TRS-80 episode

[janos112]

I loved watching the episode with the TRS-80. I had a TI-99 when i was 5. I believe you had to boot to a floppy with the O/S. I remember it had a manual that taught me basic. Near the end of the book was a sample program "Mr. Bojangles." Running that program had a graphical man dance across the screen. Awesome.


x286? I spent hours tweaking my dad's work computer for games. Config.sys and autoexec.bat with config menus on boot and ASCII graphical menus... The game Mean Streets blew me away. It was the first one that was able to use the PC Speaker for speech/music.
Turtle was an AppleIIe program that i played with in 2nd grade at our computer lab. The only memorable things for me was Open Apple - Esc and writing my own repeating text programs during class, and drawing equilateral triangles.

Gorillas and Nibbles (QBasic) were the games that I would play during school on the library computer (years later). After breaking out of the library software, playing those with my buddy made me feel like such a hacker lol.

Thanks for the blast to the past....the "new kids" have no idea what kind of work computing was before.

[fieryfrog]

That segment got me thinking about how old I am. Sad but cool.

First was the old 8088. I remember poking at the keys on that beast.

I remember when my Father brought home the Apple II. With its weird Expansion card slots. That was about 1978.

Then came the TRS-80.

Then the Apple IIC. which we never owned, but was what I used at school all the time. We had a computer club that took up alot of my time.

And eventually the beast that I spent most of my time with, The Commador 64.

[dolson]

The first PC that I personally owned was a Commodore PET (with no storage device AT ALL, so I had to code my own apps and games line by line, and if I powered off, I lost it all).

About two months after I got it, my parents bought a Pentium 200MHz w/ MMX and 32MB of RAM, 2MB Trident PCI card. What an upgrade. Sad thing is that we didn't have any PC at all before that.

It worked out fine though, as I picked up programming fast, and well, that's what I do now.

[xtian]

My older brother bought a Tandy 1000EX when I was REALLY young, like 6 years old. Games like Space Quest & King's Quest quite literally taught me how to read and write. Rad.

I love classic computer stuff, like any documentaries I can find on old computers I will watch, any suggestions? [I just watched War Games last night - haha]

[temporalagt]

Actually I still have my first computer and it was a TRS-80 model 4. Guess what it still boots... What they said was true when the computer boots up it loads its own trsdos boot screen. I did similar things with it we actually had then in the High School were I was taking Basic, Pascal, Fortran. Loved playing Zork on it. and the War game Jeff talked about was called Pillbox. Just remember Gates always said you'd never need more than 64k of RAM...

[xtian]

Actually I still have my first computer and it was a TRS-80 model 4. Guess what it still boots... What they said was true when the computer boots up it loads its own trsdos boot screen. I did similar things with it we actually had then in the High School were I was taking Basic, Pascal, Fortran. Loved playing Zork on it. and the War game Jeff talked about was called Pillbox. Just remember Gates always said you'd never need more than 64k of RAM...

I'm so mad, my parents thru away my Tandy or like, donated or something I don't remember. But I really wish I still had mine! I mean common it's my first computer!

[gorramit]

My first was a Sinclair Timex computer that I had to build myself from a mail order kit. It had Basic built in and I could save the programs on cassette tape. It had 1k of ram and would crash if I had more than 1 page of code. A $100.00 investment later I had an expansion pack that brought me up to 2k!

Our next computer was an Apple clone with an amber screen. It had this amazing game called 'Aztec' or something; a kind of side view scroller that absolutely blew my mind back then.

Good times.

[ryudo]

While at elementary school we played on 84 macs and apple II's in the 80's Our first PC at home was a 1985 packard bell 286.
Never had a mouse,but had both sized floppy drives.
Because of certain reasons we were never able to update so that was our PC until 2002..yes you read right.
While at school thankfully was able to work on better ones through the years and in my sr year of high school graphics class I worked on brand new pentium III gateways and in sociology we used laptops instead of books.

Was not able to get my own PC till I moved to my own apt in 2003 with a dell P4 4600 series. 256 mb of ram 60GB HDD grx card was a ati 9000 pro.

In 2006 bought a XPS 400 which I use today and love it..made few upgrades to it since.