[TriLUG] TriLUG Digest, Vol 1346, Issue 1

[Hank Montgomery]

In January of '78, at the tender age of 32, I purchased one of the very 
first TRS-80 Mod I units from a high school student who got one for Xmas 
and didn't want it.  Disk drives were not yet available, there was only 
a cassette tape interface.

About a year later Tandy marketed an "Expansion Interface" which allowed 
connection of several SSSD (single sided single density) floppy disk 
drives.  These drives only provided about 86K of storage including the 
master directory tracks,  leaving the user with slightly less usable 
storage (as I remember - it was just under 80K).

The early drives were error prone and there were several expensive (to 
my budget) disk recovery programs available.  At the time, I was 
teaching myself to program in Z80 machine code (prior to having an 
assembler) and I tackled writing a disk sector read/edit/write program.  
In the local TRS User group, it was one of two programs I wrote that 
proved worthwhile - the other was for ham radio -  a cassette port 
interface to the model 15 and 19 teletype machines supporting conversion 
between BAUDOT <-> ASCII, and simultaneous keyboard and display 
operation - before any O/S supported multi-tasking.

Those WERE the good old days.

K4HM - Hank


On 6/9/2011 12:00 PM, trilug-request at trilug.org wrote:
> I missed most of that too (I turn 40 in Sept).  My first computer was a
> C-64 that I received when I was 8 years old, around the time of the Apple
> 2 (not 2e) and the TRS-80.  Floppy drives were either 480K or 640K, single
> sided.