Prelude
The Tandy-Radio Shack company released the TRS-80 Model I in 1977. It was one of three 8-bit microcomputers released that year for “home” use. The other two were the Commodore PET and the Apple II. These are known as the “1977 Trinity”.
The computer was just 25 years old when I was born. The effect this has had on the world is difficult to quantify, and watching it unfold has been sureal. The effect it has had on me has been much more direct.
Fourth grade
If you were a 9 year old kid in 1979 about the only way to get your hands on a computer was at school. My school didn’t have one, but twice a month I got to spend half a day at the Jr High in a class that did have one.
I don’t remember much from those classes, but I do remember learning to program on that TRS-80. It’s difficult to explain what a magical feeling it was to come up with commands that would make things happen on a screen. It was truly novel at that time, and the more I learned the more I wanted to know.
TI 99/4A
For my 13th birthday my parents bought me my own computer: a TI-99/4A. By then I had learned several dialects of BASIC. This computer used ROM cartridges for programs, one of which was an assembler. I didn’t understand much of it, but a few years later when I was tackling assembly on the Sun SPARC and IBM mainframes things made a lot more sense.
I picked up the peripheral expansion case at a garage sale and it came with a 5 1/4" floppy disk drive. It was much faster than the cassette player I was using. I wrote programs for playing music, organizing my classes, goofy games with ASCII art and ideas I got from the many computer magazines in the 80’s. You could even attach a speech synthesizer and have the computer talk in a creepy voice; this is decades before Alexa.
There was a thriving community of TI enthusiasts and an after market for software via mail (postal). One of the best programs I bought through the mail was a C compiler written by Clint Pulley, which he wrote in 1985. It was a great foundation for learning many new languages.
Engineering
While I was in high school I picked up quite a bit of electronics experience. The Radio Shack engineering notebooks by Forrest M. Mimms III were a staple behind most of my projects.
The summer of my sophomore year I received some boxes of surplus office equipment my aunt had sent me. Her office was throwing out a bunch of IBM terminals and she knew I would find something to do with them. I built a serial multiplexer and connected the terminals to my TI through the RS232 port. I was able to get the terminals to use the TI as a server. It was silly, basically just printing remotely, but I learned a lot and discovered that I wanted to study this in college.
So I went into Electrical Engineering. There was a lot of math. And physics. And a lot more math. Eventually I did get to learn more about computers, and I ended up getting a masters degree in Computer Science for my troubles. This was at the dawn of the Internet, which was a fantastic time to enter the field.
Anthology
Now my kids carry super computers in their pockets. They have high resolution screens that can be swiped and dragged with their fingers. It’s not even called a computer anymore, just a device. It’s connected to several billion other devices. Devices are everywhere, and in everything. My hot water kettle has a CPU.
The path of how we got here is so short, and so many people alive today have lived through it that it’s funny to call it history. But I have found that looking back allows me to connect a lot of the dots I missed along the way. I still revel in that sense of discovery I found in 4th grade. There’s always more to learn. Which is what this site is about.