@bobqat wrote:
@reviewboy wrote:
Speaking of firmware upgrade: the TRS-80 level II came in a kit that provided 16Kb (4x RAM!) and a 2x speed improvement in the cassette interface (300 baud!). We hacked our cassette player - a Realistic, natch - so we could hear the ones and zeroes being read in. You knew your program wouldn’t load if it kept right past the silence to the next program. Rewind, adjust the volume, and try again. It was often faster to re-enter the program by hand. The magazines at the time were 90% source code. Many of them stank, so you learned by debugging, then rewriting.
It’s not that I MISS those days, but I do have fond memories.
Radio Shack sold a tape-based game called ‘Defense Command’ that used the cassette output to create recognizable speech synthesis at 300 baud. Halo, Schmalo! =) Or string packing in ‘Dancing Demon’. Or having to load ‘kbfix’ from tape when you first booted up to sstopp tthhe ddannnggeed kkeey rrepppeaat…
I bought an LNW expansion interface to bring my TRS-80 up to 48 kb RAM and into the 5.25" floppy era. Only $4 for a whopping 90 kb of rewritable storage! (plus the $400 drive with a solenoid that could knock pictures off the wall.)
Still have a mostly complete set of ‘80 Micro’ somewhere in the mess. For a while a writer named David Busch (I think) had a humor column titled Kitchen Table Software that was the computer equivalent of Dave Barry. (Goggling…) OMG…
…I actually remembered the name ~and~ the spelling! Close to three decades my brain cell can hang on to that, but can it remember where I just put my glasses or why the cat is yelling at me with her bowl in her paws?!? Boheimers…
What a walk down memory lane this has been! What a treat. Dancing Demon! Defense Command! Those games where little blobs moved across the screen firing slow-moving pellets that gave me more nightmares than DOOM ever did. the expansion box that helped you connect printers, add memory, connect disk drives, and that one connnector I never did figure out what it did. In today’s dollars, that was close to a six thousand dollar rig.
Remember Pillbox? The game that exploited the Model I’s unshielded case so you could tune into an AM radio and hear the screen redrawing itself? (Couldn’t watch television when the computer was on for similar reasons. Ah, the frontier days of home computing…) “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” Folks exploited it to make music on that little box - I even had a piano app - long before there were sound cards.
Relive the glory: TRS-80 emulators! http://www.discover-net.net/~dmkeil/index.htm
