This great post and thread at MetaFilter covers my early computing life rather thoroughly.
Apple had effectively no presence in south Mississippi in the early 1980s, but Radio Shack was there. My friend Rob had a no-shit TRS-80 Model 1; my friend Paul got a TRS-80 Color Computer soon after. Eventually, I got a Color Computer II, which was the first machine of my own that I wrote code for — before this, I’d written some BASIC on other oddball micros over at USM.
That CoCoII — which I think is in a closet here in Houston as I type this — had no disk drive. Instead, I stored programs and files on a cassette drive, which was WAY cheaper. And, of course way more prone to failure. Interestingly, the word processor I used all through high school was cartridge-based, like an Atari game, which had at least one advantage over floppy-based programs in that the cartridge bus was many times faster. I didn’t realize this was a Thing until later, when I was first using a dual-floppy PC at the high school and couldn’t figure out why the word processor took so long to change between modes…
I left the tiny computer world in 1988, when I bought an AT clone for college, but parts of my nerdy heart will forever belong to Tandy and their computing family, first introduced now 35 years ago. Ouch.
(Oh, and I still have one of these somewhere. I took notes on it in college. Back then, laptops were prohibitively fiddly and heavy, but this little bastard ran for weeks on AAs. I’d transfer the files to my desktop with a null modem cable, since back then there was no wifi and there were no SD cards.)
My first was the mighty, mighty TI99-4A, a close cousin to your Tandy, but I did very little programming with it other than to make hideous sound effects. Oh, and once I spent about half a day copying a program I found in a magazine line for line to make it play Bach. I played it for my mom and dad; dad gave it a very polite, “Hm,” meaning, “That’s pretty neat, but I have no idea how to properly encourage this,” and then I kicked the plug getting up from the desk before I could save it on the tape recorder.
I sold it to a very happy nerd at a garage sale a couple of years ago.
Review the Wikipedia page for the Heathkit H-8, bitches! Complete with hexadecimal keypad on the front on which you had to type the bootstrap code before it could get all up in those disk drives.
Yeah, I had a computer in the ’70’s, back when they were bad-ass.
You cheated. Panda was geeky first. You’re just lucky he wasnt into something really unseamly, like Brit sports cars.