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Do you mean the "Figure-8" free return trajectory and free return trajectories invented by the noted physicist & programmer and Dr. Jack Crenshaw, who was actually using a computer?

Colonel David Winthrop of World Power Systems. (I had to go and look it up!) He sold interesting, inexpensive, and miraculous hardware to unsuspecting customers. And it WORKED!

Well, the sale did, anyway. Nothing like advertising a little and having the money pile up for free! All you have to do is keep pushing out the delivery time a bit more.

Oh, that was also the time I first got burned with a floppy? manufacturer at a computer shop. We'd call the vendor to hear "You're the only one having that problem, it must be you" and believe them, and then try to fix it ourselves. A year or so later, found out that they were telling that to EVERYONE that called.

The Beginning of The End of Innocence -- at least for me. Now I'm just an old cynical bastard who still wants to believe but can't. (Yet I still try occasionally.)

Back when Moby Dick was a minnow (ca. 1980) there was an article in 80 Microcomputing magazine about bubble sort.

I wrote it in BASIC and the project was extremely useful, amazing, and fun, for a hobbyist working to grok the programming idea.

The downfall came in the early 90's when code and circuit diagrams were replaced by words, business takeovers, strategies and product recommendations. See BYTE!

Yeah, sad for me too. When I was a kid, in the late 1970s, with an interest in robotics and computers., my father and I would visit Radio Shacks to get various parts for my projects. Often he would drop me off at one specific one while he shopped around the mall, and I'd look at all the parts, and maybe type in some simple BASIC programs on a TRS-80. Usually when he came back he would pay for one or two small items of parts, like some LEDs or optoisolators or a pack of eight simple ICs (half of which often did not work well) or a relay or something like that. People in Radio Shacks on Long Island seemed to used to recognize us as a pair, perhaps in part because my dad was old enough to be my grandfather. On my website front page is a picture of of the robots I made that included Radio Shack parts (mostly for the interface between a Commodore PET and the robot motors, which included optoisolators and relays -- the RS relays sometimes stuck and smoked and I had to whack the relay box to fix it. :-). I miss those days in many ways, especially now that my father is gone. Thanks Dad!

I learned much about electronics from various cheap electronics guides there, and much about the fundamentals of programming from Dr. David A. Lien's "Users' Manual for Level 1 TRS-80 Micro Computer System" which had various exercises in it. I did not have a TRS-80 at home, but I would work out the exercises with pencil and paper. I just picked up that manual from my bookshelves as I wrote this to check the author's name. Thanks Dr. Lien!

Looking up his name just now on the WWW, I see this interesting tidbit about a free and open source connection to my learning back then I was not aware of until now:
http://www.trs-80.org/level-1-...
"Level I BASIC was based on âoePalo Alto Tiny BASICâ, a 2K version of Tiny BASIC written by Dr. Li-Chen Wang for the May 1976 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal. Because Dr. Li Chen-Wang placed his BASIC in the public domain (he labeled it "@COPYLEFT; ALL WRONGS RESERVED"), Steve Leininger, the designer of the TRS-80, was able to use it as a starting point. He added floating point math, cassette, keyboard, and video routines, doubling the size of the original code to 4K."

Anyway, makes me want to run out to a Radio Shack with my kid right now to buy something! Although it's also true I later learned I could buy higher quality parts for less elsewhere. Even now I could get a better Raspberry Pi on Amazon then what Radio Shack lists for more money on their website. And one trip to a store pushed by a father out of nostalgia is not the same as many trips to a store pushed by a kid.

Going to Radio Shacks years later was such a different experience, with the focus on selling cell phones and such. That did seem to be changing back to more educational DIY recently though. You would think Radio Shack would somehow have floated high on the maker movement, but apparently not, sadly. This also reminds me a bit of the "Sears" issue. Sears, given the history of the Sears catalog, should have dominated online sales the way Amazon ultimately did. But Sears somehow could not make the transition. It's so expensive to keep up a store front of course, so the price difference is understandable. It would take something else to make them a compelling destination, like a bigger emphasis on hands-on demos or training or starting MakerSpaces next door or something like that. Or maybe unique starter its with more stuff in them, even if they cost more.

I hope even in bankruptcy that Radio Shack retiree pensions are still paid out!

We used a single byte to store the offset from 1900 in binary.

Most TRS-80 operating systems figured 3 bits was enough to store an offset from 1980, so we've already lived through the Y1.988k bug.

When I was in high school my dad's office had a couple of TRS-80 model 2s (cassette tapes!) and a model 3 (8" floppies!) and after school I'd go to his office and spend ages playing The Asylum (see http://www.trs-80.org/asylum/) It was awesome. Even more so than the school's sole Apple ][, the "trash 80" introduced me to programming and I taught myself z80 assembler in an effort to write my own version of Scramble (see http://www.arcade-gameover.com/scramble.asp) as I quickly realised that BASIC was never going to cut it. I ended up nearly failing year 12 because I spend most of that year writing a text adventure game I called The Cave. I was forced to abandon it eventually and get my grades back up so as to get into university. I also spent a lot of time playing Taipan on the model 3. (see http://cymonsgames.com/taipan/)

I moved on to the Apple ][ after that, and then, at uni, the PDP 11, and then the Mac in 1984. Messed about with BBCs, Acorns, Apricots, and a bunch of other machines I can't even remember the names of but never left the Mac since then. Friends had Vic-20s and Commodore 64s and Ataris but I never really got into those. Nice to see there are TRS-80 emulators for the Mac at http://sdltrs.sourceforge.net/

If you ignore the TRS80 and the Commodore. Both way outsold the every version of the Apple II line and just about every one of those two was in a home. Maybe we have a different version of "mainstream" and "friendly". Anyone who used any computer back then was a geek or nerd, Apple or not.

http://www.trs-80.org/was-the-trs-80-once-the-top-selling-computer/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64

Thank you!!

Although the one I played was not Labyrinth, there were links on that page that led me to the correct game. The game I remember seems to be the predecessor to Labyrinth, Deathmaze 5000. http://www.trs-80.org/deathmaze-5000/

Now to see if there is a Linux or PC port.

Labyrinth?

http://www.trs-80.org/labyrinth/