August 8, 2011

I Was A TRS-80 Nerd

Filed under: News — admin @ 7:54 am

Take a trip down memory-mapped lane in this interview (link below). Matthew Reed runs TRS-80.org, a web site devoted to the very first line of computers I was into. Turns out I was kind of a wee, itty-bitty part of TRS-80 history.

Article Link

6 Comments

  1. Cool, I presume you still have the original source code for RESCUE, I have written commercial software and have either not taken a copy of the code or it needs some custom ActiveX to run so it won’t. There is nothing like the feeling of ‘I have saved some one an hour of entering stuff to hyperterminal’
    Just saying
    Glenn

    Comment by glennp — August 8, 2011 @ 1:20 pm

  2. I don’t seem to have the source for RESCUE in any of my present archives. It might be sitting in some of my old, old stuff in a folder. The code was relatively simple: A memory dump to disk starting at a specific offset. That was it. There might have been some verification to ensure that the end-of-file byte was still valid in memory, but that’s all the program did. It might have been maybe 50 lines of code.

    I do, however, have the programming archives for the PC intact. After programming the TRS-80, I went on to do a version of Communications Major for the PC and had a lot of it coded. I was called the Communications Major Host System. It ran a BBS called Hytopp, which tried to communicate with the ARPANET. I ended up starting a writing career, so the code was never finished.

    Comment by admin — August 8, 2011 @ 1:33 pm

  3. Ice on a circuit board wow that sounded dangerous!

    Comment by chiefnoobie — August 9, 2011 @ 3:23 am

  4. Sounded? Was! I put the ice inside two bags, so it wasn’t going to leak. But I did that only once.

    Hey! Back then, having a 1200 baud modem was kick-ass. I had only 300 baud, which was so slow you could read the text as it came in.

    Comment by admin — August 9, 2011 @ 8:26 am

  5. Ice, circuit board, dangerous, no, no. You either don’t work in the electronics industry, or if you do not in the R&D bit. Thats used to be standard operating procedure first does it work, will it kill you, how much is the box is the order I have found for these things!

    Comment by glennp — August 9, 2011 @ 11:34 am

  6. Well, I’m exaggerating a tad. I put the ice on top the box, not on the circuit board itself. And that didn’t really work. So I took the circuit board out of the box and set it up with a fan on it. The only thing that did was create some moderate RF interference with the TV, but it kept cool enough that I could use it.

    Comment by admin — August 9, 2011 @ 11:39 am

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.


Powered by WordPress