OT -- RE: Re: Metalink Again, tandy computers

I was in grade 11 when the TRS-80 came out. Our geography teacher had one at home, but he brought it in. In our electronics lab downstairs that teacher spent hours and hours working on his Apple IIE with Heathkit learning modules, which he later used to teach us Boolean logic and rudimentary logic board manufacturing. He was the best teacher we ever had, including the anonymous, distant, uncaring university profs I went through later.

We had a computer lab upstairs with twelve Commodore PETs, with ROM-based operating system -- you didn't need to "boot" THOSE machines! Far superior to the disk-based nonsense we have now. Meanwhile we were still submitting FORTRAN punch cards which were shipped to the local university, there was a week turnaround time for those.

The TRS-80 was a silvery-grey and dark grey thing with the screen part of the computer, with a keyboard with black keys, if I remember correctly.

Grey and black text-only monitor.

Nice.

I think that was Radio Shack's heyday, when they made their own computers. I never bought one, which could be indicative of why they gave this up in the end... I think they lost focus now, people don't do electronics much anymore, too busy playing useless video games. Too hypnotized. Re. electronics, anyone seen a Popular Electronics magazine in local stores lately? I haven't seen any in years.

They still haven't been able to improve on those ASCII graphics characters for games, now they use all this 3D full-colour stuff that no one needs. How disappointing. I wish someone would write an emulation of the old Star Trek Arcade game, still hasn't been done that I know of.

aah, those were the days. When we were wondering whether to go with PC-DOS or MS-DOS...
When Apple screens were about the size of a coaster... When we were manually cutting the edge of our 5 1/4" floppy disk, to make them 2-sided diskettes, to get that extra 160K or 320K of disk space... When the programs that were written were understandable, not that object-oriented modular bloated code...
When you could store a dozen programs on a single-density 5 1/4" diskette... When assembly language programming could be used to write programs, not just drivers...

I wax nostalgic now in my old age, I reached a new low of 35 years old last week...

: )

Pat.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph S. Testa [SMTP:teci_at_oracle-dba.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 10:50 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> Subject: OT: Re: Metalink Again, tandy computers
>
> Anyone besides me remember the old tandy computers?
>
> my first computer:
>
> TRS-80 Model III, 16K of ram, used to program it using assembler, i
> think the package was called "edasm"?, no disk drive(too expensive),
> cassette tape player, 50 baud :)
>
> joe
>
> --
> Joe Testa http://www.oracle-dba.com
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> Author: Joseph S. Testa
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Author: Boivin, Patrice J
  INET: BoivinP_at_mar.dfo-mpo.gc.ca

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