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It actually pre-dated the IBM-PC era by 4 or 5 years. It didn't run MS-DOS, but rather booted right into Basic from powerup displaying the cautious but encouraging prompt 'Ready?' 
I believe it ran on a Z80 processor (but I'm getting foggy now), which is where the '80' came from.
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It depended on what model of TRS-80 you are talking about.
I believe Model I's (with 4k, the first computer I ever messed with) booted from rom.
Model III's (I think, memory hazy as this was a long time ago) ran either CP/M or TRS-DOS(bleeecch!). They were Z/80 based. The expansion bay for it was 3 8" drives built into a desk that weighed a ton.
I still remember the Model I's grand total of 3, yes 3 possible error messages. They were "What?", "How?" and "Sorry."
Jim Wuerch
www.miwasoft.com
Quote from my readme files:
"This is BETA software, and as such may completely destroy your computer, change the alignment of the planets and invert the structure of the universe."
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You are absolutely correct, I can't believe my memory of this is as foggy as it is. I owned both a Model I (but alas never got the expansion module), and had a Model III that I upgraded to floppies with an expansion kit from ... Pertec?
I think the expansion kit you are referring to was actually for the Model II, which was the "business" machine that ran on the stunningly fast Z80a processor. Maybe I'll see if I can dig up some info from Tandy...
I remember (not very fondly) the What? How? and Sorry. Messages. We should have seen then what the future of Microsoft's descriptive error messages would be like
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Wow. My first PC was a DX4-100, after years of hating IBM in favour of Apple and then Amiga. A 'Trash80', as they were known, was a computer sold by Tandy, I *think* Z80 based, hence the name, but overall a poor attempt to compete with the Apple ][. ( My true colours showing through... )
Christian
The content of this post is not necessarily the opinion of my yadda yadda yadda.
To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion.
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Ah, yeah, I started with BASIC too, and in 4th Grade. It was on a Commodore Pet. Then I had a Timex/Sinclair 1000 to play with at home. A whopping 2K of RAM, with the 16K RAM expansion pack. A wonder of engineering, the pack was held on by a thin row of pins and merely pressing too hard on the tiny keyboard was enough to knock the RAM module out and force a reboot.
This made it hard to write programs, because just about every keystroke could make you reboot - rebooting was quick, but unfortunately, there was no hard drive or even floppy disk to work from. I had to use a tape-recorder to save anything. It took a full two minutes to save or restore a dozen line BASIC program. Because of the frequent memory module mishaps, I was forced to do a save every few lines to be save, then also a restore every four or five lines after the memory fell out. (No good way to stabilize it the way it was designed).
Despite this, I stuck it out and managed to type in a program that drew (quite crudely, but passably) pixel by pixel, the profile of the space shuttle. (Pixels on this machine being reasonably large black squares).
Needless to say, that first experience made me VERY paranoid of machines giving out on my as I worked on them, and so I have the habit now (sometimes almost unconciously) of saving whatever I'm working on with almost psychotic frequency. Every pause is a time to save. Every paragraph. Sometimes every sentence. But it doesn't slow me down at 100 wpm.
Crazy or not, I can say that in 20 years of using computers, I have never EVER lost any data.
I still remember some of those old BASIC games. I modified a few for more "fun". Mostly I just played them. Miner. Lawn. Some cool text adventure game for the Apple II/e that a friend of mine had. I miss the Infocom games too.
-D
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Like you, I started on a Sinclair model using a ZX-80 (or something like that). It was 1980 and I was in first grade... The funny thing was that I did not speak a single word of English, but I was programming happily in BASIC.
("FOR"? That the loop thingy)..
As for now, I've been doing C/C++ for 8 years. But the truth is that I dreaded C for so long, I had actually spent 5 years writing in Assembly before I was forced to learn C.. 
-Oz
---
Grab WndTabs from http://www.wndtabs.com to make your VC++ experience that much more comfortable...
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I remember in University we all had to tell the class what languages we knew (so we could get a feel for the collective skill set). There was the usual Pascal, C, C++ etc, and finally one guy with long hair, black clothes and a beat up old electric guitar timidly raises his hand and says "x86 assembler". That was the only language he knew, and man, could that guy churn out the code. (plus he had great taste in music )
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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You're all children! (smugly spoken by a grey-haired veteran) -- BASIC on Commodores, TRS-80s, and ZX-80s? For shame -- how about BASIC on a real minicomputer, namely an HP 2110? Now that was BASIC -- no screens, just an ASR-33 Teletype banging away through rolls of paper at 110 baud.
Seriously, my first language was FORTRAN IV (using the WATFOR compiler) on an IBM 360/50, learned while I was still in high school in 1969 (that was when I learned to type, on an IBM 029 keypunch). From there I went on to a PDP-8 using paper tape and the front panel toggle switches, programming in machine code and an odd thing called FOCAL (kind of a FORTRAN and BASIC cross).
Since then, I think I've gone through at least a dozen programming languages, and another dozen system architectures, and I'm still learning (the reason I love this business so much).
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My first experience was with a Commodore64. Typed in my program, and went to run it, and it crashed. I lost everything, indignant I vowed never to touch a computer again exclaiming.. "They're STUPID!" 
It wasn't til my crappy TI-81 wouldn't do some of the nifty stuff that the other's TI-85s were, that I started programming again.. heh heh.. one piece of advice, when your feeling clever and decide to show your math teacher what you can do... be prepared for two math tests the next time around.
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My first home-computer was also a Commodore64. Writing programs and store them on a tape !!! (fortunately I had the program turbo-tape, someone remembers that ?)
In school we used Apple IIe in the first year. The second year we used the first PC's and used GW-BASIC.
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Year 4 ? I was in Year 9 when I saw my first Apple ][, the //e and //c were still a gleam in Woz's eye at the time. I remember my first non-trival program drew a tank in hi-res and animated it. It was so slow I could watch the redraw frame by frame - a far cry from the 3D stuff I work on now. My second was a graphics program that was printed in 'Your Compuer' and won 3rd prize in a programming competition. Then I knew I was hooked - I could get money for doing this stuff !!
Christian
The content of this post is not necessarily the opinion of my yadda yadda yadda.
To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion.
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I started in BASIC too, with an Apple II+ that didn't even have lowercase capability. We had a little paddle-wheel hooked up to it to play pong, and I remember figuring out how to use it for my own programs.
That was when you had to give a line number for each line, which was such a hassle... I still miss that computer though. 
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