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I remember when it showed up at my door, in La Jolla, on Fay, over a thousand dollars left inside the screen door when no one was home. It’s a slight exaggeration to say it was too heavy to steal.

I set it up in my workroom, later my daughter’s room for the two years she came to live with us, then with me, and learned Tiny Pascal on it.  Built Knight’s Tour in that and other languages, including Z80 assembler, and even Basic. Put Forth on it, or tried to.

At a party once I’m told I promised it to a friend playing space invaders or something like that if she got a high enough score.

I remember a plane crash somewhere and a power surge that damaged the video memory. At one point I took it for repair to a place with a name that included “Fast Idiots.” Liked them.

Since it had extra graphic capabilities (compared to the TRS80) I did some fancy (for me, then) graphics stuff, putting randomly colored rectangles on the screen, overlaying each other in a loop.

Took it on “vacation” with me in the back of one of my VW bugs when I visited my ex-wife her husband and my daughter in her new house near Half Moon Bay, ran the graphics program and watched it from various locations around the two-story living room.

I moved the thing in a box to a garage in PB at some point, then to our house in Escondido, where it sat in a shed with the hot water heater for a bunch of years until today.  Now it looks more like an American Pickers find than the start of my programming career.  But plugged in, the light and fan come on, so it’s not completely dead.

Don’t know how to use it anymore, don’t have software for it, not sure about the connectors on the back, but loath to send it to the electronics recyclers, where it probably belongs.