I had originally published this text on Sunday, November 8, 2009. It’s seen a couple of revisions. There’s some C code in this post, but the main point of the post is to provide a way to dump TRS-80 binary CMD files. The source code for all files can be found here:
https://github.com/jimlawless/readcmd
I’ve begun to use TRS-80 emulators to recapture some of the programming experiences of my younger days. The emulator I’m currently using under Windows is trs80gp which can be found here:
“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration” – Edsger Dijkstra
My early days of computing began in the late 1970’s. I used to go in to the Radio Shack in the mall where they would let the patrons type stuff into their display-model TRS-80. You could tell that none of the patrons were skilled in any type of computer language as the screen was filled with a line of nonsense followed by a line indicating that a syntax-error had occurred.
Originally published on: Sat, 22 May 2010
The first computer in my household was a Radio Shack TRS-80 pocket computer that my dad owned. My brother got it for him as a birthday gift in 1980.
This was essentially a calculator with a pretty nifty BASIC interpreter built in. The BASIC was not without its own personality. Although it supported arrays, I found that if I DIM’ed an array “A” and placed a value in A(2) … variable “B” would get clobbered.
Originally published on: Sun, 08 Nov 2009
My first computer was a second-hand TRS-80 Model I with 16K of RAM and a cassette-recorder for auxiliary storage. I was 17 years old when I received this computer in the Fall of 1982. My goal? Like many kids my age at the time, I had intended to write a video game or two and live happily on the riches that would befall me.
I saw in the online Wall Street Journal that Radio Shack is preparing to file for bankruptcy:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/radioshack-prepares-bankruptcy-filing-1421279360
I had read a blog post eulogizing the store from a former employee several weeks ago. I ended up on the Radio Shack Catalogs site:
http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/
…poring over old catalogs, looking at all of the gear that I’d purchased throughout my childhood and through the early years of my adult life. Reminiscing brought back some good memories.
When I first began using microcomputers in the late 1970’s, development tools for 8-bit machines were precious and mysterious commodities. Most of these sorts of tools that looked to be useful were very expensive. My usage of most of these tools was driven by budgetary constraints.
The Gateway Drug : BASIC
All it really took to pique someone’s interest in microcomputers was to show them a simple program such as: