(Insert stupid Blog name here)

Nice sprites. (only 6x3!) Can hardly wait to see the proposal.

I used to hang out in Radio Shack as well. I'm surprised that the clerks never kicked me out, as I would spend hours there. Maybe they knew that I was pestering my parents to buy me a Trash-80. They never did - instead they bought me the Basic Programming cart, which was very disappointing. 63 bytes of RAM was not enough to do anything useful.

 

I also designed games on paper, and like you, almost all of them are gone. I also typed code on a manual typewriter. Sadly, only a few scraps of my old work remain.

I remember printing out what I'd programmed on some sort of silver paper, about the width of a cash register receipt. Maybe a thermal printer of some sort? Anyway, that's all they had in the store. I'm not even sure we had cassette players to save stuff on. I might have had to re-type a program each time I worked on it, but I don't really remember now.

 

But yeah, I was always surprised they let us hang out there, unsupervised, for hours. Although my friend eventually did buy a Trash-80, so I guess it paid off for them.

 

Interesting though... the Radio Shack Computer Centers remind me a lot of the way Apple Stores are set up. Although I don't think Apple would let you just sit there and say, edit all of your home movies for hours on end, the idea of having a bunch of computers sitting around that people can just go in and play with is really similar.

I also remember the Radio Shack in the mall back in the early 80's. In addition to the TRS-80s they began selling Apple computers for awhile. I recall taking a disk from school that had games on it and loading it up on their display Apple. Played Dung Beetles for about an hour before a sales guy told me I wasn't supposed to bring my own disks in. I said something like "oh...okay" and continued playing Dung Beetles.

 

That may very well have been their policy back then though. Let the kids play on 'em. After all, what better way to showcase the potential of these new machines than a bunch of geeky kids experimenting on them. As I remember it, the question "why would anyone ever need a home computer" was fairly common. I even took computer programming classes back in high school in the early 80's that focused on programming on VAX systems for business and accounting kinds of applications. At no time was there any sort of real acknowledgement that desktop and home computers would be anything more than a novelty. We had an IBM PC in the lab but if anyone ever wanted to use it they'd have to track down the student with the operating system disks. Apparently there was only one person that remotely understood how to use it.

 

I also remember getting in one of the first MAC's when they were released in '84. It just sat in the computer lab like a sideshow freak. Nobody had any idea what it was there for or how it could be put to use. But it was a real novelty seeing that BW screen built into the computer and controlling everything with a mouse. And it seemed to like graphics. The whole screen was filled with menus and "graphics." All the other computers we were used to working with had a DOS-like interface featuring blue-white text on a blue-black background. Actually you were lucky if you got a terminal with a CRT. Many of the terminals were just overblown typewriters. Instead of a CRT they had a box of paper underneath. You'd type something, not seeing what you're typing, then hit "return." Only then what you typed would be printed on the paper. Then you'd sit there for about 3 hours before the computer responded to whatever you typed. Assuming of course there were no typos that would only return a "Syntax Error."

A Radio Shack in a mall is why I ended up having Commodore computers(VIC, 64, 128, Amiga).

 

1980 - freshman year - my high school had Commodore PETs and I got hooked. I was planning to get a CoCo and spent the summer at my grandparents "working" to raise money to buy it(my parents paid for half the computer for Xmas of 81). Grandma wanted to see what I was working towards so we went to the Radio Shack in the mall(most likely in Wisconsin Rapids) where they had the computer on display, but turned off. I asked the guy if he could turn it on and he told me - "I can't turn it on - it needs a password that I don't know and if it's entered it wrong the computer will be ruined".

 

Needless to say, after having used computers for a year I knew he was flat out lying. I found out about the VIC 20 and got it instead. Turned out to be a better fit for me anyway - I was already used to full-screen editing on the PETs and when I later tried a friend's Coco I got frustrated with its line based editing.

My parents were both engineers at Motorola, so I've been immersed in computers my whole life. I got my first computer in 1977 when I was 6. It was an MEK6800D2, more affectionately known as a D2 Kit. Check out this monstrosity:

 

 

We don't need no stinkin' CRT terminal. Just 6 7-segment LEDs for the display.

 

My dad hooked up a speaker to the RS232 port and found an assembly program that played a Beethoven song. 1977 was the year Star Wars came out, so I figured out how to hack the code for the Beethoven song and change it to the Star Wars theme. That's how I learned hexidecimal. All the machine code had to be typed in raw with the hex keypad.

 

Edit - oops. Got my dates wrong. For a couple years after that, we used a TRS-80 on loan from work. I think it was a model II, because it had two integrated 8 inch floppy drives, and I'm pretty sure it had 32k RAM. When the TRS-80 was returned to work, I talked my parents into buying a VIC-20, which was a little more user-friendly than the D2 kit.

 

They've still got that original D2 kit, stashed away in a closet.