On Thu, 25 May 2017, Ancel B wrote:

Oh, well. I still have some RS parts on the blue card in the plastic bubble from 1979. Plus I have all 3 of the Transistor projects DIY books from Forrest Mimms and I built almost all of the projects. As a 14 yr old, with no internet, the projects were the only way to learn.

The most fun was the DC to DC converter that could zap people.

I also still have the portable Tandy / RS chess computer with 8 levels.I
don't think it works, but I suppose I could get in there and fix
it.Never opened it to see if the chips were socketed etc. I got up to
level 6 which took a looong time to make a move. Several hours
sometimes.

And it's probably not the software that's slow, but the processor.

I don't know when it came out, but I suspect it was an 8 bit cpu, which
likely ran at best 2MHz. Compare that with this computer, a Pentium
running at 3GHz, and I bet the same program would give results in a blink
on this (if only the program ran on a Pentium).

Michael