My dad was a firm believer in computers, we had one as
soon as a family could have one it was a TRS80. Which was a computer
that had its processor built into the keyboard. A cartridge could be
pushed into the side, if you were rich enough to have a cartridge.
The main method of storage was a tape deck that recorded the data as
what sounded like a fax machine over the speaker. To record a program
that you wrote you literally pushed record on the tape deck and the
spindles would advance as the data was sung in sweet-sweet machine
language song into memory. Then you played the tape back to the
computer when you wanted it to run the program. The monitor was a
television and because we had only one television that sometimes
caused a bit of a kerfuffle. I would want to program my computer for
hours at a time and them save the program and then play the program.
To a nerd that time is fast and delicious but to a average bystander
it looks lie a unwashed geek with his tongue sicking out is
monopolizing the one technological respite from you life of drudgery.
The TRS 80 had per-programmed games that came on a cartridge. Like I
said, we never had one of those but we had a friend who had a massive
28” TV with a cartridge game for their TRS80 which concerned itself
with the troubles of, according to the cover art, what looked like
was some sort of adventurer that went through caves maybe. It was
hard to verify any of the cover art conclusively by watching the game
but it was a video game and that was cool enough for me. My friend as
it turned out was not a very considerate friend and he almost never
let me play but he would let me watch him play. When I did get to
play he would loudly insult my abilities by telling me I sucked
anytime I would die in the game and force a derisive laugh at my
feeble attempts at competence in the two minutes I got to play the
game. It was degrading but he was the rich kid with the cool stuff
and sacrifices had to be made. He was actually my friend for several
years so I will tell you more about him when we are not so engrossed
in this TRS 80 talk. The TRS 80 we had was programmed in Basic 2
which is a computer programing language that is good for not that
much. My dad bought me a programing book that would let me write fun
games for myself once I mastered the ones that they had in the book.
The problem was that I was not a terrible careful programmer and on
the TRS 80 when you pressed 'enter' the time for repentance was past
and the 200 lines of code you had previously written were just as
corrupted as the last line which contained a typo. You just had to
type 'NEW' to dump the memory and start over. The worst though was
one time I stayed up most of the night programming a cool sounding
game called 'VoCAB' which I thought meant it was some sort of cab
driving or cab racing game. I mean, that is not ideal, but sounded
like a really good time after programing the only other game in the
book called 'Fox and Geese', that was just a checker board with one
fox piece represented by a square and 8 geese pieces represented by 8
other squares. That game required either one very lonely player or
two human players to play a incredibly lame game that cost me six
hours and 300 lines of code. 'VoCAB', as you may have guessed because
you are not nine years old and know what that word is short for, was
a game concerned almost entirely with vocabulary flash cards. You may
have thought that I would have caught onto that somewhere early in
the process because I was writing so many words and definitions into
the code. But I was so locked in I was just reproducing what was on
the page like a game wanting robot. When I saved the program to the
tape and then loaded it up and saw what I had wasted all night on, I
broke down and cried. So loudly, I gather, that it woke my mom up and
she told me I had done a very nice job and that she would love a game
like that. I was not mollified because I wanted to help a eight bit
hero navigate perils not learn what some stupid word meant. I didn’t
ever get a game proper for the TRS 80 it was much later when I
finally got a computer that I spent my money to get a game on.
