RadioBanter - View Single Post

March 19th 04, 04:36 AM

(Michael Black) wrote:

No, I think Wayne was pretty successful.

I'd have to agree. Back in the late '70s (long before the IBM PC) Green
published "80-Micro" devoted to the Radio Shack TRS-80 (of which I owned
three or four, various models). It was a thick, hefty magazine with
tempting ads for expensive things like a 5-MB hard drive. Every issue
carried many program listings in Basic, or hex code which could be
laboriously keyboarded to produce an .exe file. I typed in most of them,
learning how to program in the process (and I'm sure MANY current old
programmers started out the same way), and eventually sold a few of my own
new programs to Wayne for publication.

Wayne was a pioneer, and the TRS-80 was the first "serious" (even with only
16K ram) computer most of us saw... it had a 64-column screen fine for word
processing, compared to only 40 or so on the Apple. The early TRS-80 had a
very bouncy keyboard, and I had a real epiphany about the power of software
when Wayne's magazine published a little software patch... I keyed it in
and the bounce went away for good.

I've never heard him on the radio and thus can't comment on whether his
current ideas are wacky or not, but his many contributions to ham radio and
home computing are indisputable.

Back on topic: once I even programmed a controller for my NRD-525 in
compiled basic with full dual VFOs and could control everything on the
receiver but the volume. Without Wayne, I might never have taught myself
how to do that :^)

--
Anti-Spam address: my last name at his dot com
Charles Gillen -- Reston, Virginia, USA