Upgrading to a Soldering Station

For some years now I have been using a cheap soldering iron with a 15W/30W switch that I purchased from Radio Shack (I miss them).  This has been just fine for the electric guitar modifications that I like to make, but I'm not comfortable using this iron for the Final Expansion 3 cartridge for my VIC-20.  I decided to purchase a soldering station with temperature control so I can tweak it while I'm doing my work.

Here is the station I bought on Amazon for about $30.

This is an AOYUE 469, which is a 60W iron.  It has a nice steel spring to keep the iron, which is much better than the cheap stamped stand I was using.  It has a place to put your spool of solder, and a place for a sponge (that's not a Post-it note!) to keep the iron tip clean.

Here you can see this does not let you specify a temperature.  The specifications provided state that the temperature is from 300F to 480F.  But, the dial goes to from 1 to 8 (not to 11)!

This is a photo of iron tip.  If you look carefully, it seems they have pre-tinned it for me.

Moving to Belmont

About this time I moved to Belmont with my brother Paul and his little daughter Christina, and also a friend of ours from our church named Stuart Harrington. Belmont is a very nice little town between next to Waltham where I worked, so I had a 15 minute commute. What a great place to live. Drive 15 minutes one way and you're in Boston. Drive the other direction and you're in Lincoln. I really enjoyed that.

Eventually Stuart got married and moved out and we were joined by another friend from church named Paul Ward. Paul was a sonar operator in a fast attack sub when he served in the Navy. He told interesting stories. We decided to share a room. We bought a steel tubular framed bunk cot. I would get up early in the morning and help him deliver newpapers in Lexington. I had inherited one of the Osborne 1 computers from work which Paul and I would spend some time tinkering with and banging out simple BASIC programs. My memory is a bit foggy, but I seem to remember giving the computer to Paul.

I thought I might be able to purchase a new computer for myself now that I had a regular paying job. I was interested in practicing my C programming and Radio Shack had a nice little portable called the Tandy Model 600. I read somewhere that CP/M and a C compiler could be had for this little machine and I thought this would be a very neat computer to own. When they were getting ready to discontinue this model the price dropped well below a thousand dollars. However I wasn't very good at saving money.

I never did purchase a Model 600. Just as well because I think I would have outgrown it very quickly.

Mousing Around

Since my Tandy 1000SX had high resolution graphics (if you could call monochrome CGA 640x200 high resolution) we thought it made sense to get a mouse and learn to program with it. Then we might be able to write even better software for the engineers to use when setting up each circuitboard for production. We had a crude graphical CNC simulator that ran on the Kaypro machines, so this could be a step forward for us with more detailed graphics and a mouse for a pointing device.

We bought the mouse at Radio Shack. It was a pretty nice little mouse, and it came with its own interface card like most mice did back then. I'm guessing that this mouse was made by the same people who made the the famous Microsoft Mouse. It was very similar. All the mice at that time had a ball for tracking movement, and this one was a metal ball with a rubber coating.

I believe that my first experiments with the mouse were in Turbo BASIC. There were no built in commands for the mouse. I don't remember exactly how the mouse was read either, but I remember there was documentation. Playing around with some code for drawing on the screen with the mouse inspired me to write an experimental character recognizer. I would draw letters on the screen and the program would attempt to convert them to ASCII characters. It really wasn't that hard to do, but prototypes don't have to be practical. It was fun.

Pocket Computers and Programming

My brother Ernie was a fan of the Radio Shack pocket computers. He started with the original pocket computer. This was a neat little machine with a QWERTY keyboard and a BASIC interpreter. This was a real step up from a programmable calculator. Later on he bought their Pocket Computer 2 model. I think this model had two microprocessors, and you could draw very simple pixel graphics with it. You could save your programs to tape, and there was a printer for it. My brother managed to discover a machine code monitor in that model and he was experimenting with that. This reminds me of what another friend of mine told me about the first model of the HP-41 calculator, that it was possible to program it in machine code in an undocumented way.

Today these pocket computers would seem quite primitive and wanting, but for many purposes even today they would be very useful. Of course nowadays people expect their pocket devices to have Wifi and Internet access. What was great about these machines? They shared the same approachability as home computers like the VIC-20 and TRS-80. Just by reading a simple 100 page manual you could learn how to make the computer do your bidding. Want to be a programmer?

You + pocket computer + 100 pages of reading = programmer

Microcomputer Trainer

I think one of the best things a budding programmer can do is program in machine code. The absolute easiest way to get your toes wet in this skill is by using a microprocessor trainer. Radio Shack used to sell the simplest trainer I've ever seen, and I even have one of these around the house somewhere. Sometimes you can still get these on ebay (in fact that's where I got mine).  

I know this looks like a toy, and it is. For a toy it's serious business. It has a very simple Texas Instruments microprocessor and you program it in machine code using the hex pad. Easy instructions are included. 

https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=1053&st=1

Once you've played with one of these, the next fun thing to do is to write a simulator in BASIC. Not that hard to do actually. ;-)

Enter the TRS-80

I remember when Radio Shack started to advertise the TRS-80 computer on television. I don't think I had ever seen an ad for a computer on TV before this. It was $599 for the computer which seemed pretty amazing.

When these machines arrived at the local Radio Shack store my brother and I went to have a look. The only interesting thing you could do with the machine was program it. They may have had a couple of applications on tape in the store but we ignored them. The programming manual was very friendly, with a cartoon character that looked like a TRS-80 spouting explanations.

As I understand it the Level I BASIC that came with the machine was a custom version of Tiny BASIC. It had single letter variable names, only one string variable (I think), and it had only three error messages for the programmer:

• What? - Syntax error
• How? - Divide by zero, etc.
• Sorry. - Out of memory

Level I BASIC also had SET and RESET commands so you could draw graphics on a 128x48 grid.

Radio Shack

In 1977 I was ten years old and I was learning about transistors, resistors, Ohm's Law, reactive inductance and stuff like that from my father. I used to go to Radio Shack a lot after school and poke around. They always had a bargain bin box which always had odd things like computer keyboards, and other stuff that seemed good for making computers. Their catalog also listed things like this.

I had no idea of course how to do anything with these kinds of electronic parts, but it was very intriguing. I wasn't sure yet what a computer was, but I knew just a little bit. My life was about to get interesting.