Aaah, TRS80 memories....... Thanks for sharing and bringing back some nightmares! Man, we have come a looooong way
No kidding. Hard to comprehend sinking over three grand (in 1970s dollars!) into a flakey machine with 48KB of memory, and four floppies adding up to 2.8MB -- with a black and white monitor, and two "sounds" (the two relays inside, one of which gave a soft click, the other of which gave a loud click -- I used them for kkeybboard eefectts (that bbouncy kkeyboard really got OLD in a hurry) -- a soft click while typing a character key, and a loud click when hitting the Enter key -- I wrote my own key entry routine, hated the stock BASIC Input function; mine let me tell it a maximum size for the string, would not allow "bad" keys (like messing up the screen, etc.) -- so, it was easy to add OUT commands to click the relays. Woo hoo.)
The amount of money I soaked into that thing, sheesh...