"I purchased my first System 80 for $999 back
(er some time ago now), from Dick Smiths, just so I could learn something
about these things called "computers". Somehow I knew that
they would be important in the future. And so they were, in fact they
have provided me with an excellent career.
I have managed to keep two System 80 computers, the first, a Business
Computer (ie a numeric keyboard instead of a cassette player) and the
second a basic System 80 with Cassette player.
I never had a "real" Dick Smith expansion unit, but my first
Disk Controller was a kit I purchased from someone in Queensland (he
was a truck driver by day, and a System 80 enthusiast by weekend/night).
I breadboarded my own printer driver, piggy backed three banks of memory
to give the computer 48KB of RAM.
Later, after completing an Associate Diploma in Electrical Engineering,
using a breadboard, I made a Single/Double Density Disk Controller with
Printer driver (the sound amp never did work).
I have purchased quite a lot of Tandy software just before they got
rid of it all (I hate to say how much money I spent on this, even having
to take out a personal loan, what a stupid idea that one was).
As time went on, friends, others and myself all lost interest as the
IBM PC (and a few other distractions) took our attention and time. Even
these days, the wife, children and certainly work, all demand much of
my time, leaving me with a little for home maintenance, garden, etc
and not much for playing Linux or System 80.
However, even during our moves, and house contents re-evaluations that
this caused, I still have two System 80's and bits and pieces, and original
software, plus quite some old disks (who knows whether they are still
readable, and I have yet to have time to put my computers together so
I can transfer more of the files from old disks to the IBM world. (Though
this is a task that I have set myself to complete this year).
Before the end of the System 80 days (for me), I
managed to create a circuit and some hardware to implement a "memory
drive" of a maximum of 1 MB which could be accessed via 256 byte
pages in the 256 byte memory hole that was designed for the Model I
but never implemented. A friend wrote the software to interface with
NEWDOS 80 and it made the use of SuperScripsit so much better and faster,
no physical disk access was needed for spell checking or SuperScripsit's
modules. I keep the document on a disk to ensure it was not lost should
the computer have problems. The memory disk could be formatted using
NEWDOS80 to any particular size up to 1 MB.
I would love to talk one of the TRS80 emulators
writers into implementing this feature, even if only for demonstration
of what could be achieved."
George is a very busy family man, but has a keen interest
in Linux, and 80's emulation in that environment (ed).
