TRS-80 Computer Whiz Kids

TRS-80 Computer Whiz Kids
Archie Comics / Tandy Corporation
March, August, October, 1984

My local comic book store got in a large pile of old, 1980s comics, and lying within the pile was this giveaway book, published by Archie Comics in 1984. It was a part of the Tandy Corporation's efforts to promote the TRS-80 personal computer, sold by Radio Shack.

Whenever I look around today and see junior high and high school kids sitting with their smartphones, I feel like tossing them a copy of 'Whiz Kids' to let them know how it was, 30 years ago.....

The TRS-80 was first introduced in 1977, and by 1984, had been upgraded to the Model 4:

One of the more surreal aspects to the 'Whiz Kids' comic is that the artists, Dick Ayers and Chic Stone, were regular contributors to the super schlocky, deranged Eerie Publications black and white comic magazines...... !

I won't belabor the plot of 'Whiz Kids', which deals with an effort by a criminal gang to hold an entire museum hostage. Schoolchildren Shanna and Alec use their knowledge of computers - and Tandy products - to foil the gang.

What is interesting is the promotional blurbs for the TRS-80 that occupy much of the narrative.

In these pages, Shanna demonstrates how to boot up the TRS-80's word processing program, 'Scripsit' :

The demonstration is interrupted by the arrival of ace reporter Judy Baker, who shows off her 'portable' PC, the TRS-80 Model 100 (the machines we know as laptops really didn't exist back in 1984).

Judy also demonstrates a primitive modem - the 'acoustic coupler' !

That's how you communicated with other electronics, through phone lines, back then.....

Later on in the story, the class takes a trip to the museum (the same museum where the crime gang are plotting to hold everyone hostage). There, Mr. Anderson walks them through an exhibit devoted to explaining the operating principles of the modern computer:

To defeat the criminals, Judy Baker, Alec, and Shanna make use the Judy's Model 100 and acoustic coupler to send word to the authorities:

The criminals are of course soon brought to justice, thanks to Judy, Alec, and Shanna. As the comic ends, the kids eagerly rush to boot up their Model 4s....along with the 'Network 3 Controller' software, which enabled up to 16 TRS-80s to be locally networked for learning purposes.

If you read 'Whiz Kids' back in the Summer of '84 and wanted a Model 4, well, how much did you have to shell out ? Depending on the memory and floppy drive capacity, anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000....compared to today's PCs, this was quite a bit of money at the time. And it didn't include peripherals, like a printer or modem. But still, it was competitive with IBM's PC Jr, which retailed for $670 - $1270, and it was even more affordable than the Apple MacIntosh ($2495).

In case a new Model 4 was beyond your means, Radio Shack had less costly merchandise that allowed kids to experience the thrills of modern electronics and computing....

That's how it was in those ancient days......nowadays, a single smartphone has more computing power than the TRS-80. Who knows what the next 30 years will bring ?

Book Review: Count Zero

Book Review: 'Count Zero' by William Gibson

5 / 5 Stars

‘Count Zero’ was first published in hardback in 1986; this Ace paperback edition (246 pp) was released in April, 1987. The cover artwork is by Richard Berry,

‘Count’ is the second volume in Gibson’s so-called ‘Sprawl’ trilogy, with ‘Neuromancer’ (1984) the initial volume, and ‘Mona Lisa Overdrive’ (1988) the third volume. 

Thus, ‘Count’ is set in the same locales as Neuromancer, but several years after the events in that book; some of the characters in Neuromancer, as well as in several of Gibson’s short stories (such as ‘Burning Chrome’), make oblique appearances in ‘Count’.

Count Zero opens with quintessential cyberpunk prose, prose that revived sf writing from the doldrums into which it had fallen by the time of the mid-80s:

They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street named Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

He didn’t see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco façade of a place called the Kush-Oil Hotel.

It’s not disclosing spoilers to relate that Turner, a mercenary who specializes in supervising the defection of high-level scientific researchers from their corporate overseers, recovers from his attempted murder. He then gets recruited for a particularly dangerous defection job, one calling for a secretive operation in the remote Arizona desert. Turner suspects someone on his team of black market mercenaries, hackers, and medics is probably a saboteur, but he isn't certain as to their exact identity......and H-hour draws ever closer........

Bobby Newmark, aka ‘Count Zero’, is a young wannabe cyberspace cowboy who lives in his mother’s apartment in a seedy neighborhood in New Jersey. As the novel opens, Count Zero is trying a new hacking program that recently has gotten loose on the streets of the Sprawl. To Newmark’s dismay, it turns out that this is no ordinary hacking program, and when counterintrusion software, or ‘black ice’, mounts a response, Count Zero finds himself jacked into his Ono-Sendai deck, paralyzed, drooling, peeing his pants, and seconds away from dying…….

In Paris, Marly Krushkova, the former owner of a small art gallery, is contacted by the cyberspace avatar of the world’s richest man, Josef Virek. Virek hires Marly to find one Joseph Cornell, the reclusive genius who has crafted an unusual series of diorama-style artworks, artworks that command astronomical prices. As Marly sets out to track down Cornell, she discovers that someone else is interested in locating the artist….interested enough to commit murder…..

In ‘Count Zero’ these three plot threads eventually coalesce to illuminate corporate conspiracies, casual violence, and the manipulations of cyberspace by entities unknown.

As with 'Neuromancer', 'Count' is not the easiest read; it offer's Gibson's dense, descriptive prose, crammed with neologisms and idioms. Readers will need to accustom themselves to Gibson's idiosyncratic approach to writing; for example, passages describing a desert landscape or a neighborhood of the Sprawl or the depths of cyberspace may be lengthy and adjective-filled, while important plot developments are related in clipped, casual sentences that are easily overlooked. 

However, as the second novel from Gibson, 'Count' stands out as a worthy sequel to Neuromancer, proving that Gibson was no one-hit wonder and that cyberpunk would have an impact on sf equivalent to, if not greater than, the New Wave movement. It remains an important contribution to the cyberpunk Canon.

Last of the Dragons

Last of the Dragons by Carl Potts

 

‘Last of the Dragons’ was a six-part comic serialized in Marvel’s Epic Illustrated magazine, starting with the December, 1982 issue (No. 15) through to October, 1983 issue (No. 20).

‘Dragons’ was one of the best, and perhaps the best, comics to appear in the entire run of Epic Illustrated. It not only took advantage in the interest in all things Japanese that marked the early 80s, but it featured a very well-organized and engaging storyline from Carl Potts, one that works in ancient Chinese and Japanese mythology, ninjas, Asian philosophy, violent combat, and, of course, dragons. 

Potts delivered outstanding artwork. Inker Terry Austin ably supported Potts’s pencils, while Marie Severin showed what she could do as a colorist when given quality color separations and the opportunity to print on ‘slick’ magazine-style paper. 

This Epic Comics graphic novel (64 pp), published in 1988 in large format on quality paper, compiles the complete ‘Dragon’, as well as offering an afterward section in which photographs and bio sketches are provided for all the contributors.

Anyone with an interest in fantasy with an Asian / Oriental flavor, or a graphic novel of high quality, will want to pick up a copy of ‘Last of the Dragons’. Copies are available from your usual retailers for very reasonable prices.

The Bus by Kirchner

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

Book Review: Orbit 3

Book Review: 'Orbit 3' edited by Damon Knight

1 / 5 Stars

‘Orbit 3’ (224 pp.) was published by Berkley Books in September, 1968. The cover artwork is uncredited, but is almost certainly by Paul Lehr.

The ‘Orbit’ series was the quintessential New Wave anthology in the US, and I approach each volume with a faint hope that two or three stories might possibly be coherent.... and readable. I have learned that such an approach is warranted and justifiable. And so it is with Orbit 3…….

My summaries of the contents:

‘Mother to the World’ by Richard Wilson: in the aftermath of a plague, the only people left alive on Earth are Martin Rolfe and Siss Beamer. Both are fertile and willing to play Adam and Eve. The catch ? Siss is mentally retarded.........

This isn’t a particularly impressive tale, and by the standards of the modern era of the Special Olympics and being disABLED, it is politically incorrect. However, it does address one of the more wrenching aspects of the End of the World: what is to be the fate of all the poor animals left in their cages and fish tanks ?

‘Bramble Bush’ by Richard McKenna: in his preface to this story, editor Damon Knight reveals he first read this story in 1960, when the author presented it at a writer’s conference; Knight found the story incomprehensible.

However, after McKenna died in 1964, his widow provided Knight with her husband’s unpublished manuscripts, and Knight changed his mind and agreed to publish ‘Bramble’ in 'Orbit 3'. Bad move; this is the worst story in the anthology. The plot has something to do with a team of explorers confronting perceptual problems on an alien planet. The dialogue is embarrassingly bad, like something from 1930s – era fanfic. What was Knight thinking ?!

‘The Barbarian’ by Joanna Russ: this story features Russ’s proto-barbarian heroine, Alyx. A magician with evil intentions coerces Alyx into assisting him in his transgressions. This is probably the best entry in the anthology.

‘The Changeling’ by Gene Wolfe: a man returns to his hometown, and discovers a childhood acquaintance is not what he seems. While the ending is vague and unfocused, this is one of Wolfe’s less obtuse, and more readable, stories. 

‘Why They Mobbed the White House’ by Doris Pitkin Buck: this short story won a contest hosted by ‘Data Processing’ magazine (!). It’s a humorous treatment of the ‘can computers really do it better ?' theme.

‘The Planners’ by Kate Wilhelm: a scientist ponders the implications of a treatment that enhances the intelligence of chimpanzees. As with several of Wilhelm’s other stories written in the 60s, the narrative shifts in time and place, and interweaves passages of real and imaged events, without any framing devices, leaving it to the reader to try and parse out what is happening when and where. This New Wave affectation hasn’t aged well.

‘Don’t Wash the Carats’ by Philip Jose Farmer: short-short tale about a man with a diamond for a brain; an effort at absurdist sf. It’s not very good.

‘Letter to a Young Poet’ by James Sallis: Sallis was a frequent contributor to New Wave anthologies, mainly because everything he wrote was ‘speculative fiction’, with the most superficial trappings of sf – and thus, irresistable to editors like the hapless Damon Knight. In this tale, the aging narrator, writing in his study on a far-off planet, provides advice to.….a young poet.

‘Here is thy Sting’ by John Jakes: a man discovers that the coffin transporting his late brother’s corpse has disappeared under suspicious circumstances; his investigation of the disappearance leads him to a disturbing scientific endeavor. This novelette starts on a note of satire, but in its latter stages actually veers, to an effective degree, into horror. 

Had it been shorter in length and more focused, it could have been one of John Jakes’ best short stories. 

Summing up, ‘Orbit 3’ delivers barely digestible New Wave content…. I suspect that only hardcore fans of this sub-genre of sf will find much here to reward them.

Car Warriors issue 3

Car Warriors
issue 3
Epic Comics / Marvel, August, 1991

In issue 3, the big race - The DeLorean Run -  finally gets underway......and the Wysockis, my favorite entrants, are doing well......

But when all is said and done,there can only be one winner.....here it is, part three of 'Car Warriors' !

Book Review: The Glass Cage

Book Review: 'The Glass Cage' by Colin Wilson

3 / 5 Stars

You have to admire the calculated, underhanded, deceptive way that Bantam Books went and took a 1966 novel by Colin Wilson, gave it a ‘scary’ cover, and marketed it as an ‘occult’ thriller akin to The Exorcist.

The reality behind this 249 pp. book, released in July, 1973, is that it has essentially no ‘occult’ or supernatural content, and even further, its crime novel / murder mystery aspects are quite muted.

‘The Glass Cage’ is set in England, in the mid-60s. As the novel opens, Damon Reade,the country’s foremost scholar of William Blake, the 18th century poet, is visited at his Lake District cottage by a London police detective. It seems that a serial killer is loose in London, having butchered nine people to date. Some of the so-called 'Thames Murders' were marked by the mutilation and dismemberment of the hapless victims. And where some of the bodies (or parts of bodies) were discovered, the authorities have found quotations from Blake’s poetry written in chalk on nearby walls.

Reade has been visited by the London police in order to learn if he is aware of any Blake scholars who might be of a murderous or fanatical bent. But Reade cannot come up with any real suspects. Intrigued, and finding himself bored by his self-isolated lifestyle, Reade decides to make for London. There he contacts his friends among the city's artsy set, and recruits them to assist with his own investigation of the murders.

While the term ‘psychological profiling’ of serial killers is an unknown concept in mid-60s London, as the novel unfolds, Reade comes to display an innate ability to divine the motives, and personality, underlying the gruesome actions of the ‘Thames Murderer’.

But when Damon Reade personally meets his prime suspect, he is beset with doubts: for the suspect seems a harmless, disaffected dilettante…..or is he ? In order to arrive at the truth, Reade will have to place his own life in danger…….

‘The Glass Cage’, as I said at the beginning of this review, is devoid of supernatural content, and it’s not really a detective novel, either (no new murder takes place in the entirety of the narrative, for example). It’s mainly a literary platform on which author Wilson promotes his philosophy of ‘new existentialism’, through the vehicle of the dialogue passages that make up the bulk of the narrative. These are well-written and make for an easy read, but at the same time, readers looking for a genuine thriller will be very disappointed.

For me, the main value of ‘Cage’ was its setting; Wilson perfectly captures the cultural and social aspects of the swinging London of the mid-60s, where attractive young women in short skirts are plentiful and willing, and it doesn’t matter if you are a bohemian artist, or an affluent businessmen. Wilson adopts a point of view in which the reader sees the London scene, and its carefree and youthful energy, through the eyes of the somewhat sheltered Reade.

Summing up, ‘The Glass Cage’ is really a novel about the insights Wilson’s new existentialism could bring to understanding human nature, including its more aberrant aspects. Fans of Wilson’s work will probably find the book interesting, but those looking for an occult thriller are better off avoiding this novel.