points by blooalien 5 days ago | 0 comments
> When my family went to the local mall I'd make a beeline for the Radio Shack and play w/ the various computers there until my parents pried me away.
Sounds like my childhood. Remember the Tandy TRS-80 CoCo? I do. :)
[–] jjav 12 hours ago
[–] EvanAnderson 5 days ago
Absolutely! There would inevitably be a CoCo on display and that's the machine I'd play with.
A common BASIC program I'd write on new-to-me computers was a FOR/NEXT loop to print all the characters in the character set. I remember discovering the color semigraphics characters in the CoCo character set and being weirded-out. I'd never seen anything like that on any of the other machines I'd ever used.
I snared a CoCo2 a few years ago so I could re-live a few of those memories (and explore the machine with actual documentation).
[–] thijson 5 days ago
My favorite part of that era was subscribing to Rainbow magazine. Every month when it arrived, reading it cover to cover a few times. I didn't have access to any dialup in those days, so this was my only window to the whole ecosystem. I remember a box of 5.25 inch floppies were horrendously expensive at Radio Shack, maybe it was just our store though, I grew up in a small town in Canada.
[–] Mountain_Skies 5 days ago
For any CoCo folks not already aware: https://colorcomputerarchive.com
There are several other good sources out there too but it's a good start for anyone looking to relive the fun old days.
[–] blooalien 5 days ago
Ah, the nostalgia. Those early days of home computers were sure some amazing times. Possibilities were infinite. Who'da thunk that we'd carry freakin' supercomputers (compared to those early machines) around in our pockets someday? Not me. LOL!
[–] ButlerianJihad 5 days ago
The 8-Bit Guy develops and distributes games for vintage computer platforms, and you can download Quarx for the Tandy CoCo 1, 2, 3: https://www.the8bitguy.com/25753/petscii-robot-shareware-ava...
The complete version is also available there for purchase.
My childhood as well! In 6th and 7th grade my parents would drop me off at the mall 9am on Saturday and pick me up around 5pm. I spent all day at the Radio Shack (and a bit of time at the arcade after lunch). Learned to program in BASIC on the Model III and the CoCo and wrote all kinds of demo programs. They tolerated me there all day since I was also happy to talk to customers and show them how the computers worked and how to write simple programs.
By end of 7th grade I'd saved enough money to buy a CoCo to program at home, so my long days at Radio Shack came to an end but I'd still drop by for a bit every weekend.
One of the lesser known and vastly underrated systems of the 80s was a CoCo running OS-9, a multiuser multitasking operating system on an 8-bit CPU! OS-9 Level 2 was particularly powerful, and prepared me to move seamlessly to SunOS when I started university.