Well, I've succumbed to pressure... in response to several emails (well, twelve, exactly),  I'm finally updating The 4P Diaries.  Despite the extremely long period between updates, not much has changed.  I'm still using the 4P (and TED/CMD) to do the vast majority of my writing, but I haven't fooled around with VisiCalc much.  I loaded VisiCalc to see if it ran, but that was the extent of my usage.  That reminds me, I have several dozen text files to export to my P166MMX...

I recently (four months ago...) picked up a Tandy 1000SX along with two printers, a DMP-130 and a DMP-302 for a song at a thrift store.  The Tandy 1000SX has a card-edge Parallel port (as opposed to a DB25 port), the same as my 4P!  So, I connected the DMP-130 to the 4P and tried printing a document from TED.  Ugh, gotta figure out how to send carriage returns and line feeds from the 4P.  Probably just a software setting, but I'll get to that later.

I've also been perusing www.trs-80.com for more useful things, and I picked up a book called "Graphics and Animation on the TRS-80" on eBay.  Of course, the book was already freely available for download as a PDF from Ira's site, but I'd rather have the book in front of me while working from it, instead of having to concentrate on two or more machines at once, or wasting a hundred pages printing the PDF out...

Speaking of useful things, I may start to develop software for the 4P.  I haven't decided WHAT I'm going to develop (as I have little programming experience outside of BASIC), but I welcome the challenge.  Any development on a so-called "dead" platform can only be seen as good in my book!  And heck, if I write something in C, I can always port it over to other systems, too, and vice-versa.

So, The 4P Diaries are not dead.  They were "just resting".  Or "pining for the fjords"...

CJ
02/19/2006