Subj : Today in History - 1977
To   : Ed Vance
From : Dave Drum
Date : Sat Feb 03 2024 05:28 am

-=> Ed Vance wrote to Dave Drum <=-


 EV> Howdy Dave,
 EV> A friend I met at Church got a TRS-80 Model 1.
 EV> Earlier he played with an 1802 ELF (believe that's the name).
 EV> 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.

 EV> One day he told me it wasn't much fun typing BASIC Code in, running it
 EV> and when he finished with that PRG he would type NEW and all the time
 EV> and energy it took to type that PRG in was gone as he typed in some
 EV> 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.

 EV> I told him about the circuit I saw in Popular Electronics that used a
 EV> 7414 IC, in between a Cassette Recorder and the C=64's Cassette Port to
 EV> Save his Code, and to CLoad it back into his PC when he wished to use
 EV> that program again. That Circuit worked very well for him...UNTIL I got
 EV> my own C=64, VIC Modem 300 and 1541Floppy Disk Drive.
 EV> The Modem had a program on a cassette tape and I wanted to put that
 EV> program on a Disk.
 EV> I asked him to bring the Circuit he built and his cassette recorder to
 EV> my home so I could Load the program from the tape to Save it on a
 EV> floppy disk (I bought a 2-pack of SSSD 5-1/4" disks for $2.00 when I
 EV> 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.
 
 EV> was Saved on the disk, compared to the much longer time it took to Load
 EV> it to my COMMODORE 64, his jaw dropped and he bought a disk drive the
 EV> next day. BTW, He let me play with his 1802 ELF board some time later
 EV> to type in the Star Trek program on the HEX Keypad it had.
 EV> 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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