jim_lawless

In Fall of 1984, a friend bought one of these for his Commodore 64. He talked me into buying one for my C64. We chatted clumsily with the spartan terminal software for a while. I had an ad for a local BBS in a magazine. We called that BBS which had a list of numbers for other BBS's in town. We started calling those.

During those days of calling a lot of BBS's on a regular basis, I was calling on a rotary-dial phone. That got to be hard on the finger if you encountered a busy signal. It wasn't too long before my friend and I each picked up a Westridge sutomodem ... which was a workalike for the Commodore 1650 automodem ( both the Westridge and the 1650 had auto-answer and auto-dial (pulse) capabilities.

If I remember correctly, on a C64, you could push the vicmodem to 400 and 450 baud for boards that supported it, but the communications errors were higher. It garbled characters frequently ... usually attributed to line-noise.

In the latter 80's, I had gotten rid of my old computer gear and was getting ready to buy something new. In the interim, I picked up a VIC-20 with a vicmodem for about $25. That allowed me to visit the local BBS's until I got some better hardware.

Agreed. I only recently found out about a book that Barden wrote (also a Sams book) that was published in 1977 called "How to Program Microcomputers". It explains the common workings of microprocessors and then goes over the makeup and instruction sets of the Z-80, 6502, and 6800. I wish I'd had that as a primer on assembly language and programming for microprocessors.

I remember seeing the TRS-80's in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou but I didn't know that they were Model IV's.

According to this list, there was a TRS-80 Model III in the Star Wars TV series Andor:

Andor - Season 1, Episode 1, "Kassa" (2022)

I interviewed Rob Sherman the gent behind Southernamis and other Atari BBS's on my podcast a few months ago. He's running emulated Atari 8-bit systems in AWS for these BBS's. Rob also has written some articles on telnet-access retro BBS's in the newly revived Compute's Gazette magazine.

Visiting BBS's that run on actual or emulated hardware can be a nice trip down memory lane for those who were part of the 8-bit BBS community in times past.

I asked ChatGPT to write a Windows GUI C program that looks for a running instance of the onedrive EXE at regular intervals and terminates it while keeping a running log of the attempts in a scrolling window. It took a few iterations to get what I wanted and it was simple to compile with GCC.

You can use a Powershell to see if onedrive.exe is running and kill it with the -force option to do something similar ( ps * onedrive * | kill -force ) with no spaces between the asterisks and the word onedrive, but that turned out to be a little heavier to have running continuously than I wanted.

If you use a process like this, you absolutely need to run it at intervals because the onedrive exe seems to execute at regular intervals.