🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 26 Jun 2018 11:31:32 +0100, Gareth's Downstairs Computer
<headstone255.but.n...@yahoo.com> wrote:

>Yankland and its politics is increasingly irrelevant on
>a day-to-day basis to the rest of the world (Trump and
>Clinton the only candidates????? ), so is anyone here
>interested in computers?

Cleaning out my shed, I just unearthed some boxes of my old Tandy
Color Computer stuff. A few intact examples (1 through 3, and I think
an MC10) plus a bunch of peripherals, cables, tapes, disks, reference
manuals. Been at least 20 years since I put power to any of it.

Part of me wants to say how awesome it all was. And it did get me
started. I first learned to program the MC-10's slightly funky BASIC,
so deeply baked-in that the keywords had keyboard shortcuts in
hardware. Seems weird now.

Then there was Color and Extended BASIC, then 6809 assembler. Hacking
hardware to add RAM where Tandy never meant for RAM to go,
overclocking to nearly 2MHz (!), burning custom DOS EPROMs, letting
the smoke out more times than I care to admit. But the fact is that
all of this wasn't very shiny after all...sure, it got me started, and
at the time it was all I could afford, but I didn't know what else I
was missing. Nostalgia is funny.

By the time I had hardware that could run OS-9, I'd begun to have
access to x86 type PCs, and that was pretty much the end of that
phase. It would take many more years before I started to learn about
OSes that could do amazing things like run two programs at once.