BASIC Programs

I started writing in Z80 assembler only one month after receiving my Dick Smith System-80 computer. However, I still recall writing quite a lot of BASIC programs. Some of them are here (others I think are still on cassette tape and it will take another project to digitise the tapes into WAV files and feed them into an emulator to recover their contents).

BASIC is a ghastly language with no consistency of syntax and a variety of ad-hoc extensions (Disk BASIC for example). In most cases I can only guess at what these programs were written to do.

Also due to the lack of documentation (and also comments) on these programs it's possible that I have included code which I didn't actually write. If that is the case then I apologise and hope nobody will mind, after all these years.

appoint

Manage a calendar with appointments and reminders. Turn the computer into an alarm clock and bulletin board.

convert

Change spaces in EDTASM source files to tabs. That was important because some programs didn't understand about whitespace.

dialer

In 1981-1982 I discovered the joys of telephone decadic dialling. I found that dialling was basically a matter of breaking and making the telephone circuit sufficiently quickly for the dial counters in the exchange to count digits correctly. With a bit of practice I was able to dial using my fingers on the "on hook" plate. Sometime later I wired up a relay to my computer (or used the internal cassette relay) and wrote this little program to click the relay and dial. The program even had a timer to stop the user from spending too long on the telephone!

keyword

This program appears to alter the system to add an extra function to BASIC. Maybe somebody will decode the instructions one day.

life

This one plays Conway's Game Of Life.

lookit

A tiny program to allow me to view a part of a binary file on disk. The file is opened as a Random access file. I don't know if it shows more than one byte at a time. It certainly isn't a hex dumper!

morserec

Some programs to generate morse code (sounds) and parse received morse code. I remember earning some money by transcribing part of pilgrim's progress into Morse code. I also remember recording morse receiptions from my shortwave radio and the computer was able to decode some of it (that was way cool, particularly as I have never been able to understand morse code myself).

renumber

BASIC had a terrible problem: numbered lines (no labels!). The problem with these lines was often that there weren't enough gaps to add changes to the program. So the holy grail for basic programmers was the renumber utility, which was often itself written in BASIC. I have no idea how the renumber utility coexisted with the program which it was supposed to renumber, but it happened somehow. I remember using a version which renumbered the lines, but not the GOTO statements. How useless was that?! From what I recall, my version was much more functional but sometimes there just wasn't room for the new number (like "goto10" ... spaces were optional in some BASIC implementations). This program is probably a pretty good in-memory renumber utility.

roulette

It looks like this program simulates a roulette player following a betting algorithm.

wordproc

This is a Word Processor, 1981 style. It's notable because it says TRILOBYTE SOFTWARE which is what I called my business in High School, and because the file contains linefeeds and other unexpected characters. It looks like this one will need some cleaning up. Don't give up your Micro$oft Word installations just yet.

Download

• trs80-basic-1.0.tar.gz