Scanning my collection of snapshots brought back many memories. The photo above was taken at a computer show in Chicago. The vendor was selling custom computer furniture. This computer system was virtually identical to the system I first owned.

In the 1980s, I was teaching electronics in a high school in Fargo, North Dakota. I am not sure how I found out about it, but I learned Prentice-Hall, then textbook publisher, was looking for authors for technical books. I started a project writing a book on basic electronics.

At the same time, I was experimenting with computers, and my first computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer similar to the one in the photo above. The first one I purchased contained all of 16K RAM. I used a small TV for a monitor, and a cassette player designed to interface to the computer for data storage. I learned a lot about computers from the machine nicknamed CoCo.

Working on the book turned out to be more tedious than I liked, and having seen the power of word processors, I longed for their flexibility. Taking a short hiatus, I used the Microsoft BASIC interpreter built into CoCo’s ROMs to create a simple word processor. It was no Microsoft Word by any means, but it allowed me to work on the book a chapter at a time, saving and editing individual paragraphs.

Thanks for taking the time to review my Throwback Thursday post.

John Steiner