I believe level 1 is the key to the claim at the end that the M3 had no graphics mode. The M3 had blocky character based graphics (non-ASCII) as seen at:

http://www.classiccmp.org/cpmarchives/trs80/mirrors/www.disc...

Look for example at trsdos 1.3 on a model 3, I saw that screen a lot in the early 80s. Much like the emulator author, my first computer was also a model 3. Fun times.

Later moved on to the coco and OS/9 and its K+R C compiler and all that. After using OS/9 for years, downgrading to msdos for about a decade was quite a bummer, till I upgraded to linux.

(And edited to add, noobs don't understand that software always declines to $0. Dev environments used to always be $250 or even the Borland/Turbo series were $99. So $300 for basic isn't unrealistic. Text editors used to be expensive. Well, this is specialized and complicated software that only specialists use and they need lots of expensive support, insert all the arguments you hear today about CAD or office software. Then growing up in the 80s and paying $99 to fool around with Turbo Pascal or Turbo Prolog and then in the early 90s being able to install better stuff for free with linux? Wow. Office software is already free, and soon CAD and everything else will join it. Good luck selling expensive software, you can't do that for long, it all eventually drops to zero.)