At age 17 in 1978 our local Tandy (Radio Shack) had a TRS-80. I managed to find out how to list the program that was running, read the (minimal/inadequate) "manual" and started to modify the existing programs.
I purchased a Model I (16KB) and started to run things in BASIC for real, and got seriously fed up with the (lack of) speed. I somehow, somewhere got a Z80 book and started to write code in assembly. That was too slow, so I wrote a compiler.
That way I learned both BASIC and Z80, pretty much entirely self-taught from books that didn't really have much. I might still have them somewhere - I should try to dig them out. I certainly still have the TRS-80, and its schematics. I've been trying to work out if I should replace the dud AND gate that corrupts data when it reads from the screen memory.
Comments
At age 17 in 1978 our local Tandy (Radio Shack) had a TRS-80. I managed to find out how to list the program that was running, read the (minimal/inadequate) "manual" and started to modify the existing programs.
I purchased a Model I (16KB) and started to run things in BASIC for real, and got seriously fed up with the (lack of) speed. I somehow, somewhere got a Z80 book and started to write code in assembly. That was too slow, so I wrote a compiler.
That way I learned both BASIC and Z80, pretty much entirely self-taught from books that didn't really have much. I might still have them somewhere - I should try to dig them out. I certainly still have the TRS-80, and its schematics. I've been trying to work out if I should replace the dud AND gate that corrupts data when it reads from the screen memory.