Trip down memory lane

Mine came with 2 little white legs to prop up the screen. I lost one at the Carrier Dome. Whoever found it, please send it to me. Thanks. Pen cap worked fine as a replacement.

 

$$$ rings a bell, but maybe it had to be <$$$> or -$$$-. I do remember you could enter format coding from the Tandy such as </news> or </agate> and Harris systems would pick it up. For a little while we were astonished to see that a remote file could come in all coded for typesetting.

After using a Tandy 100 for a long time, I scrimped and saved for a 200 and it made a huge difference. It was about $800 in 1990 dollars. I also tried a Tandy 1400 for a while but returned it because it was far too slow (4.7 mHz) and the screen text was too tiny.

photo: http://world.std.com/~mbg/tandy_1400hd.jpg

In the earliest days of the Tandy, the expensive part was the modem. I remember drafting up a proposal asking our publisher to spend more than $3k on the Mycro-Tek "Telephone Interface System" (a 300-baud modem) so we could send stories from the state tournament or the county courthouse. I think I used it 5 or 6 times before taking another job.

 

I had to use one of those old Tandys a couple of times to send stories from the VHSL state tournament in Lynchburg. What a huge pain in the backside that was. I think it finally sent on the 12th or 13th try. Made deadline with about 3.2 seconds to spare.

 

The worst was finding a place to file when the high school pressbox phone went thru the central phone system and you couldn't get a true dial tone. I used payphones in the rain, hotel front desk phones, you name it.

But damn, those things were nearly indestructible.

And at one of my shops, the coding that you had to put on the beginning of the story was like 40 characters long. Getting the information to freelancers was a pain in the ass. One character wrong and the file wouldn't get into our system.

 

Then there were the times when you would have to send from a phone booth in the middle of the hood. I used to always look for a spot before the game, usually in one of the hallways in one of the college buildings, that had a pay phone and a power outlet in the same vicinity.

Now I get pissed if I can't get wireless where I am sitting at the event. How soon we forget.

 

I remember what a pain in the ass it was when you'd be somewhere and all the phones were multi-line phones, like at a school, and you couldn't use the direct phone jack link. So then you'd have to try the couplers, but that didn't work if it was too loud or the phone handset didnt fit right.

Once I was covering beach volleyball in LA (only event I ever covered with no shoes) and had to walk up the street into a flower shop or something in Manhattan Beach to file.

 

At our place, it was six = signs. But, oh, those couplers ... and using a direct connection wasn't much better. Our techies used to insist there wasn't a problem, even when I showed him exactly what was going on before taking off to softball regionals one year.

 

On one of my first road trips at my first job, I had to write a 34-inch feature on the Trash-80 where you could see four lines at a time... I remember being very excited when I got one with a flip screen a few months later... I'm pretty sure I still have it. Amazingly, they never asked for them back when we got real laptops in 1997 or so...

I remember when we got new laptops, we had one old-timer who refused to give his flip screen radio shack up. Apparently he used it for another decade or so until it finally came to the point where it wouldn't work with the system they'd upgraded to. I remember talking to a copy editor there and he said, "You do realize that (name) is the only reporter in the country who has probably never been on the Internet?"

 

Once your humble correspondent had about a 30-inch lead zapped by a short in that direct-connect coupler (this was on one of the old four-liners). This was one day after a 50-inch feature had been killed off by the same thing. I got the story re-written and refiled in time (barely), then walked outside of the media center and tossed the coupler into a creek.

 

We had multiple guys in the department who were dragged kicking and screaming into the laptop era. They badly wanted to hold onto their Radio Shacks, and actually did for a while.

"How the fuck are you supposed to get the story, then, if I don't press F4?!"

 

As a freelancer/stringer in the mid-'90s the TRS-80 was a must-have (which I realized after I got my first freelance gig ... and had nothing to write it on. Amazingly, I was able to type it on a normal computer, print it out and fax it over - the paper was out west and might have even been a p.m. paper).

But somehow I got one and it was great. Until it broke. I tried to get it fixed, but either they couldn't or the cost was something crazy. Luckily, I found a notice in the repair place for someone selling one for like $50 and used that one until *it* broke down. I was able to trade something - I think an old, broken down original mac I had - to a friend who had a Tandy 1100FD (I think).

Without those crappy things, I don't know how I would have survived working from around 1994-99.

 

I didn't use couplers (thankfully; just plugged it into a phone), but a friend of mine also had one in the early '90s and I remember being with him when he threw them across a hotel room. Multiple times.