. I had to have one after seeing how cool (and easy) it was to write and run a BASIC program. Within a week, I purchased my Model I/16K/Level 2 machine. I recall it costing around $800-$900.

Within a month, I'd purchased "Space Invaders" and other games -- plus the assembler (on tape). Assembly language was fun and pretty easy -- once you figured out how to get the tape unit to work. Only problem was saving the source, then object, then reloading to get it to execute. If it locked up or died, you had to reboot the machine. As for that (*&$ tape drive, I kept a bottle of denatured alcohol and q-tips handy as frequent cleaning of the heads seemed to help.

I developed 4 or 5 non-remarkable Basic programs (math drills, road racer) and sold a few copies. Found myself coming home from work, eating a quick dinner, then going on to the computer until the wee hours in the morning. It was just so much fun!

My next purchase was a Lynksys (sp?) modem. The Lynksys people were kind enough to send the names and phone numbers of other Lynksys owners in the area -- cool idea. There were not many on-line systems available at the time. I was fortunate to run into 2 people - one guy (Ralph) who was running a BBS, the other (Dale) interested in having his own. Both of these guys were "shooters" as they had disk drives on their systems!

Ralph asked if I could fix a couple of bugs in his system and once I did, he loaned me a disk drive to "try". I was hooked! No more tapes, much faster loads and no volume controls to mess with.

Ralph then sold a copy of his BBS to Dale and Dale asked me if I could help improve it. I gave Ralph back his drive, then borrowed one or two from Dale. We also made a good friend in Tony, a CE from Burroughs and his hardware knowledge helped us more than once.

The BBS was a combination of machine code (I think it was Radio Shack's Host48) and Basic. I bought a disassembler and went through the machine code to understand how it worked ... and then wrote my own version - squeezing the Basic as tight as I could and making the machine code as efficient as possible. We christened the new system LDBBS.

By this time, I'd bought 2 of my own disk drives (with the Expansion Interface [E/I] and 48k), the Pennington book and every other reference I could lay my hands on. I could not afford the double-sided drives but did get the higher density. Dale showed me how to punch the holes (timing?) with a 3-hole punch so we could use both sides of the disks. I recall a box of floppies (10) cost about $30 and held about 180k each.

I quickly learned about Basic's "garbage collector" and why it was important to write the code as tightly as possible. I poked and peeked wherever I could, removed comments (that made life interesting), renumbered the code constantly from 1 by 1 (GOTO's used ASCII charters for numbers) and made USR calls when I could. I found myself keeping two copies of the code, one with comments, the other without (for production). I wrote a utility that would strip the comments out.

I'd also become a member of the Dearborn (MI) TRS-80 User Group where I met Vernon Hester (author of Multidos, Super Basic and many other great products) and David and Theresa Welsh (Lazy Writer). Vernon, David and Theresa were all very nice, down-to-earth people who would answer any question, show interest in everyone's programs and were remarkable open on what they did and how they did it. Within the UG, I made many other good friends, some who put up their own BBS systems using LDBBS including Randy, Tony, Jacques and Paul.

The E/I had the worlds worst connectors ... at least for some time -- and most folks found themselves constantly "wiggling" that 3" cable on either end when their Model I's fell "asleep". Someone told me putting WD40 on it would fix things - sure did - went dead as a doornail! Yes, oil will inhibit the flow of electricity. DOH!

I was in grad school at the time and worked with 3 friends to develop an operating system simulation on our TRS80s. It was written in Basic and was quite sophisticated with a handful of I/O devices (simulated), a random job simulator, time-slicing and yes, even a couple of pages of documentation.

Somewhere along the line, I recall people being into lowercase modifications - some of the early hardware could only display uppercase. Was there a chip that upgraded it?

Remember when good friend Randy bailed out another friend (Dave). Seems Dave, quite by accident, put 110v to the Mod I's expansion port. Randy rebuilt the Mod I chip by chip - amazing guy. Randy also taught me how to straighten out bent legs on RAM chips and why it was important to be grounded when doing so. Randy was also big on the CoCo including it's machine language. He never quite seemed to learn that I was right and the Z80 was better than CoCo's Motorola chip (in jest).

With LDBBS, we used Lazy Writer for all our documentation. We eventually had over 60 features and all were fully documented as were the error messages. During this time, I wrote my master's thesis on Lazy Writer and printed it on an MX-80. We also began making optimized versions of LDBBS to run on Multidos - the fastest DOS in town. And about this time, I graduated to a Model III.

I nicknamed the Model III the "silver bullet" as it was silver and, with a speed up clock and CPU (think it was a 4mhz), ran much faster than the Model I. Even better was the "everything in one box" (except hard drive) and no more E/I and cable. Vernon's help with the internals of Disk Basic, DOS - plus some work experience with a mainframe system called CICS led to CCP - Communication Control Program.

During one of the TRS80 UG meetings, a local vendor displayed a 10mb hard drive in something about the size of a shoe box. I about fell out of my chair. Recall asking him "would hard drives ever go below $1000". His reply "never". Oh, and he's long out of business too.

Having seen the hard drive, I realize I could not live without one -- a 5mb Radio Shack hard drive ($1200?!) in a box about the size of a mini-spare tire. But it was fast, quiet and reliable. The flexibility it offered was as great a leap as it was from tape to floppy. It significantly changed the operation, reliability and capability of the machine from hobby to serious computer.

Vernon Hester was quite an interesting guy - used to tell me how he'd work into the night on his TRS80 and his wife would find him the next morning, asleep, with his head on the keyboard. At one of the UG meetings, a vendor demonstrated his Basic compiler and said it made the code very fast. Vernon challenged him, saying his interpreted Basic was faster! The vendor set up his compiler, compiled a simple FOR/NEXT loop for 10,000 iterations and timed the run -- it ran for a few seconds. Vernon typed in the same code using SuperBasic under Multidos - within a VERY short time after hitting the return key, the program ended - probably 1/3 the time of the compiled code. The vendor was astounded ... and never came back.

I remember going into my local TRS80 software store (non R/S) and seeing a Model I, keyboard opened, unplugged from everything and sitting in a bucket of water. I asked the owner if this was a joke and he replied "no, someone spilled a Coke on it - the sugar, when warm would short things out, but soaking it in water, then later blowing dry with a hair dryer would fix it". I did not stick around to find out, but other folks I talked to all agreed that was the way to do it.

CCP, like CICS, provided "services" for the Basic programs. Using one of the unused verbs (I think it was STR), we replaced the dead-end jump for STR to point to CCP. The numeric argument within the parenthesis would be used to JMP to a routine in CCP and other arguments [such as STR(3,"Test")] could be passed for the service.

Some of the services I recall are upper to lower case conversion, hang up the line, log printer output to disk, send/receive binary files, send/receive ASCII files and store/lookup data.

Another aside - a young fellow came to our UG meeting and showed us some machine code he developed - could flip the screen around, do all kinds of things. Afterwards, we gathered around, asking him about programming and techniques (it was that good). Someone asked him if he had any techniques for Basic programs ... he responded "I don't write Basic programs - that language is just to difficult"!

CCP had other features including an overlay ability (a new routine could be read from disk and overlay one in memory) and saved memory by running all the initialization routines within a buffer area that was later used for file transfers.

My BBS friends chipped in and bought me a music card that connected to the expansion interface, complete with a music editor and some canned songs. I recall spending hours developing music and playing it on that simple 4-voice card.

I knew the Model III was getting tired when I noticed the paint was wearing off around the keyboard, disk drives, etc. CCP now detected when the printer was offline and automatically routed printer traffic to disk. New services included creating special indexed files, maintaining them and searching (such as valid registered BBS users and their passwords). CCP also could drop the phone line after a specific idle time (no characters coming in/out) and had word-wrap ability for chat (thanks to input from David Welsh).

I now graduated to a Model IV ... and the fun stopped. I never liked the Model IV, even with the improved screen, 128K ability. Too many changes from the Mod I/III resulted in a machine that no one seemed to want to program for or use. I didn't keep the Mod IV for very long, instead buying a Sanyo, MSDOS machine that had no hard drive. That lasted less than 4 months.

By this time, the competition for BBSes was much greater. Many were offered as 100% machine code and could run rings around LDBBS. And the TRS80 market was drying up. I'd purchased a Tandy 1000 by this time (kept it 6 months) and had moved on to MSDOS. I don't recall what happened to all my documents, floppies, books or listings - but I'll never forget how much pure joy the TRS80 (and the people around it) added to my life.

Randy Marsh [Randy.H.Marsh@kp.org - 02/13/2003]

This is for all the TRS-80 devotees. I graduated from college in 1978 with an Economics degree where I had one required class in Fortran. A 30 line program on key punch cards was no trivial matter, so computers weren't on my resume'. I landed a job as an insurance adjuster in Dallas, Texas and soon realized peoples problems were not for me. It wasn't too long before I plopped $1,000 down on a TRS-80 16K Level II with cassette drive. I was hooked! Well, the Iranian hostage thing came along, so being an Air Force brat and tired of claims adjusting, I went in the Navy.

Four months later after graduating from OCS, I was an Ensign on my way to the Navy Supply Corps School in Athens, GA. Six months later, and the very same day (January 20, 1981) that the hostages were released I reported to the USS Talbot (FFG-4) as the Assistant Supply Corps Officer for Disbursing and Sales. In short, I paid the crew in cash and then I took their money back selling them cigarettes, candy, and t-shirts. I had a lot of fun on that ship: withdrawing cash from the Federal Reserve Bank on my signature (way cool), deploying to the Mediterranean Sea and then sailing North of Norway a few weeks later where I became a "Blue Nose" for crossing the Arctic Circle on a Navy ship.

The next Summer, 1982, Talbot went into overhaul at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard which gave me time to finish the TRS-80 program that I was entertaining myself with on duty days. Duty days are the ones where a chunk of the crew stays on board to watch over the ship in the middle of the night. It was either program the TRS-80 or watch TV with poor reception. I chose programming and ended up writing a BASIC program to calculate my Ship's Store profits. This allowed me to perform what-if scenarios near the end of the quarter so I could maximize profits to Talbot's Welfare and Rec fund. If my profits were too high then $$ would go the general Navy Welfare and Rec fund. Plus, my inventory would be in a bad position for the next quarter. All in all the program made my life a lot easier. Of course today I would be able to do the whole thing in Excel in a day, but heh, the way of the Pioneer is not! the autobahn.

My TRS-80 had been safely stored at Mom and Dad's house until I dragged it out about 18 months ago. I managed to get it working, the cassette drive needed some minor cleaning, but sure enough my true love was awakened from hibernation. Encouraged by my success I contacted the U.S. Navy Supply Corps museum in Athens, Georgia whose curator, Dan, was interested. I'm convinced and no one else has stepped forward, that I wrote the very first personal computer software to manage a Ship's Store Afloat operation. December 31, 2002, Dan accepted my donation of the Ship's Store Software and the TRS-80 on behalf of the museum.

Over Christmas vacation at my parents I had many fond memories of loading the software, starting my data load, making a pot of coffee and returning with a fresh cup of java just in time to see the data load finish. I had some trouble loading the data tape, so I managed to modify the program to back up the data to a new tape following an interrupted data load. To further archive the software and data for the museum, I hooked the analog cassette cables to my new Pentium III laptop's audio jacks and saved everything to a .wav file. I was then able to load the software and data to the TRS-80 directly from the CD. I managed to pack everything nice and neat, write a User's Guide, and send the whole piece of history to the museum. It's not yet on display, but some day I fully expect to have my picture taken next to my very first computer in the U.S. Navy Supply Corps Museum.

Epilog: My first professional computer job came in 1985 from the Talbot's 2nd Engineer (Main Propulsion Assistant for the knowledgeable) who left the Navy about the same time I did in 1983 and hired me into a startup in San Antonio, Texas. The startup developed software ported from DataPoint's DataBus to Novell 1.0 using the PC-Bus programming lanquage. We accessed the server from MS-DOS remote boot PC-XT/AT diskless workstations. So, my entire computer career has it's roots in my TRS-80 and the U.S. Navy.

I would like to thank everyone on this site for their contributions. The documentation CD sent to the museum has both the User's Manual for Level 1 (I can't track down the reference - my apologies), and David Keil's Level II Manual. It also includes Matthew Reed's and David Keil's emulators. Thank-you everyone for this wonderful knowledge store that made this such an enjoyable donation for me. The below is a picture of USS Talbot (FFG-4) to which I can certify that the TRS-80 did in fact go to sea in the Summer of 1982.

USS TalbotUSS Talbot (FFG-4).

Ken Johnston [kenmarie at sk.sympatico.ca - 08/05/2002]

I computerized my tractor salvage yard in the winter of 1981-82 with a used Model 1, 10 meg HD, and two (yes, two!) floppy drives. Boy, we were the cock of the walk around our little town! 10 meg of hard drive space - wow! It was hard to comprehend at the time. I remember looking in a Radio Shack catalogue and wondering what the hell all this garble was about. Actually, a young high school kid that was working for me convinced me that I could put a computer to good use in my business. We hand bombed our card system into the old Model 1, using Scripsit. Our cards, when measured, were fifteen feet deep!!! We typed in about 12,000 entries, then converted to SuperScripsit on a Model 3. Of course, then we used a utility program to convert to a database program on a Tandy MSDOS of some kind. When we did a printout of our inventory, we had to take the cover off the poor old DMP500 so it didn't overheat. It was about 350 pages!! We are talking about a three man business here, not GM of Ford. I have fond memories of that old Model 1. It is now in our local museum in Grenfell, Saskatchewan, Canada.

John Dahlman [jrdahlman@netscape.net - 04/27/2002]

In 1982 my parents got me a TRS-80 Model III before I got into high school. (A friend had a complete Model I setup, including speech synthesizer AND the rare voice-input digitizer, so I was biased to Radio Shack computers.) I used that thing all the way to 1990, when Radio Shack BROKE it on the way to a repair center. But there's one thing I used it for that may be unique: to control a film camera for stop-motion animation.

I was also getting interested in film, and played with my parents' old 1960's Super-8 camera. Simple metal box with a plastic lens, no sound. I wished I could take single frames for animation, but it wasn't built for it. It kind of worked if I banged on the trigger REALLY FAST, but I wished for a more automatic, "computer controlled" system.

I knew some electronics, but not enough to connect anything homemade to the printer port, much less the expansion port! Mostly I just read about the neat things hobbyists had built. But I did feel safe about the cassette port--especially the neat way the motor plug could turn things on or off. I'll try it!

The circuit wouldn't win any awards: basically I put a slip of paper between the batteries in the camera to block power, then literally stuck wires on either side of the paper to go to the motor plug on the cassette port. (I tried wrapping the wires around the tiny plug, but finally bought a bare plug adapter from good old Radio Shack.) Lock down the camera trigger, and ready to go. I could turn on and off the camera just by Sending the OUT command from BASIC to turn on the cassette port! With a FOR-NEXT delay loop between the commands and trial-and-error, I found the delay setting that popped the shutter just fast enough for a single frame. Camera on tripod, wires running to computer: instant homemade "professional" animation setup!

Being a hobbyist, naturally I never spent much time actually USING this setup--inventing it was the fun part. But I did shoot one bit of film where a Transformer toy "transformed," and a time-lapse out the window with the afternoon turning to night. (At that one I discovered my timing wasn't QUITE right: on the last frame the program left the shutter open. At least it made the last frame a nice long-exposure night scene.)

(While we're on the subject of TRS-80's and movies, I remember reading an article saying that a TRS-80-type computer actually DID help animate a "real" movie! It was in an issue of "American Cinematographer" in the mid-80's. The polygons for the 3-D cartoon "Star Chaser, The Legend of Orin" were computed by a LNW-80! The article doesn't explain that the LNW is a home computer, only that it's "the equivalent of the Cray's little finger." Compared to the Cray that did "The Last Starfighter," it could only do "a limited number of polygons" and the actual animation was done the old-fashioned way overseas.)

Eric Carpenter [ericmelissasydney@hotmail.com - 04/27/2002]

I can't believe the outpouring of emotion I have just witnessed on the stories page! There is nobody.......N O B O D Y like TRS-80 users. We were in a class all by ourselves.

I got a CoCo2 on Christmas 1982 (I would've been 10 years old) and was hooked IMMEDIATELY. Oh, I'd fight with the Commodore and Atari users, but I had a few friends I managed to bring over to my side. I didn't get rid of the computer until about 1993, because I had lost all of my ROM's and cassettes long before that, but everything else worked! A friend of mine even lent me the Speech ROM just before I got rid of the computer (he still has his, by the way...working condition despite the unit drinking a few beers accidentally) and I still got a kick out of it.

My only problem now is that I have an iMac with OSX and I can't run any CoCo2 emulators. Phooey, huh? I'm sure there's a solution....(little help?) Anyway...I sat down tonight with the intent of finding some old games, and I have, I just can't RUN them.

I just remembered....I had a bootleg cassette from a friend of mine that must have been made of ROM games...you had to type CLOADM to load them from the tape, as opposed to a CLOAD. I remember WhirlyBird Run ("wbrun" on the tape), Trapfall (an exact copy of PITFALL but with different colours), BlocHead (a cooler version of QBERT that used a wider pyramid), etc. MAN!!! What memories.

Anyway, keep up the site.

Eric Carpenter

Ontario, Canada

Larry Fosdick [lfosdick@lisco.com - 10/22/2001]

I started using the TRS-80 Model I in early 1980. I bought it in Washington, D.C. and hand-carried it to Saudi Arabia, where I was working at the time as a chemist. Later that year a local Radio Shack store opened in Riyadh. The computers were popular there, but all the business software was written for the U.S. I moonlighted writing business software for the Saudi environment for almost two years. It was a lot of fun. I ended up with two Model I's, a Model 3, a Model II, a Model 4P, a pocket computer (the first version), Tandy 1000, and a Model 100. All but the 4P, 1000, and pocket computer are gone. The old 4P came out of storage when I found your site, and it still runs. I was even more amazed that a program I published for the Model 4 is on your site (Reference Library, 1985). I still have the issue of 80-Micro that published the article, but have to thank you for the ability to get the code again and see it actually work.

I'm trying to interest my children in the early history of microcomputers, and sites like yours really help.

Ardeen Hague [ardeen@kcuhc.com - 10/22/2001]

My first computer was a TRS-80 Model III (cassette). I purchased it for $1,300 after playing with my neighbor's mom's (now my mother-in-law) TRS-80 Model I. My friend (now wife) used to type in lengthy basic programs (usually adventure games). At the time my mother-in-law to be couldn't save programs to disk because they would be corrupted -- it was only later that we discovered you had to disable the real-time clock before saving files. We'd type for a couple of hours then play for a little bit, then sadly turn off the computer. Once, after typing in almost the entire program, one of us accidentally hit the "clear" button -- we thought that cleared the memory, so we sadly shut off the computer not realizing that we only cleared the screen.

My first real job was a s a data entry person on a mainframe. After about nine months I was miserable and a co-worker found a job listed in the paper for someone looking for a person with TRS-80 experience. I applied and during the interview I looked at their computer and found an improperly closed file, fixed it and had the job on the spot. Ironically they traded the TRS-80 for a Tandy 1200 (the only 100% IBM compatible Tandy ever made). That got me into the IBM world. I love TRS-80's and now my kids are starting to love them too -- they're always thrilled when I let them play a game on the TRS-80 Model III -- that's better than any CD-ROM I let them play on their computer...what more could a dad ask for?

Mary Thacker [jaymaryt@mn.mediaone.net - 8/21/2001]

I was born in 1985, on the tail end of the Age of Micros. I got a couple glimpses of the Old Micros as a kid, just enough to get me hooked. When I was 12 my brother and I got a Commodore 64; it gave us the experience of using a real computer. After a while, we progressed to an Apple //e (big pile of junk, no manuals, didn't know how to save to disk, etc.), and then to an Amiga 500.

Meanwhile, our family in general had received a Pentium ][, for Quicken and games, etc. But I couldn't forget my Amiga. I used it quite a bit before I realized that it wasn't what I was looking for. It was too powerful.

I happened to be in Goodwill on the right day, and *gasp* there was a TRS-80 Color there! It took a little while convincing my dad, because he didn't think my mom would like ANOTHER computer(I didn't mention that an uncle had given me and my brother a Pentium for using), but I finally convinced him after informing him that a friend was going to buy my Amiga. At the time of this writing, I'm almost 16(so it's been almost 4 years since the Commodore 64), my TRS-80 Color is in perfect working order, and I am waiting to buy a CCR-80 recorder for my TRS-80. I don't plan to get rid of my TRS-80 till it breaks.

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".

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ah yes, just like the old days.

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:

TRSDOS Ready

*………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mel Hatfield [mhatfield@iquest.net - 9/3/2000]

I happened by your web site for TRS-80's. Oh, the memories. We purchased a Model I for Christmas, 1980 at the wishes of my son, Bill Hatfield (aged 13). It clicked! He was in his realm. Bill went on to other computers later...but never forgot all the basics learned on that old computer (he still has it in storage). Bill is now a consultant and Corporate Trainer in web based technologies, as well as best selling author of several computer books, including the first book on Powerbuilder and two "Dummies" books (Active Server Pages and Visual Interdev). His web site is at www.edgequest.com. Anyhow, I just wanted you to know how pleased I was to happen on your site!

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.

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 ;-) -

				10 INPUT "WHAT IS YOUR NAME", A$
				20 PRINT "HI "A$

(Note going to 20 for the line number so as to leave room for more code!!)

I ran it and was blown away - it worked !!! I was hooked for life.

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.

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.

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.

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 ????

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.

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!!!

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!!

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....

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 ... :-)

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.

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.

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 ...

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. :-)

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.

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!". ;-)

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.

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.

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.

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....)

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.

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. :-)

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.

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... :-)

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, th

Ira Goldklang's TRS-80 Revived Site Stories

Ira Goldklang's TRS-80 Revived Site

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