The Caffeinated Equine Thread

There aren't many dreams that make me shout myself awake so hard that it scratches my throat, but aliens seem to do it every time.

I am living in some kind of Truman Show.

I just got groceries delivered. And I got the same driver I always get. I don't usually order groceries on Monday evenings but that's just how it worked out this week. Same driver.

I also got vodka delivered. This is not at all a weekly thing. I make these bottles last a while. My schedule for ordering this is entirely unpredictable. And I got the same driver I always get for my vodka orders. But here's the kicker. I didn't even order it from my usual store. Doesn't matter. Same driver. Dude's name is Ivan. The writers aren't even trying.

In tonight's "I should have been in bed hours ago" computer project, I just managed to get a local weather report. On my Atari XE.

Okay it's just a virtual machine. Still complicated and frustrating to set up. I was not going to be able to sleep if I couldn't get it working. But it's working and I'm happy now.

I'm having fun. I've found my early computing home.

For those who don't recognize it, this is a TSR called Monte's Window, running on Montezuma CP/M for the TRS-80. It's like Borland Sidekick for CP/M. It's a lot clunkier to use than Sidekick, but feels like it actually might be more powerful in some ways. Which makes sense. Sidekick was a hack. This was made by the same company that sold the CP/M variant it's designed for, so they had an advantage in making the two work together.

If anything I said just sounds like "Meow meow meow" don't worry. You are normal.

I love this stupid old thing. It's so clunky to use, but powerful for what it is. I do not have a manual so I'm just trying stuff, and I'm impressed.

In the screenshot above I'm using Notepad. I went into Calendar first, and selected the current month. Obviously it is Y2K compatible. There's a menu option to send the calendar page to Notepad, so I tried that. I opened Notepad and there was my calendar, ready for whatever editing I wanted to do. Everything is just text, so transferring stuff between programs is trivial. At any moment I can send all the contents of the screen to Notepad. In 1984 this must have been awesome.

Man, seeing these old screens takes me back to my elementary school computer lab...

Yeah, I saw these too. Good old TRS-80. They actually didn't disappear from schools until the 90s. Hell of a run for an 8-bit computer.

Yeah, I remember being shocked in grade 9 when I saw my high-school had computers that had rgb monitors lol

If it works, it works. Tandy's school software was solid. Nothing really did anything better until IBM's SchoolView came along. I encountered that too, and it was great.