My first computer was a Radio Shack's Tandy Color Computer 2. Not much, I was asking for a Commodore 128. But later on, I really came to appreciate that computer. The language I learned was BASIC which came with the computer. Extended Color Basic was what it was referred to on that machine. I went to learn everything I could on the machine.
As my programming talents got better and better, I learned real quick of the limitations to it's Basic language. It was slow, took more memory than it should at times, and was very limited. Finally, after much begging, my parents broke down and bought me a little cartridge called EDTASM+. With it, I was able to right smaller, extremely fast programs using the assembly language. But the drawback was that writing large programs became a nightmare if I tried to code everything in assembly. I succeeded at coding only two full programs in straight assembly. The rest was in Basic with a little dash of assembly to help it out. The most popular approach.
C was never heard of by me at the time. Even though the C compiler was available for the computer. It required a disk drive, which I did not have. Every program I wrote ad to be saved to cassette tape. (uugh)
Well, later on, around 1994, I got a new PC compatible computer and I thought I was in heaven. 8 megs of RAM, compared to 64K of my old machine. Disk drives! A much better Basic interpreter! Then finally, a C compiler! I never coded in assembly since I put my CoCo out to pasture. Of course assembly is just a mnemonic form of machine language which is different from machine to machine.
Well, enough of that stuff. Let's move on to something of value here.
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