On 8/3/10, Murray McCullough <c.murray.mccullough at gmail.com> wrote: I grew up a block away from Ohio State University which happened to have two Radio Shacks in proximity - one 4 blocks from my house, one a bit over a mile away on the same street. When the TRS-80 came out, I used to alternate between the Radio Shacks, pecking away for as long as they'd let me. We never did get a TRS-80 (we went with a 32K PET instead, which I still have), but I did get just the TRS-80 manual (which I also still have). I read that book several times over during our summer holidays when visiting relatives out of state, itching to get back to a Radio Shack to try out what I'd just learned. Thinking back on the state of the state in 1977/1978, before we bought a machine, I had limited but no-cost access to the three dominant new consumer platforms - the Apple II at The Micro Center (long before they got large they were a local storefront a few miles from my house), the TRS-80 at Radio Shack, and the original chicklet-keyboard PET at the main library downtown. When it came time to buy a computer, the Apple II was clearly too expensive for us, leaving the choice down to a TRS-80 vs a PET. I think "features" like the expansion interface (and its notoriously bad edge connector) and the chunky graphics (with no rich character set to enhance quarter or sixth-cell blobs) were what pushed me to choose the PET over the TRS-80. Perhaps if the TRS-80 had been 80-col vs 64-col, that might have been enough to tip the balance the other way. Choosing between 40-col with PET "graphics" and 64-col with ASCII and fat blocks wasn't so difficult. I do have to wonder where my early wanderings might have gone if I'd learned Z-80 machine code before 6502 machine code and what might have been my second machine (the progression that happened was PET->VIC-20->C-64->Amiga) -ethan