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.....

 

BUT IT WILL PLAY SUBLOGIC'S FLIGHT SIMULATOR - I think I paid $25 and got a cassette with 32k of code.

16 hours ago, Mace said:

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

I began college at Edison Community College (now part of the University of Florida) in Ft. Myers, FL. I took COBOL, SNOBOL, Fortran IV, and RPG. Later, at the UofF, Gainesville, I continued with the same programs, but added LISP as well while developing primitive AI constructs.

Want to have some fun? Try dropping a stack of ~400 punch cards while rushing to the window to submit your latest program, and then having to re-sort them into proper order again...

On 2/24/2018 at 6:21 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.

I spent all my ATP time in the yellow 767!  Had hexagon-sided engines, black dot for the intake, but man was the VC awesome! LOL.

I too was on Prodigy, a member of SunAIr, and flew on an Atari 520ST with an Indus GT 5.25 DS/DD (remember what that stood for?) floppy.  I paid $300 for the Indus, it was all black, had a hydraulic door over the disk insertion slot, and all sorts of lights that told real geeks (not me) exactly what it was doing.  It was supposed to be sooooo much faster than normal drives, hence the hefty price for a floppy drive.

I completely forgot about Simon....but that is a name you don't forget if you were into ATP.

Still have the brown manual somewhere.   Man those were the days, hehe. 

2 hours ago, n4gix said:

Want to have some fun? Try dropping a stack of ~400 punch cards while rushing to the window to submit your latest program, and then having to re-sort them into proper order again...

Did that once at IU a day before my final exam!  That course was basically to understand not how to program, but what was going on and how.  So essentially we were choosing routines and then arranging the cards.  Oh but was that a long time ago!

My Trash 80 was overclocked to 5.31 Mhz.  That's 3 times the original clock rate.  Bet you can't do that with your fancy PC nowadays.

On 2/27/2018 at 10:55 AM, n4gix said:

I began college at Edison Community College 

WHILE Thomas Edison was still living, no doubt :)

On ‎2‎/‎24‎/‎2018 at 6:21 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.

I purposely downloaded DOSBOX and since I still had the installation disks and the manuals, I was able to put ATP on my desktop.

On ‎2‎/‎24‎/‎2018 at 10:05 PM, Rob Ainscough said:

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.

Rob,

Would this work in the Atari emulator I have?  I grew up on Compute magazines and my dad would say, "If you want a game, start typing."

 

 

Edited March 1, 20188 yr by FormerSF3

17 hours ago, FormerSF3 said:

Would this work in the Atari emulator I have?

I don't think so, but I honestly don't know ... the TRS-80 Color Computer used the Motorola 6809E and ran Color BASIC 1.0 (or was it 2.0) OS.  I believe the Atari family ran MOS Tech 650x series CPUs with Atari's own proprietary OS.

Cheers, Rob.

Well, old memories,

My father purchased the 13 unit of TRS-80 sold in Canada. I got my first arms at computer on this machine. I remember also having done my first electronic projects on that. Connecting a Novar terminal to the computer. Building a light pen (that was detecting the TV beam and translating this into position) and I remember there was also modification to the tape recorder to eliminate the sound level problem. Some Zilog assembly language programming in the process...

The Ira Goldlangs site is still alive;  http://www.trs-80.com/wordpress/

 

Edited March 2, 20188 yr by kama2004

On ‎2‎/‎24‎/‎2018 at 5:05 PM, Ramjett said:

SORRY IF I APPEAR TO BE SHOUTING.  I ASSURE YOU I AM NOT IT'S JUST THAT THE TANDY TRS-80 MODEL 1 I AM USING, IT'S A SWEET MACHINE I GOTTA TELL YOU, CANNOT DISPLAY LOWER CASE LETTERS.

I still remember my Commodore 64.  Ran FSII at a whopping 4-10 fps, depending on the scenery add-on.  I even learned to hack some of the parameters so the Piper could exceed 200KTAS by putting negative values in the flap settings.  I learned how to program using the C64, created a prime number generating program in assembly language using binary encoded decimals, could generate prime numbers much faster than basic.  I bought a macro assembler for the C64, also bought Pascal for it.  Then I graduated to an Atari ST and bought a programming language called GFA basic.  It was lightning fast, and looked more like an advanced programming language than Basic.  I ran flight simulator on that and it ran very fast, like a Mac, given the 68000 processor on the Atari.  The Atari was also a great desktop publishing platform.  My father bought one and did his reports for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on it, he was an ace in desktop publishing even in his early 60's, just before he retired.  Finally I graduated to PC's but had to wait until what I have today to get something really fast that could run P3DV4 and Xplane11 without complaint.  Now all I do in retirement is enjoy simming, I am enjoying it more than I ever have before.  Who knows what simming will be like ten years from now.  I thank Lockheed Martin, Austin Meyer, and the smaller sim developers for keeping our hobby alive and interesting into the 21st century.

John

Edited March 4, 20188 yr by John_Cillis
Removed excessive quote. Please don't quote a "wall of text"!