02.24.12
BASICally speaking
BASIC in rom?
TRS-80 Model IV
TRS-80 Model IV
I’m having to face it; I’m aging. When I made my exit from tech school, my first electronics job was with Tandy/Radio Shack. Yeah, those guys. I was in San Antonio working at their put-together-and-test plant for the TRS-80 Model 4. That was Fall of 1983. This is Spring of 2012. Back then I thought surely I’d be working as a technician on Moonbase Alpha by 1999. Well, the world didn’t quite turn out to be the Utopian place sci-fi writers of the 1970s thought it would be. But the computers have sure come a long way. And there’s only a small shadow of BASIC still floating around today.
In the year following Space:1999 and endless Star Trek in syndication reruns, Tandy came out with their first computer designed for use in the home and small business: The TRS-80 Model I. I remember approaching one of these things at a Radio Shack in Del Rio, Texas and seeing a chess game running on the screen. And I hit the “Break” key. That soft blue glowing
READY
>_
had caught my eye for what seemed like an eternity. And the first thing I typed gained me an unceremonious “Syntax Error”. And so at the tender age of 13, I was flung into the computing world. Walking home from school I would pass a business in the downtown that discared boxes of IBM computer punch cards every few days, and I would grab a handful and drop them into my notebook. Looking through them at home, they would have captions like “MOVE LEFT” “MOVE FORWARD” “MOVE RIGHT” “CRANE DOWN” and stuff like that. I knew they were making a machine do something, but I never figured out what it was.
Little did I know that the pale glow of TRS-80 Level I BASIC would start off my fantastic move into the technological world. Now, mind you – I never owned anything labeled TRS-80 until recently. I took typing in High School on an IBM selectric. We were not exposed to computers in the year 1981. It wasn’t until I had 3 semesters of “Microprocessors I, II, III” at TSTI/Waco that I encountered the idea again of programming something to do a task. That class was on the E&L Systems MMD-1, which used an Intel 8080 8-bit microprocessor running at a blazing 750 kHz, had a whopping 256 bytes of ROM and 512 bytes of RAM. We hand-coded machine code into the device using an Octal keypad (0-7 numbering system, with bytes from 000 to 377).
My MMD-1 8080 trainer
Then my last semester, one of my classes failed to make. So after 2 weeks in, we were all told to find another course to join ASAP. So I went down to Computer Sciences building and signed up for a self-paced class in… BASIC programming.
Now, I had the jump on a few of the students with my understanding of machine code. The other trump card I held was that my precious Mom had allowed me to buy a VIC-20 on sale from K-Mart in Waco for the sale price of $89.00. That was no small sum of money for my family and I had some ‘splanin’ to do in order to jump that hurdle. That night, I took that thing home like it was the helm console to the starship Enterprise, hooked it to my little black-and-white 9″ TV and started down the pages of my Commodore manual, entering BASIC programs. Wow, I was hooked it and was to become my Nerd-dom doom from then forward. Having the VIC allowed me to work through most of the self-paced stuff back at the dorm room at 200 Langley Drive, so when I went to my class all I had to do was enter the program assigned and show it to the instructor. I ended up finishing that class well ahead of the end of the semester, even though I started it a couple weeks late.
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do after TSTI, and I turned down a friends’ offer to move to the D/FW metroplex (probably a big mistake on my part). But I went to San Antonio instead, trying to get jobs here and there. Not too many people wanted entry level technicians so my interview path landed me at Goliad Road in the building that housed Tandy Computer Assembly. A former Lackland Drill Instructor brought me a Model IV pcb and asked me if I thought I could work on it. I recognized a lot of the chips and told him about them. I was hired. For a whopping $5-something an hour. Not quite what I had hoped for, but it was employment.
Now the things I learned in that year at Tandy were invaluable to me and have been ever since.
But looking back these last few weeks, reading old Radio Shack computer catalogs made me realize something. As soon as the TRS-80 Model I (with giant 4K of ram) hit the market – People began writing software for it. Not just games and crap, but business applications. So the first catalog didn’t have much in 1977, but next year there was a ton of Inventory, Payroll, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and so on ready for the machines. It was like they launched right off the springboard of the machine into the business realm. So what maybe they weren’t all today’s modern PC are capable of, they were still the going thing. And every machine that followed seemed to lead out of the gates with BASIC in Rom. The VIC had it, the C64 had it, the Acorn, the TI99, the Coleco Adam, Atari 400, 800. The list goes on and on.
And in later years I found myself typing on a blue DOS based screen still coding things in BASIC, but QBASIC compiler this time using labels instead of line numbers (when I wanted to) and creating stand-alone applications for the place I worked, the last of which was phased out only about 4 or 5 years ago. And I remember the first time I loaded a Microsoft operating system on a machine and realized that EDIT.COM and QBASIC.EXE and BASIC.EXE were no longer on board. The writing was on the wall, so they say.
But now, I am finding Emulators and Simulators for every kind of ancient computer that there was. And I’m really curious, what is the drive behind this trend? Do people really still love this stuff (I know I do), or are people still trying to CPR life back into their old applications? I noticed that a lot of them offer game software downloads – I think the VIC and C64 have come out with full cartridges that carry just about every game ever invented for the platform. But it’s everywhere. And of course, most of them say “Roms not included” in order to avoid some old copyrights still floating around out there. But they are easily locatable.
And so, I downloaded the TRS-80 Model I Emulator, just so I could return to my first encounter with the computer and BASIC in Rom. I found that actually someone had used an original, non-upgraded Model I (with it’s 4K ram) to write programs which created the comptuer displays that were seen on Star Trek:The Motion Picture (remember sleeping through that one?). I entered a couple of these programs and saved them off to something called a “Virtual Cassette“. Yep, as soon as I typed RUN the display was something I instantly recognized from the movie. How funny.
Well, I’ve been playing with Z80 computer boards for the better part of the last decade as my hobby. I’ve done some cool things with the, learned a ton more software coding and stuff than I ever imagined – Even learned the inside guts of floating point math and how it works, which has saved me tons at my job. In the middle of that hobby, I was able to recode NASCOM BASIC to run on the Z80 MCB. It saved me more time, because instead of having to hammer out machine code to drive hardware, I could write and run something simple on the fly while the computer was in operation. Before that, I had to code some Assembly on the PC in some editor, compile it down to Intel Hex, load it on the machine and then test it. With BASIC, I could simply fire the commands to the ports and set the 1′s and 0′s as I needed to without all the in-between steps.
For whatever nostaligic reason or mmmm, I’m back to enjoying the simple freedom of BASIC in Rom that my first old computers offered. Even as people are putting those entire computers into single FPGA chips, I have to wonder once again – What’s behind this? Nostalgia as I mentioned earlier? Just good old school fun? Is it still somehow as practical to use as it was back then? Hard to know. But one thing is clear – It’s being done every day.
