Four Decades of PCs

Forty years ago this month, on January 31st 1983, I purchased my first computer, a TRS-80 Model III, for almost $800. It included 4K of RAM and a Cassette Tape player. Yes, we stored programs on audio tapes. It wasn't long before I replaced the 4KB RAM chips with 16KB chips. Then added a Signalman 300/1200 baud direct attach modem, purchased from an ad in the back of Byte Magazine. Next came a CompuServe account, and I was online. Note the Internet didn't come into being until some fifteen or so years later. Shortly after getting online, I added two more rows of 16K chips maxing out the system to 48KB of RAM. It should be noted that the Zilog Z80A processor in the Model III could only address 64KB of memory, and the ROM took up the first of the four 16KB banks.?

At this point, sometime around March of 1983, I responded to a Putnam County, New York Penny Saver ad for Apple and TRS-80 computer programmers. On calling the number, I was instructed to show up at a residential address on a Friday evening, it sounded sketchy, but I was 21 and fearless. Orange Cherry Media, an educational film strip distributor, was holding a cattle call orientation/audition for programmers. Everyone, there was in high school and came with a parent, except me, a community college kid with a car. At the end of the evening, I was hired, perhaps because I was the only one with a license and a vehicle who could come every day. Maybe it was because I was taking an actual college-level Computer Science class, Assembly Language for the IBM System 360/370. My job was to help drive their new expansion into educational software. Daily I would test, debug and edit other kids' code on Orange Cherry's TRS-80, then produce a final version for reproduction on cassette tapes. It was a husband and wife team, the husband was a former teacher who created educational content on his Commodore Pet-2000, and the wife ran off copies, filled orders, and otherwise handled the day-to-day filmstrip side of the business.

The husband would provide Pet-2000 program listings to high school kids, who would then go home and translate his listings into TRS-80 basic code for $25/program. His code was the most horrible spaghetti code you could imagine. I was paid $7.50/hr to make each program into a product. When I wasn't fixing TRS-80 programs, I was writing new ones on their Apple II+, mimicking and, often, improving on what his Pet-2000 programs did. It was ingenious; they would have an educational program title and offer it for all three platforms simultaneously. This Apple II+ was my first computer with a diskette drive and color graphics. With the proceeds from this job, I soon ordered a disk drive upgrade kit from the back of an 80-Micro magazine that included mounting hardware, the controller, cabling, and a 90 KB single-sided, single-density drive. My god, I was in heaven. A reliable way to store and retrieve programs, gone were my days of writing a program out to three different brand new cassette tapes in hopes that one worked when I needed to read it back in the future. Soon I copied over everything I could from the cassette deck to floppies and ripped the class A amplifier out of the cassette deck forever.?

Next, I carved open a hole in the side of the case near the power switch, so the amplifier's volume on/off dial could be exposed outside the case. I then permanently mounted the amplifier inside the case soldering it to the power supply, audio in/out port, and a speaker inside that case that was just outside the range of interfering with the display and the motherboard. This was my first computer hardware hack; I'd added sound to a TRS-80 Model III. While not original, I got the idea from an 80-Micro article. It was a fun project. Plus, imagine the horror on my mom's face when she came into my room and saw my new $800 computer in pieces all over the desk and me standing over it with a smoking iron; priceless!

During the summer, I cracked the system open again, perhaps for the last time, and added a second single-sided, single-density 90KB floppy drive. Now I could easily copy diskettes without having to do a bunch of swaps. These upgrades were why IBM Research hired me in December of 1983 to work with their newly formed PC group for hardware distribution and repair. The first of dozens of Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Co-ops hired into this department. IBM Research remained my primary employer for another eleven years. They assisted me in obtaining my Bachelor of Electrical Engineering and Technology from RIT and later my Masters of Computer Science from Polytechnic.?

1983 was an AWESOME year. I know 2023 will be even better!