I am very pleased to let you know Wire to the Ear is featured in this months Engadget Distro! Distro is thier super slick and free iPad magazine. In the interview I discuss Make Noise, TRS-80s, Ableton, Buchla and more. Be sure to download the March 8, 2013 issue and check it out!
“What are you favorite gadget names? There is a modular synthesizer module called…”
Download now: itunes.apple.com/us/app/engadget-distro
This entry was written by , posted on March 8, 2013 at 7:57 am, filed under promotion and tagged ableton, apple, Distro, Engadget, interview, Make Noise, TRS-80. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I was 13 years old when this episode of The Computer Chronicles aired. This means I was logging onto BBS’s and CompuServe with my TRS-80 Color Computer. $9.99 of a floppy disk with a low res christmas card on it!
“The Computer Chronicles was an American television series, broadcast during 1981-2002 on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) public television, which documented the rise of the personal computer from its infancy to the immense market at the turn of the 21st century.” – wikipedia.org
For more info: wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Chronicles
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This entry was written by , posted on December 22, 2012 at 7:54 am, filed under hardware and tagged 1983, hacker, Radio Shack, retro, The Computer Chronicles, TRS-80, vintage. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
My first computer was a TRS-80 CoCo. Short for Color Computer the CoCo had a Motorola 6508e microprocessor. The 6508e was in some ways the predecessor to the 68000 which found it’s way into the original Mac and Atari ST machines. I had my CoCo hooked up to a television and I wrote a few small programs using Basic. I remember I created my own address book that would randomly pick a friend to call. I still have some of the old cassettes to which my programs are saved. I can barely make out the handwriting on the tapes scribbled in my thirteen year old handwriting. I frequented a local TRS-80 user group run by a guy named Larry Bank who I believe today works at IBM. We would trade games like “Donkey King“.
Believe it or not I was going online way back then. There was a local BBS called Mnematics Videotext I use to log into. To be honest I can’t remember what I even was discussing or downloading. Whatever it was it could not have been all that thrilling because in the early 80s download speeds were at about 300 baud. A slow stream of text would jump out of multi-colored cursor across a bright green screen. I have fond memories of my TRS-80 with the exception of his chicklet style keyboard which was universally panned as being cheap. I think it’s pretty funny the new Mac Laptops have a similar keyboard but no one has made a reference to the old CoCo.
My flashback was all triggered by some photos uploaded today on flickr by rach_thegoat. Apparently her parents gave her some old CoCos. Included in the happy gift was a Cartridge for something called “Stereo Music Synthesizer”. I never owned that Cart and I sure am jealous! Her photos are set to “All Rights Reserved” so I won’t post them here but you can take a look at her score here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rach_thegoat/sets/72157610837576228/
photo credit: david_s_carter
via Matrixsynth
This entry was written by , posted on December 7, 2008 at 2:00 pm, filed under synthesizer and tagged Color Computer, Mnematics Videotext, Radio Shack, TRS-80, TRS-80 Color Computer, vintage. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
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