The last time I programmed a computer, it was my TRS80. Really. I'm pretty sure that it's called 80 'cause that's the year it came out. I need to make a program to help understand/explain/demonstrate natural selection. Is this the software I want? and; Is there a tutorial I could download with the demo?
Emergence Basic comes with a very nice help file. And most of the questions I have had, have been asked before... on the user forum.
There is also a very nice tutorial and other useful information found here: http://ebasic.wikispaces.com/ and here: http://www.codingmonkeys.com/index.php
Good luck!
Quote from: RobVranichII on December 03, 2008, 11:43:14 AM
The last time I programmed a computer, it was my TRS80. Really. I'm pretty sure that it's called 80 'cause that's the year it came out.
I think they called it TRS-80 because it was designed to use in with a Zilog Z80 CPU.
Barry
I also had a TRS80 back in the early days. As far as I remember it was also called "The Color Computer". And I am pretty sure that the CPU used was a 6809.
Actually, the TRS80 included a whole range of different systems... first model came out in 1977, the last model in 1985...
Have a look here for more details...
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/company.asp?st=1&l=T (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/company.asp?st=1&l=T)
The site is an amazing collection of info on old computers...
Have fun.
Cheers,
Frank
Quote from: Egil on January 01, 2009, 08:27:08 AM
I also had a TRS80 back in the early days. As far as I remember it was also called "The Color Computer". And I am pretty sure that the CPU used was a 6809.
That's correct. The Color Computer had a Motorola 6809 CPU. I had one at home and I had a lot of fun with it. I used it both in Basic (with much asm) and with OS-9, a Unix-like system from Microware.
Once, just to prove it could be done, I connected another computer to it through the serial port and another computer and a dumb terminal through serial cards plugged into the Multi-pak interface and 4 of us logged on to it, one at the main keyboard and 3 at the other terminals, and we each loaded and ran a word processor and created a reasonable size document; all at the same time; all within the 64k RAM the Color Computer had. And there were no slow-downs for anyone once the program loaded. Let's see someone do that on a Commodore/Apple II/etc. :)
The Color Computer was made by Radio Shack to be a toy and it was a toy. No question about that. But it was an amazing toy. :)
Barry
The original Color Computer was a toy, agreed. The Color Computer III was much more, It originally came with 128K ram, I upgraded it to 512K which at the time was better than most DOS based machines. I had OS9 Level II running on it, full multitasking and hi res graphics modes. Had a BurkeXT controller for hooking up the then standard MFM hard drives, think it was a 40MB drive, small by todays standards but back then it was huge. The 4 slot mutil-pak interface was stuffed, a 4 channel sound card, the HD controller, an I/O card so I could have a standard parallel port and the extended disk controller.
Used it for a long time as a music workstation controlling my midi keyboard, and of course wrote a lot of programs that ran on OS9. Retired it when I got my first Amiga which beat everything, hands down, at the time.
Paul.
I had an evaluation unit for the TRS80 - the serial no was 'D'.
I sold it in a yard sale a few years back - it was still working. Had 5 Meg HD - wow!.
I still have one of the 'laptop' TRS80 computers - found it in the barn last week. It is also still working.