It was how I learned BASIC. I didn't write a lot, but one of the things was a rudimentary altitude calculator I could use to figure out how high my model rockets flew. Enter the distance from launchpad, and angle from you to the rocket, and there it was. I was hooked.
Back in 1982 I got the complete pocket TRS-80 with the mini-printer-plotter and the RS-232 communication interface, plus the handy carrying case.
Full documentation was amazing.
Since it was a plotter it could sign your name to the ticket if you took the time to program the coordinates, and the pen moved like someone was actually writing with it. You could also do graphics on the LCD, animation was not too hard.
I had already done some scientific & industrial programming on Atari and Commodores which came out pretty good, and this was going to be a portable version for carrying on board cargo ships to make some difficult independent calculations at the end of the bulk transfer.
It took hours to work through the forms the traditional way with a hand calculator.
If you saw me going up the gangway with it like everybody else does with their laptop today, you probably would have thought nothing of it.
But the IBM PC had just been launched and it would be well over a decade before laptops even became a thing.
Back in the office we got the next model when the good one was discontinued, the newer one would actually fit in the pocet of your coveralls, so no little suitcase.
But it only had 0.5K of memory and I was going to fit in the massive measurement tables which had been finally standardized in 1980 as an algorithm that had been reduced to a few pages of 32-bit Fortran. Floating point and heavily commented by high-stakes engineers with strict instructions during steps when numerical rounding was necessary. From that point on the official values were those generated by the code or from tables printed from the code.
It was the right thing to do but it was only an 8-bit pocket computer.
Had to scale down using a non-universal rudimentary version of Gustafson's UNUMs, and re-algorithm using integer math so it did not resemble the official code at all.
Then without a 32-bit machine, had to come up with some way to check the output, this required the TRS-80 having the 2K of memory to be connected to the little one.
This one had a completely different program. It was quite adversarial though not much of a network, it took almost a week and only caught 3 suspected errors which were confirmed incorrect by looking them up in the full 83,000-entry Fortran reference printout.
Never did know how many incorrect entries my artificial not-so-intelligent approach failed to detect.
I guess it might have changed my life too.
I wouldn't say it changed an industry, they're all boarding vessels using laptops now not TRS-80's.
It was how I learned BASIC. I didn't write a lot, but one of the things was a rudimentary altitude calculator I could use to figure out how high my model rockets flew. Enter the distance from launchpad, and angle from you to the rocket, and there it was. I was hooked.
I think it changed my life.