TRS-80 WON'T PLAY P3DV4

[WarpD 824]

GEnie

[Guest]

24 minutes ago, Ramjett said:

Lotta good memories coming out here!

Programming was so much easier back then (age 16), and users were so less demanding.  I actually got fan mail ... not eMail, but mail (I've shown this before but this topic comes back to life every so often).

Cheers, Rob.

[jimelder2 3]

I remember that my first flight sim was by sublogic.  I also remember that a peripheral hard drive held a FULL megabyte and cost $900.  Needless to say, I did not get a hard drive until later.

Jim Elder

[SolRayz 392]

On 2/24/2018 at 6:25 PM, fppilot said:

?????
My first color monitor was a Sony Profeel in 1982, 9 years before Prodigy.  The Prodigy interface was inherently blue, like what you see here:

http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/04/chapter-3-part-1-compuserve-prodigy-aol-and-the-early-online-services/

This is more like what I remember. Not all of us had VGA monitors. 

http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/932/prodigy-20-years-ago-today

[fppilot 4,339]

39 minutes ago, SolRayz said:

This is more like what I remember. Not all of us had VGA monitors

Actually the 13" Sony Profeel monitor I started using in 1982 had a unique wide flat-cable interface port that later accepted an unusual proprietary  VGA-compatible cable.  I could hook up that proprietary cable to the computer and hook up composite cables to a VCR that was connected to cable TV coax, and with a switch on the Profeel's panel could touch to go back and forth from computer to TV.  The Profeel lacked its own tuner and also required external speakers. When configured to adapt I could work on the computer while monitoring audio of sports broadcasts, and with a touch of a switch go from work display  to play display!

I just this past year finally took that Profeel to the disposal site.  For almost thirty years, still connected to a VCR which provided the TV channel tuner, it served as the TV in my garage/shop.  The picture quality on that 13" Profeel was always incredible! It was the first of the Trinitron displays.

It was also my first IBM PC monitor that I used with MS Flight Simulator.

Edited February 26, 2018 by fppilot

[tf51d 284]

On 2/24/2018 at 8:31 PM, fppilot said:

In the earlier Compuserve day you had to first connect to your local ISP, then from there connect to Compuserve.  The first recollection I have of connecting direct to Compuserve as a standalone service was after the demise of Prodigy. That was in the mid 1990's.  So that may be what you recall.  All of that was before the advent of the internet.

I was clearly connecting to Compuserve from my home in New Jersey in the mid-late 1980's. Like 1986 on... I am from Indiana and an avid basketball fan, and my New Jersey ISP was named "nothing but (dot) net".  The ISP name had nothing to do with basketball but it was a natural match for me!  I know I had that service, and Compuserve, when my Indiana University team won the NCAA Championship in March 1987. 

Actually Compuserve predates the internet as we know it, there were no ISP's then. Compuserve, (as well with AOL and Prodigy) was originally stand alone networks where you would have a access number to dial into with your modem, and directly login using your account  number, something like for example 73435,2306. Compuserve didn't start offering connection to the Internet, until 1989 and then it was only for email. It wasn't til 1997 that it converted to HTML from it's text base forum system. (HMI).

[Penzoil3 480]

LOL, you need to replace that Tandy machine with a Timex Sinclair 2600 !  My first computer, it too spoke basic. I was typing in 1200 lines, of an Oregon Trail game; when my cat ran oven the extension cord and taught me about backing up my programming more often. I had about 950 lines done... never did put that program in.

  I still have the TS 2600. It's in a case my husband made for it.

 Sue

Edited February 26, 2018 by Penzoil3

[Ramjett 27]

I loved Oregon Trail.  My kids and I would play it for hours.  Rafting down the Dalles...or was it the Wallowas...was tough!  I actually searched for a version my current system could play recently so my grandson could experience the fun I had with it and learn some History...albeit somewhat slanted...at the same time.   No luck, nor with finding a playable version of "The President is Missing".

Randy

Edited February 26, 2018 by Ramjett

[n4gix 4,947]

Ha! You young folks are pikers. My first computer was a clay tablet and a Greek Slave/Scribe!

[JRBarrett 3,034]

 

On 2/24/2018 at 7:21 PM, fppilot said:

I flew subLogic's ATP: Flight Assignment and still miss it.  That was in my days on the Prodigy network, and I was a founding member of the first ever virtual airline, SunAir, Airline of Imagination, that emerged from our group on Prodigy.  I kept ATP going like something from the Energizer Battery Bunny, with help we got from an Austrian programmer named Simon Hradecki, who breathed life into if for several years after subLogic ceased existence.  https://www.nomissoft.com/simon.html 

I logged over 5,000 hours with ATP, still the greatest number of my logged simulator hours.  I break down FS by version and am still just over 3,500 FSX hours.

Those were the days! I flew for SunAir using Flight Assignment ATP. That was an amazing program.

As you may know, Simon is still very active in aviation, running the Aviation Herald web site, which is probably the world’s premiere resource for aircraft accident and incident reports.

[Mace 1,902]

 

4 hours ago, n4gix said:

Ha! You young folks are pikers. My first computer was a clay tablet and a Greek Slave/Scribe!

clay tablet.  Bah.  I took a COBOL class in college.  haha !

We had to send our programs to a server (big room sized server) to compile them.  I think that was old-school, even for 1991.  In a few short years, things changed so much.  By the time I was a senior in college (1995) things had changed tremendously, with classes on web design -- no more COBOL.

[fppilot 4,339]

1 hour ago, JRBarrett said:

As you may know, Simon is still very active in aviation, running the Aviation Herald web site, which is probably the world’s premiere resource for aircraft accident and incident reports.

Very much aware of Simon's present stature.  Proud of him.  He was a mere youngster back in the day and produced incredible improvements in an otherwise dying sim.  He single handedly kept ATP ahead of FS versions for several years!

In regard to ATP, I still am amazed that no sim since has improved on ATP's ATC.  Actually it had none of the flaws of the native ATCs in our current simulations.  And the ATP flight assignment grading has not been equalled since.  I flew and logged all of the assignments.

Edited February 27, 2018 by fppilot

[rightseat 277]

Wow! The original post made my day!

I was actually the proud owner (my dad bought it from Radio Shack) of a Tandy 1200. Some of the best times in my life were learning Flight Simulator "2.0" and tearing my hair out playing Kings Quest, Space Quest, or Police Quest. Those were the days! Great memories.

 

 

[Ramjett 27]

I can't top the clay tablet, Father Bill, but I did learn how to use an Abacus in high school...just because.  Cobol and college.  When I took Basic Computer Science at the Univ of Idaho in the 70's we "typed" out our programs on 3x7 data punch cards and then took the stack to a card reader to "run" the program.  Wanna guess how hard it was to "debug" a program that involved hundreds of cards?  I believe the program was called Fortran.  I even used that "experience" in my resume for a few years after graduating until I realized the computer world had moved on.

I saw someone earlier mention the Tandy 1000.  That rang a bell and I believe that is what I "traded up" to when I quit the TRS-80, but not for certain.  Even stranger, my system is a 4 year old Dell Dual Core...antiquated by today's standard, but runs FS2004 amazingly and FSX very well...Win7 64-bit Pro version, yet just the other day I clicked on the wrong drive and "remembered" that it came with the A:/ drive as a...3-1/2 inch floppy disk reader.  Now if I could only remember where all those 3-1/2 inch floppies were!

Randy

[Zatoichi 45]

I got my trash 80 in 1979?

Did my own expansion of ram.
 

I sold a program or two through Radio Shack.

 

My job involved heavy DoD contracts (F16 mux box, F15 FLT RCDR (I wrote the bootstrap - 48 bytes) Front Panel for the Av8B) so we had an acoustic modem and a teletype connected to DARPA Net.

I used to log onto BBS and download BASIC code for things like Monopoly. 16k or code would take HOURS.....