OT: Tandy Silver

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Aug 19, 2004, Bill Vermillion wrote:
>On Thu, Aug 19 11:06 , Jay R. Ashworth, showing utter disregard for 
>spell-checkers gave us this: 
>
>> On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 10:34:03AM -0400, Bill Vermillion wrote:
>> > > Naw; let's make it a trivia quiz.  Anyone remember where Tandy Silver
>> > > came from?
>> > 
>> > Everyone knows that don't they? :-)^32
>
>> Well, apparently even *I* don't.
>
>That's why I had smileys to the 32nd power.  It's one of those
>truly obscure things.  I did a 'loc'[1] on paint or color and
>there was a file in one of my directories that had the name
>of tandy-paint-color.  It was  post from Mike Yetsko who was
>deepling involved in the early days - possible as a CSR.

I always thought that RS selected the color because it was cheap and
readily available.  I surely couldn't have been because it was attractive.
BTW:  When I was racing, I took a roll of yellow duct tape and a roll of
red to the local auto paint store and asked for paint that matched the
tape.  That way I could do tape repairs without it being obvious to the
spectators.

...
>LDOS was a great training ground for Unix with it's device
>independance and linking ability.    I had an original TRSDOS
>2.1 - with a handwritten label at a 12 page mimeograph instruction
>set from Radio Shack.

Roy Soltoff, author of LDOS, was quite active in the various Tandy user
groups in the D.C. area when I was managing ``X'' departments in downtown
D.C. and the RSCC in Rockville, Maryland.  He didn't show up much at the
Model II group which had a very heavy Xenix bias after it was released in
late 1982.

...
>I often wonder what I'd been doing today if I had not made that
>step in 1977 and bought that Model I.    Who knows - I could have
>become rich and successful instead of addicted to these
>wee beasties.

I never had a Model I, having decided that an HP 97 calculator did
everything I needed at the time, and provided hard copy which cost a bunch
on the TRS 80s then.  The first micro I used extensively was the Model II
with TRSDOS, and later the Model 16 with Xenix.  In the three years that I
was with Radio Shack, I sold one Model I, an expansion interface, and fewer
than a half-dozen Model IIIs, and no color computers.  When I left Radio
Shack in October of 1983, I bought a Model 4P and a Model 100 as I left for
Seattle to develop software under Xenix on the Model 16/6000 systems.

Bill
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    ratification of the Constitution.