Random Technology Ramblings

I was tagged by “Mr. Denny” Denny Cherry in his post My First Computer and as much as I hate the whole tagging thing his post got me thinking so I decided to do this post (dam you Denney!)

The first computer that I could call mine was a TRS-80 Color Computer to be precise it was the TRS-80 Color Computer 1 16k Model E motherboard and I had the available tape cassette storage. After having for a year or two I even saved up and got an external add-on speech synthesizer but my parents would not let me get the 300 baud  modem (I hated them for that for a long time).

I wanted to get a computer for along time because I would use my uncle computer (not sure I think a TRS-80 Model III) but my aunt and I would have issues with power. Every time she would use the hair dryer and I had the commuter on it would pop a circuit breaker and they did not have kids so did not have too much tolerance for some punk kid but they handled me better than I would handled me ;). So I nagged and nagged  my dad and being the PHD he is he thought he would put be off for a few years and require me to know how to do differential equations but that only lasted 3 months. He was good to his word and the weekend after I answered several equations for him he researched the computers on the market and I had my CoCo!

I spent many an hour in our windowless guest room\office programming and hacking on this computer with the help of the “Rainbow” Magazine… wow I am going back now I could not afford to get the debugging kit for the computer that would let me get around the BASIC environment so I rewrote the machine code on the box so I could stuff more in to the 16k and later the 32k piggy backed memory felt totally cavernous.

I wrote a lot if car and plane simulations where you could add all types of dimensional variables and I would build different simulators to modal how the car or plane would behave. I recall my dad suggesting I start modeling the road surface so the friction coefficient would come in to play… wow I still remember how hard that was. Later I would even use the UI to graph some of the output values over time but what wowed all my friends was my worm like game where you had to move a worm through a maze, that is where I should have learned that “it’s not how had it is it’s how sexy it looks” but I enjoyed the hard more.

Later my dad got me a IBM clone called Columbia with a 8086 coprocessor and I never looked back at having any type of social life or skills.

And now I tag… no one! If you want to write about your first computer and enjoy the memories like I just did then go for it but don’t tag anyone!