Suddenly finding myself out of the Navy was a bit of a shock. Although I had known it could happen for a couple of years now the rapid actions which terminated my career were completely unexpected. At 32 I find myself with a little understood chronic disease, I have lost the job I had invested over 10 years in and have been told that I am unemployable. Fortunately, the Veterans Compensation combined with Social Security, which I am suddenly eligible for, is enough to live on.

My mind, however, is not deteriorating as fast as my body. Sitting around the house is completely foreign to me. I can get to know my family for a change, soon I find that I can’t even make it up the stairs in my house to the children’s rooms. At least that would be resolved in our move to Florida.

Radio Shack has been making news with the release of a new computer for individuals. I had seen computers in the Navy and one of the Officers on my last ship had bought a kit for one. He even got it to run, but you had to program it by throwing switches in binary code and the output was in the form of combinations of lights in binary numbers. This one had a keyboard and a television like output.

The TRS-80 was not available at the local store in Lexington, VA, but I was able to order one directly from Tandy in Texas. It soon arrived and the monitor, the keyboard and the computer went together effortlessly. Following the manual that was included I soon had my first program running and the screen soon said Bob ten times.

10 cls

20 A$="Bob"

30 for x=1 to 10

40 ?A$

50 next x

WOW!!!!

This computer used a high level language called BASIC. I could learn to program in a near English language instead of binary code. The language was on a chip inside the computer so once it was turned on it was available. It was actually a version of BASIC very similar to Tiny BASIC. The computer was powered with 4Kb of memory (that’s kilobytes not megabytes). The BASIC installed used a lot of abbreviations (such as ? for print) to save space. There was also a limit of two strings, one of which must be A$ and the other B$. Additionally, the strings were each limited to 40 characters. This lead us, as all our predecessors, to tight coding. There were no disk drives hard or soft. Programs were saved to and reloaded from cassette tapes.

Since 4k of memory limited how much we code we could put into the machine we did everything we could to get as much as possible into our coding. We could put more than one command on a single line by separating each command with a :. Therefore the above 5 lines of code could be combined in one line as:

Cls:A$="Bob":for x=1 to 10:?a$:next

This type of programming lead to popular computer magazines running completions to see how complex a program could be written in a single 255 character line.

Graphics were colorful on the TRS-80, the monitor had a green screen so everything was green on dark Grey. Graphics were interesting, we didn’t worry about pixels per inch, we worked in blocks. The major block took up the area of the screen that covered the entire area of any character. In graphics mode this rectangle was divided into 6 smaller blocks. That was the extent of graphics, monochrome blocks. Many of the best one-line programs involved moving these blocks around the screen.

Once I moved to the Space Coast of Florida I found that I was not alone in having a personal computer. At first I went to the local computer club meetings at the library. There I and my fellow TRS-80 owners were put down regularly for not understanding the hardware of computers. Many of the locals had either built their own computers from scrap or at least from kits. Soon there were enough TRS-80 owners to form our own club with our "appliance" computers. The group grew by leaps and bounds as more and more people discovered the joy of owning their own computers.

By this time my legs had become essentially useless and I was, reluctantly, forced to use the wheelchair I had resisted taking. I could no longer operate the pedals in the car. If I could manage to get a foot on the brake pedal, I could not press down on it hard enough to stop the car. Fortunately, the Veterans Administration came to my aid once more. In addition to paying the cost of hand controls they would make a one time contribution of $3000 towards buying a care that was more suited for my use. I figured a two-door car with its bigger doors and folding seat back would allow me the most independence. By parking on the right side of my two-car driveway I could roll out of my house and open the door of the car. Then I would maneuver until I could transfer to the car’s driver’s seat Then I would move the seat forward, fold the wheelchair and lift it behind the seat. Then I could move the seat back to driving position and pull my legs into the car. The hand controls made driving doable again. The most impressive reaction was when I drove my self to the computer club instead of having to get a ride from someone.

At club meetings we would discuss how we were using our computers and what programs we were writing to help with our daily life or work. There were pre-written programs available on cassettes they varied from check stub programs to word processors to games. Most of us n the club found most of the prewritten programs lacking in one way or another and soon wrote programs to handle our needs better. Games were very popular and included some graphics games like battleship and mortar where the landing spot of the mortar is affected by the wind. Hangman was another big game.

One of the major things we came up with in the club was a kind of primitive modem. Since the computer used cassette tape to read and store programs it generated and understood sound signals. Using a Radio Shack Speakerphone adapter. It was designed as a cradle for a telephone handset. It had a microphone and a small speaker. With a little rewiring and relocating the speaker into the cradle device we had a functional device which would allow us to send programs to each other’s computers by phone. It wasn’t really a modem because the computers did the modulation/demodulation, but effectively it functioned as one and we were soon tying up the phone lines with strange series of sound signals.

One of the major developments was a new ROM called LEVEL II. This gave us more flexibility and gave us the ability to use additional variables and a more powerful BASIC. Then we were able to expand memory to 256K. I can remember paying over $250 dollars for it and thinking how neat it was to be able to buy 1024 bytes of memory for only a dollar each.

These two changes gave us undreamed of power. We began creating functional databases, word processors that had actual capabilities to format and structure documents. Guys were really using their computers in their jobs to keep inventories and keep records. Now club members were getting jobs creating programs for others. Even police forces were beginning to use member’s programs for scheduling shifts.

Then disk drives became available. Our first drives were 5" flopies that used a single side and stored about 140kb of data on it. We were also introduced to a Disk Operating System (DOS) superseded the Level II ROM and had a new version of the BASIC language giving us access to the drives and even more capabilities. Initially the disks were quite expensive, if memory serves, about $5-$8 each. We soon figured out that both sides of the disk were coated the same, if we cut a little square notch in the edge opposite to the one the disk came with we could flip the disk over and record another 140k on each disk.

Soon the amount of data was increased to 160k on a disk side. When the world understood that in order to produce a floppy disk that worked well the same coating had to be applied to both sides of the disk we started to see drives with two sets of read/write heads making each disk 320K.

Printers were making big advances too. Originally we used line printers which were like electric typewriters that would take a whole line of 80 characters into its memory and print it out a line at a time. My first Pin based computer was an EPSON. This thing was amazing, not only could it print out a standard Font for the alphabet, numbers and basic symbols, but you could send commands to individual pins to fire on command and we could start to create our own fonts and print graphics.

Each pin was addressed with a binary number so that 01 would fire the first pin 10 would fire the second pin and 11 would fire both the first and second pins. We all became very familiar with binary and hexadecimal numbers. I found myself using graph paper to shade in shapes which were translated into hex code to create new shapes for various letters. Not only did you need to create code for each column, but you had to created the right number of columns to form the appropriate letter. Next you would program a couple of columns of non-firing to get the correct spacing between the letters.

This was arduous and I ended up only finishing one complete font on my own. Thankfully fonts soon became downloadable. The next big thing to come along was printing in color with those old pin printers. It took time, effort, a lot of thought and planning, then a lot of luck. You would start by programming the parts of a picture you wanted in one color, putting that color ribbon in the printer, printing it. Then programming what you wanted in another color, loading that color ribbon, printing it and hoping that you got the paper in exactly the correct position on the printer and repeating the procedure until you got the desired result. Obviously the works had to be simple in order to do anything at all, but those were my first colored printouts.

By now IBM was making a Personal Computer and the term PC was coming into common usage. I couldn’t afford a genuine IBM at that time, but I could come up with some $3000 to buy a Columbia, which was a clone of the IBM PC. It included a 10Meg hard drive as well as a built in 320k floppy drive.

The displays, by this time were up to what was called four colors. In fact we had two palates we could choose from Red Green Brown or Cyan, Magenta, White and the fourth color in each was the black of the un-illuminated screen.

The version of BASIC we were now using was called GW-BASIC, technically different from the BASIC IBM was using, but highly compatible. As with all the previous versions of BASIC which I had used it saved programs in a compressed format using token or symbols for keywords to save memory by default. When you loaded the program into the GW-BASIC and listed it you could read it, but as saved it was essentially unreadable. It could be saved in ASCII form by adding a ,A after the name when saving but took up more memory.

We now were able to purchase real modems that chatted at 300 baud and services such as COMPUSERVE, ORACLE, and PRODIGY were beginning to spring up. We chose COMPUSERVE which, at the time was much like a big computer club where we could share programs and learn more about the computer. People from all over contributed programs that they had written along with a brief descriptor for others to download. The beauty was it was all source code so you looked for the description of a program that interested you, downloaded it, and learned from the code and modified it to suit your needs. It was a wonderful learning tool.

Pat and I wrote several programs for the library. I remember a graphic program specifically that Pat wrote. It was a coloring book drawing of Pooh floating under a balloon while the Pooh song played through the speaker. Yes, we could even program music note by note at this time. My contribution to the program was to make Pooh and his balloon move from the left to the right of the screen as the music played. This was all accomplished using sets of arrays. I remember this particular program because I was able to find a copy of the program in a database of programs shortly after I got an INTERNET connection.

SHAREWARE was starting to show up on the various services.