I received one of these from parents when I finished the 8th grade in 1980. I think they got the base model though with 4KB of ram, it was “only” $999. I recorded programs onto a cassette tape. Fun!

  • MehBlah@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    I already had a computer when I started computer science in the ninth grade. These bad boys were fun to play with. The teacher who was a very smart guy quickly gave up trying to keep me from typing away. I spent most of my time porting basic games from magazines to these. There were a lot of copies of my floppy making the rounds if you know what I mean.

    • perishthethought@piefed.socialOP
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      24 days ago

      porting basic games from magazines to these.

      Same! Lunar Lander, a maze generator, so many. And I even started to learn about Assembly language but that turned out to be too hard for me at that age.

      • MehBlah@lemmy.world
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        24 days ago

        On the trash 80 I had to do a lot of work to find the memory region for the display. It didn’t take that long but many of the games I ported used peek and poke statement to write the screen. Doing it was fun in a way nothing today can be. Its either too simple or way too complex these days.

      • MehBlah@lemmy.world
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        24 days ago

        Didn’t steal anything. They were programs printed out in magazines. Very few were written for TRS 80 model III. I took those free programs mostly games and ported/converted them to it.