Don Inman

The cover title, Advanced TRS-80 Level II BASIC: A Learning Guide, is by Radio Shack. According to the title page, the book was originally published as, More TRS-80 BASIC. This book is a follow-up to TRS-80 Level II BASIC (1980) by Inman, Albrecht, and Zamora.

This book shows you how to get the most out of PEEK and POKE to use your TRS-80 more efficiently. This book also teaches graphics, animation, and file-handling (both cassette and disk).

Since this is a self-teaching guide, the writers assume that the readers are sitting in front of a TRS-80 computer. Their motto is "Let the TRS-80 be your teacher."

The chapters are intended to be studied in sequence. They proceed from less challenging to more challenging lessons and exercises.… (más)

This book is devoted to the use of Radio Shack's T-BUG Monitor and Debugging Aid. T-BUG came with a tiny 8-page instruction manual, barely enough to start using T-BUG, making this 120-page handbook a godsend.

The TRS-80 used a Z-80, 8-bit processor, with a clock speed of 1.78 MHz. You can access the Z-80's hexadecimal machine language registers directly by using Radio Shack's T-BUG monitor program. T-BUG was available on cassette tape. In my Radio Shack Catalog, T-BUG was recommended for use by advanced programmers who had a working knowledge of machine language.

My 7th grade son's first steps in machine language programming were taken with the aid of T-BUG on a TRS-80 Model I Microcomputer with 16KB of RAM.

The Inmans taught the use of T-BUG by means of seven problems: (1) talking to the computer, (2) displaying data from memory, (3) using the recorder, (4) gaming, (5) drawing your own graphics, (6) games using graphics, and (7) debugging with T-BUG.

A late friend of mine, a nuclear engineer who worked for TVA, kept the Brown's Ferry Nuclear Plant online back in the late 1970s by writing a Fast Fourier Transform program in machine language using T-BUG on his TRS-80. The program was used to measure the safety of the temperature changes taking place inside the big concrete cooling towers. When the telephone lines connecting the northern Alabama plant to TVA headquarters in Knoxville, Tennessee, went down, temperature monitoring was lost and safety was abridged. My friend would throw his TRS-80 into the back of his car, drive to Alabama, set up his computer, and manually enter temperature samplings into his machine language program. Results were almost instantaneous because of the speed of machine language execution on the TRS-80.… (más)