CompuServe Messages

Denny's Mischevious Teen Years, circa 1979: Radio Shack used to run a BASIC demo program on their b&w TRS-80 Model I and III units. I used to go in and quickly type in a short subroutine that would print TRASH-80 instead of TRS-80 about every five minutes, but only for about 10 seconds, so that by the time someone showed the salesperson it would be back to TRS-80. 🙂 More fun, but harder to implement, was the elaborate rewrite of Commodore's PET demo that some high-school buddies and I would take in and surreptuously load on on the PET 2001s in the store in the Burnsville Mall in Minnesota. It would get to a "type your name" prompt — present in the original demo — but as soon as you'd hit a key it would print a "Key pressed too hard.. ERROR!" message, followed by "CHIP Failure" and eventually it would start making the speaker hooked to the User Port scream a horrible noise before finally filling the screen with random characters and then suddenly blanking it. <grin> Certainly scared the bejesus out of the largely computer illiterate browsers of the day. Of course, we'd be watching this from a store across the mall aisle. 🙂 And to think — today I set an example for hundreds of thousands of novice computer users who read a certain national computer magazine. <evil grin> (Hey, I was 14 at the time 🙂