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On Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:08, Jim wrote
> I don't know if this would be in the one up category, but I remember
> being a high school freshman in 1981 and spending time after school
> in the math teacher's room messing around with his TRS80 with a
> whopping 4KB RAM and running programs stored on cassette tape.
Speaking of that old TRS-80 Model I ... I bought one the first week
they showed up in Radio Shack stores, thinking it might make a fun
father-son hobby project. I knew absolutely nothing about computers
at the time (and still feel very much a "newbie" compared to all the
brilliant minds in the plug community) ... but after tinkering with
that old Model I for a couple of weeks, I built a little basic program
to demonstrate for one of my clients how I thought we might be able to
use a computer to produce shipping documents that were then being typed
and retyped over and over endlessly on selectric typewriters.
From that simple little demonstration, we went on to build the first
international export shipping documentation system that ever worked
(on a Basic-4 computer that had 15-meg of HD space in a refrigerator
sized box). My clients sent me on a tour of every place in the U.S.
known at that time to have people trying to build such a system for
several years, but still didn't have anything that worked. We ended
up beating them all to the finish line with a fully operational system
implemented in offices on both coasts and two countries, all connected
and transmitting documents with, get this ... 150-baud modems.
That same basis system ran from the early 1970's for more than 15 years
... all derived from that little old cassette tape "powered" TRS-80
Model I demo.
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