Articles in the "Books" Category

Priming the Pump: How TRS-80 Enthusiasts Helped Spark the PC Revolution

Lately, there seems to be an increasing interest in the history of early microcomputers. But for whatever reason, Radio Shack and the TRS-80 are rarely mentioned in histories of microcomputing. When the TRS-80 is mentioned, the details are often incomplete or completely wrong. I don’t know what has caused this collective amnesia, but the TRS-80 deserves to have its important contributions recognized.

The Programmer's Guide To LDOS/TRSDOS Version 6

The Programmer’s Guide is my favorite TRS-80 programming book, and in my opinion, the most useful. The chapters include:

• an overview of the operating system
• device input/output, with information about filters and drivers
• disk drive input/output, with information about writing a disk driver
• DOS directory structure
• disk file access and control
• interfacing with supervisory calls (SVCs), including detailed information about parameters
• other useful miscellaneous tables and topics

Programming the Z80

Even though Programming the Z80 was not written for the TRS-80, it was one of the more popular TRS-80 programming books. I suspect that this book and TRS-80 Assembly Language Programming by William Barden introduced more TRS-80 programmers to assembly language than any others.

The Source

The Source was a three volume set containing the complete source code of TRSDOS 6.2 (which was the same as LS-DOS 6.2). Each individual book cost $99.00, so total cost for a complete set was $297.00. Later on, these prices were heavily discounted.