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My family bought a Tandy 1000 around 1985. I was eight years old and quickly started writing batch scripts and rudimentary BASIC games. My friend had a Tandy to
by pjungwir 4y ago
My family bought a Tandy 1000 around 1985. I was eight years old and quickly started writing batch scripts and rudimentary BASIC games. My friend had a Tandy too and, being a musician, talked all the time about their "three-voice sound." We taught ourselves BASIC together by decoding the spiral-bound reference manual that came with the computer. Without any tutorial-style material it was rough going, but we persisted. I remember him trying to explain for loops to me and I was just n-o-t getting it. And I always wondered what GOSUB was for. "Why would you want to go somewhere then just come back again?" After several years it finally clicked when I independently invented function calls. ;-)
- soylentcola 4y agoHad similar experience with our Commodore 128 (even had a spiral-bound brick of a manual too). Between that and just the old LIST command, I was able to poke around in loads of games and programs and see how they worked (or, say, give myself a million gold in Telengard). I did grasp GOSUB fairly easily but I never understood why I could load some programs from disk, but when I typed LIST, I would just see a single line with SYS (and a number). Didn't realize until later that this was just a way to call machine language code that had been loaded directly into memory. How the hell was I supposed to learn from that??
- timbit42 4y agoWell, the C128 had a built-in ML monitor which could disassemble assembly.
- soylentcola 4y agoI think I stumbled across this, but I was in grade school and without another spiral-bound reference to make sense of it, it just looked like gibberish to me. I was still a little way off from learning the benefits of "structured programming" for easier debugging and tweaking, so long piles of BASIC was my limit at the time.
- timbit42 4y agoIt's in the manual from page 371 to 380.
- tiahura 4y agoMy dad bought one in '85 and kept it for 2 days. He thought it was junk (he was a mechanical engineer and used Apollo workstation as his daily driver. He returned it and bought an Amiga. Best decision ever.
- icedchai 4y agoIn middle school I had a friend with a Tandy 1000EX. I had an Amiga 500. He refused to believe the Amiga was a superior platform! Early 90's computer wars were so childish.
- troymc 4y agoI remember that spiral bound reference manual. Learning from that was like learning English by reading the dictionary. Thank goodness there were examples. I also never understood the point of GOSUB for a long time.