Wikipedia Browser for TRS-80 Model I | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia Browser for TRS-80 Model I

pski.net

34 pointspskisf10 comments

Oh, lawd! I learned to program on TRS-80 Model I and Model III back in high school. Writing animations in BASIC by sort of bitmapping with extended ASCII characters.

The most useful thing I learned was my first security hack. Floppies (all we had) could be password-protected. The teacher's disks (with the video games) were password-protected so we couldn't copy or alter them. So put in your disk. Enter "current password". Replace it with teacher's disk. Enter "new password"...

This actually makes me miss those days. At that time it was possible to know EVERYTHING that was happening in micro computing. There was some comfort in that I think. Fun.

That's right at the core of where I'm somewhat frustrated with modern computing. There are days when I feel like an ant walking on a map with no idea of the size of the map nor any overview of what is on it.

Limiting the scope of what you're seeing is no longer a luxury, it has become a necessity to get any work done but this tendency to want to understand everything is hard to get rid of and a huge time-sink.

Couple that with the speed with which formats, protocols and technologies are obsoleted and you end up with an even more frustrating situation.

I suspect the next level of major real progress will come from simplification or a total reboot.

That would be true in any big software project, and in any complicated system. Regardless of how many reboots will there be, systems that are simple enough for an ordinary developer to fully comprehend can not complete the tasks we want from them.

I wonder if this could evolve into a more general web-browser... given that there's several(!) available for the C64 already, like this one: https://www.c64-wiki.de/index.php/Singular_Browser (German)

I'm in the middle of doing something similar for the Oric-1/Atmos machines, which recently gained newly designed hardware giving them gigabytes upon gigabytes of storage.. so .. what to do with it? Easy: put Wikipedia on it!

Anyone got a Dragon 32 they could try this on? :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_32/64

CoCos and Dragons were completely different than the original TRS-80; the CoCo only carried the TRS-80 badge for it's brand recognition.

Even amongst actual TRS-80's, the Model I is only partly compatible with the Model III and Model 4.

Dragon 32 is a 6809 machine, TRS-80 uses Z80.

The ZX Spectrum also, have a Twitter client : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ECnN7jdgA4

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