Tropico 4 mods shack
The original TRS-80 only offered uppercase characters, so to get lowercase, I had to open the case, and piggyback some new chips, soldered onto the motherboard (a technique I learned from a contemporary electronics magazine I was a bit of a solder jockey back then). I learned some assembly code, too, although I never programmed anything more than a subroutine or two using it. In those days, you could buy tapes of programs in BASIC, or type them in – rather laboriously – from listings in magazines and then alter them. I learned to write programs in BASIC on that machine (and subsequently improved on the Atari computers). It had a standalone B & W monitor that didn’t have any graphic capability, although canny programmers used the blocks in the ASCII character set to create pseudo-graphics (a bit like today’s Dwarf Fortress game displays, but only in B&W). Each floppy could hold about 160KB of programs or data. A year or so later, I upgraded to a 64KB RAM system and dual floppy (5.25″) drives. I had to boot it and load programs from a cassette tape player. The PET was only sold at stores downtown, so I bought the closer one. But the TRS was sold at a nearby Radio Shack store within walking distance, and they also offered nighttime classes to teach the basics. It had similar limitations in memory and input devices, but came with a green and black screen integrated with the keyboard in one unit. But not as much fun.īefore I bought it, I debated for a week or two whether to get the TRS or the competing Commodore PET, powered by the 6502 processor. Smartphones today are more versatile and more powerful. It had no USB ports, didn’t use a mouse, and had no audio card. My current machines all run 64-bit, multi-core processors. It was powered by a Zilog Z-80 eight-bit processor. It was a 16KB computer (yes: that’s 16,384 bytes of memory) In comparison, my current laptop has 8GB, or 8,388,608 kilobytes: 512 times the Model 1’s amount of RAM! But that was when I was writing about them, editing computer books and writing computer manuals. As many as six or seven at one time, back in the early 1980s, all different brands.
Since then, I have not been a day without one, and generally had more than just one in my home.
But as soon as I saw one, I had to have it. Nothing seriously hands-on, experience-wise, and no programming skills either. I had little experience with computers prior to that – a few weeks working after hours on an APL system at the U of T, mostly to play games against the machine, reading a few magazine articles on the coming ‘personal’ computer wave. It was forty years ago this fall, in 1977, that I bought my first computer.