. On Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:08, Jim wrote > I don't know if this would be in the one up category, but I remember > being a high school freshman in 1981 and spending time after school > in the math teacher's room messing around with his TRS80 with a > whopping 4KB RAM and running programs stored on cassette tape.
Speaking of that old TRS-80 Model I ... I bought one the first week they showed up in Radio Shack stores, thinking it might make a fun father-son hobby project. I knew absolutely nothing about computers at the time (and still feel very much a "newbie" compared to all the brilliant minds in the plug community) ... but after tinkering with that old Model I for a couple of weeks, I built a little basic program to demonstrate for one of my clients how I thought we might be able to use a computer to produce shipping documents that were then being typed and retyped over and over endlessly on selectric typewriters. >From that simple little demonstration, we went on to build the first international export shipping documentation system that ever worked (on a Basic-4 computer that had 15-meg of HD space in a refrigerator sized box). My clients sent me on a tour of every place in the U.S. known at that time to have people trying to build such a system for several years, but still didn't have anything that worked. We ended up beating them all to the finish line with a fully operational system implemented in offices on both coasts and two countries, all connected and transmitting documents with, get this ... 150-baud modems. That same basis system ran from the early 1970's for more than 15 years ... all derived from that little old cassette tape "powered" TRS-80 Model I demo. --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
