Ed Vance wrote to Dave Drum <=-
Howdy Dave,
A friend I met at Church got a TRS-80 Model 1.
Earlier he played with an 1802 ELF (believe that's the name).
When the COMMODORE C=64 came out, he bought one.
The TRS-80 was my first "store bought" computer. It surely was a leap up
from the SWTP kit I bought from the back pages of Mechanix Illustrated.
That arrived as a circuit board and loose parts in a plastic baggie. The assembly instructions were mimeographed on a single sheet of rough paper.
No KBD and certainly no storage. When it powered down there went what
had been so laboriously entered via the DIP switches.
One day he told me it wasn't much fun typing BASIC Code in, running it
and when he finished with that PRG he would type NEW and all the time
and energy it took to type that PRG in was gone as he typed in some
other code he wanted to try out.
When Radio Shack introduced the TRS-80 there was a substantial discount offered to Tandy stockholders. So, off I went to Shearson-Lehman to buy
10 shares. I saved the price of those shares with the discount. They
never paid a dividend but the company would split the stock when its
price hit a certain point. And when Tandy startede a new company I got
some shares in that. By the time I sold out I had over 200 shares of
Tandy and holdings in two start-ups. Part of that money bought my
first Amiga 2000.
I told him about the circuit I saw in Popular Electronics that used a
7414 IC, in between a Cassette Recorder and the C=64's Cassette Port to Save his Code, and to CLoad it back into his PC when he wished to use
that program again. That Circuit worked very well for him...UNTIL I got
my own C=64, VIC Modem 300 and 1541Floppy Disk Drive.
The Modem had a program on a cassette tape and I wanted to put that program on a Disk.
I asked him to bring the Circuit he built and his cassette recorder to
my home so I could Load the program from the tape to Save it on a
floppy disk (I bought a 2-pack of SSSD 5-1/4" disks for $2.00 when I
got the Disk Drive at K-Mart). When my friend saw how quickly the File
I bought my C=64 after seeing a friend's VIC-20 with colour display. WOW!
And the 1541 drive was only U$395.00. Later I picked up a Commodore PET
8032 with dual floppies and a printer - that looked like it might have
been the model for the H.A.L. computers from 2001 A Space Odyssey.
was Saved on the disk, compared to the much longer time it took to Load
it to my COMMODORE 64, his jaw dropped and he bought a disk drive the
next day. BTW, He let me play with his 1802 ELF board some time later
to type in the Star Trek program on the HEX Keypad it had.
Good Days back then.
The best thing about the good old days is that they're gone. Bv)=
... MS-DOS=suit & tie, Macintosh=cool shades, Amiga=high heels & leather
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