Raised, in part, by Radio Shack

Update: Thanks BoingBoing for linking. My lil' sister writes in to say, "you forgot to mention that you never let your little sister play your video games and she used to cry" and now she's a corporate lawyer. Thanks also to CrunchGear and MakeZine for linking in.

I appreciated Wired's homage to the Radio Shack of old (The Lost Tribes of Radio Shack Apr. 2010). While too young to be a true DIY maker, I was, in part, raised by Radio Shack.

At a family party at age 10 or 11 in 1981, I saw my first TRS-80 Model I and met a teen programmer who showed me the version of Asteroids that he wrote in assembly. From that time on, I bugged my mom to get me a computer. 

It took several months but having convinced her of the education benefits, she finally relented. She bought me a TRS-80 Model III with a cassette tape drive.

From that point on, I spent a lot of time hanging out at two different Radio Shack stores: the one at 2011 Westwood Blvd (it's still there) and another (I think) at 8500 Wilshire (no longer there).

The Westwood Store

Initially, I hung out at the Westwood shack where retail sales clerks Mickey and Ivan let me try out pretty much all the TRS-80 software. I'm really not sure why they tolerated me spending so much time there.

Here, I discovered Leo Christopherson's Dancing Demon and his later gems Duel-n-Droids and Voyage of the Valkyrie. Christopherson was the maestro animator and game programmer of the TRS-80. He made that box and its rectangular pixels dance and sing.

Christopherson would poke graphic characters and assembly code into RAM into his lines of basic code so that listing out his code would create this amazing scrolling, jumping mysterious illegible puzzle of basic commands and graphics. Voyage of the Valkyrie was most amazing to me - winged flying creatures, video game action and an incredible soundtrack.

I was happy to learn that Christopherson's still programming using Dark Basic Pro, a advanced version of Basic for game programmers.

I used to live for each year's Radio Shack computer catalog.

TRS-DOS and the Wilshire Store

Eventually, I parlayed $600 in horse race winnings (my Dad picked and placed a good exacta bet for me at Hollywood Park) and about $600 in sales from my entire baseball card collection to upgrade my computer to have a 5 1/4" floppy drive. Yes, $1200 for an internal floppy drive. It turned out to be a good investment if you count my later time at Microsoft.

After taking an assembly language class at the Wilshire Radio Shack store (I was the only teenager enrolled), I started hanging out there. I was shocked and saddened to hear from my employee-friend Chuck that Ivan had committed suicide - it was not something I was able to understand at that age.

At one point, Chuck paid me $10/hr (a fortune) to manually re-type the entire contents of private investigator Gavin De Becker's client database. Chuck set up two Model II computers side by side and I manually moved his entire database from (I think) Profile Plus to (I think) DBase. Basically, it was a catalog of all the psychos tracking his clients such as President Reagan (prior to his election) as well as a lot of code names, e.g. I think Reagan's was Pigskin. The Model II used 8" floppies.

Another fellow traveler hanging out at Chuck's store was the child star, Josh Milrad, from Beastmaster. I was impressed with his filmography but couldn't take him seriously because he had a TRS-80 Color Computer. Luckily, he wore actual clothes at Radio Shack.

The Z-80 and 80 Micro 

Eventually, I upgraded the RAM of my TRS-80 from 16 KB to 48 KB (KB, not MB or GB, BillG used to write really tight code). I'm still kind of amazed I didn't break the thing.

By 1985, after some additional Z-80 assembly tutoring, I won first place in 80 Micro's Young Programmer Contest's 12-14 year old category for a multi-screen graphical drawing program and received an honorable mention for a Castle Wolfenstein clone. Both programs were written in assembly.

I always was confused by the hi-res sine curves on the cover of my model III manual (kind of like this) - the basic Model III lo-res graphics actually couldn't do this. At some point, I added in the hi-resolution add-on board for the Model III but there wasn't much software for it.

Hat tips also to Big Five Software ... Asteroids, Meteor Mission II and making my TRS-80 speak with Defense Command.

Eventually, mom bought me an Apple IIe but I never got the hang of 3 register 6502 assembly to the degree of expertise I had with the Z-80. 

I went on to get a B.S. in ComSci at RPI and to spend 8 years in program management at Microsoft.

Thanks Mickey, Ivan, Chuck and Radio Shack! And, thanks for Wired for this blast from the past.

Comments

[Bill K]

I still have one of those 6 D-cell grey plastic flashlights that they used to give away when you purchased the batteries needed to power the thing. Now *that* was a light...

[joe]

wow. blast from the major past. i was a young TRS-80 Model I hacker, got published in 80-Micro for a Epson MX-80 font program, wrote Leo a lot of letters, and he wrote back - learned a lot of cool stuff about z80 music making. Good to see he has a website (though it's not updated, now i wonder...) and Big Five - another wow - there was an Atari joystick hack using diodes to plug into the TRS, and i wrote a z80 vector hack for those which was also published somewhere. good times.

thanks for the reminders!

[phil koltko]

Coincidences abound. Not only was I "raised by Radio Shack", I ended up at RPI, too (Computer & Systems Eng. '86). Cool!
.
Now, about that Color Computer remark: The Color computer was a *perfectly respectable* box. And for $400, a box with color graphics (ok, so you did have to hook it up to your TV) and 4K RAM was a great deal!

[Matt]

I used to save almost every cent I got from odd jobs and lawn mowing help for my brother. I remember that the very first time I took money *out* of my precious savings account was to purchase a Radio Shack 200-in-1 kit for (I think) the daunting sum of $50. I think this would have been 1984/5 at age 10 or 11.

I never dug too much into the guts of our family's Apple II+ or got beyond writing (easily circumventable) login password programs in BASIC or doing graphics noodling in LOGO (love that turtle). By the way, Long Live Miner 2049er!

[Steve]

Familiar story for me, too. Mine was a Model I - and it went with me to RPI ('86).

[Pete]

Such a similar background to myself. Great to read such a well-written piece. Well Done. I just wish my parents hadn't thrown out my old System 80 (Dick Smith here in Australia - basically a TRS-80 "rip")

[Davi Jordan]

The ibm 360 model 40 was my first computer to program. The TRS-80 model 1 was the second. Fortran to Basic was an easy conversion. Also wrote a simple game program for TRS80 magazine in one of it's first issues. I kept a Trs-80 model III for a long time as a good luck thing. Wish I had not let it go. Don't code much anymore, but still am an avid computer user. We have 40 legacy systems that still work great.

[Andrew L. Ayers]

Great story, but as a longtime CoCo user...

The TRS-80 Color Computer never got a fair shake, not then, and seemingly not even today. I guess we're all used to it, though.

You probably would've loved the 6809 from an assembler standpoint; your hi-res graphics would've been "free". While its sound wasn't spectacular compared to some offerings, for the day, in the right hands, it could hold its own (4-voice FM sound synthesis from a 1-2 MHz box isn't bad; the 6-bit DAC though held it back).

Finally, everyone should know the legacy of the Color Computer 3; it's still surprising us long time users. Roger Taylor's website (http://www.coco3.com/) and Cloud9 (http://www.cloud9tech.com/) have both been keeping this machine singing and dancing long after "retirement". Recently, a special "256-color" mode was discovered - not bad for a 25+ year old computer with only 64 native colors (though from what I hear this was more a "re-discovery", but the first notice of it back in the day was not made as public as it should've, and went unnoticed).

Not many computers from that time still have new hardware being made for them; fortunately, the Color Computer is one of them. Whether you need hookup to a VGA monitor (Roy Justus' VGA adapter is awesome!), or you want a virtual hard disk sitting out on the network via Roger's MicroSD Drive Pak (or just use the 2 gig local SD card!) - its there, among other possible upgrades and additions.

The amount of software and other information available for this machine, both old and new, is absolutely amazing; the archive I have collected, which is by no means complete, is over 12 gig.

Long live all the old Radio Shack computers; here's to a past the current generation can only dream about, a time when one could walk into an electronics store and the people actually knew about what they sold (and in some cases, could repair it right there at the counter, if it needed fixing, with store-stocked parts!). Those days are long past, today you would be lucky if the guy at the counter could turn on the overpriced cell phone you just bought from him...

[George Phillips]

My first computer was a 16K Model III cassette system, too. I still write the odd program for it when I want to feel close to the hardware. I discovered a technique for getting higher resolution graphics without the extra hardware. Used it to make a higher-resolution version of Dancing Demon:

http://members.shaw.ca/gp2000/dandem2.html

Thought you might find that amusing.

[Blake T. Gonzales]

Very good reading. Thanks for sharing Jeff!

I wrote a similar homage to Radio Shack a few weeks ago - http://wp.me/pXtX6-1P