Six and a Half Aircraft Carriers

During an episode of the popular British comedy panel show QI, host Stephen Fry demonstrated how much computer memory has advanced:

Fry displays a core memory module from the 1960s that is about the size of a CD-ROM drive. He explains that it held one kilobyte of memory. Then he drops a tiny Micro SD Card in front of it. It stores 128 gigabytes which is equivalent to 128,000,000 of the core memory modules weighing about the same as “six-and-a-half Ark Royal aircraft carriers.”

My own memory lane starts with 128 bytes (not kilobytes or gigabytes, just bytes) of memory in my Super Elf single-board computer to now having a NAS device in my home that has over 20 terabytes of storage.

Bugs From Outer Space

The March 1984 issue of 80 Micro magazine contained the first article in a six-part series I wrote describing how to write arcade games in assembly language for the TRS-80.

I was 17 years old in 1979 when I received my first TRS-80 computer as a Christmas gift from my parents. It was a Model I with 4K of memory and Level 1 BASIC.

I quickly discovered the limitations of Level 1 BASIC and limited memory, so I learned to program the computer using Z-80 machine code. There wasn’t enough memory to load Radio Shack’s Editor Assembler, so I was forced to hand-assemble my programs and enter them in hexadecimal using the T-Bug monitor program. Even now, more than 45 years later, some of those hex code sequences are seared into my brain. 

21 00 3C
11 01 3C
01 FF 03
36 20
ED BO

The above was one way to clear the screen on the TRS-80 Model I/III/4.

One of the first programs I wrote in machine language for the TRS-80 was “Marq 2,” an enhanced version of the “Micro Marquee” program from Radio Shack which allowed you to create signs which were just large lines of text scrolling across the screen. My program offered more options including vertical scrolling and special effects.

Marq 2 was the first software I sold. A bowling alley paid me a few dollars for a copy on cassette.

I eventually upgraded the Model I to 16K of memory and wondered how I could ever use that much RAM.

I started using the Editor Assembler program to create my programs in assembly language. One of my early projects was a game called RASMAN which, as the name suggests, was based on PacMan. It was the first complete arcade that I created.

Shortly after starting college, I got a part-time job writing software for a small company. I created a patch for the Scripsit that added several features to the word-processing program. I also wrote a program that allowed you to create and print graphical calendars.

The main product of the company was a set of accounting and management programs for churches. These were written in Level 2 BASIC. For this suite of programs, I created a patch that added a “formatted input” statement to Level 2 BASIC.

With the permission of the company, I wrote an article about the patch and submitted it to 80 Micro. They accepted the article and paid me $300 for it. The money came at a good time because it paid for a new clutch for my 1975 Chevy Vega.

Shortly after that I went into debt for the first time in my life by purchasing a TRS-80 Model III with 48K of memory and I started work on Bugs From Outer Space.

I designed Bugs as a tutorial and series of articles from the start. I broke the functionality into parts so that each article would produce something that the reader could execute.

I completed all six parts before I submitted the articles to 80 Micro. They accepted the series and paid me $1800 which was about what I had paid to buy the Model 3.

Once the first article in the series was published in March of 1984, I began to receive mail from around the world. Most were asking for help with things that weren’t working, but some were just friendly notes and postcards. I started a pen pal relationship with a man who lived in Hobart, Tasmania. Communicating regularly with someone over 9000 miles away was quite exciting back in those pre-Internet days.

I still have that TRS-80 Model III (as well as a Color Computer and a Model 4P) along with boxes of magazines, discs, printouts, and more. This blog is mostly inspired by an attempt to dig through the ephemera and document what deserves to be remembered (and, hopefully, to free up space in our over-crowded garage).

An Interesting Find …

While going through a box that had been in our garage for years, I found a stack of letters that I had received about forty years ago after I had some articles published in 80 Micro and other computer magazines. Near the top of the stack was a large envelope containing print outs of assembly code. The sender’s name was “Kevin Trojanowski.”

That name is familiar to me, but not from forty years ago.

Although I don’t think I have ever met him in person, I’ve run into Kevin often on the Internet. We are both rocketry enthusiasts who build and launch high power rockets.

Kevin is well-known and active in the high-power rocketry community. He is currently a member of the Tripoli Rocketry Association’s IT committee.

80 Micro – Article Acceptance Notification

While cleaning out a closet this morning, I found a bit of interesting TRS-80 memorabilia.

80 Micro Poscard

Back in the early 1980s, I wrote submitted several unsolicited articles about the Radio Shack TRS-80 for 80 Microcomputing magazine. Most of them were accepted and published. I received the above postcard after I submitted an article that I called “Formatted Input.”

Back then an article had to be submitted by mail. I would send the printed text of the article along with a cassette or floppy disk containing the software to the editor of the magazine. Then I would wait and anxiously check the mail each day for a response. Most magazines took several weeks to respond, but 80 Micro usually responded within a couple of weeks.

As you can see, the magazine paid $300 for the article. That was a good chuck of change back in 1983. Many of my friends at the time were working part-time jobs and not taking home that much in a month. Of course, I wasn’t publishing an article every month, but it was still a nice return on the time I spent working on the code and writing the article.

I received the postcard in June of 1983, but the article wasn’t published until the November, 1984, issue of 80 Micro. I don’t recall any other of the articles I had published taking anywhere near that long between acceptance and publication.

Looking at the article and the code, I’m impressed by what the 21-year-old me accomplished!