Learn. Live. Love. An occassional glimpse of the Kaisers

I was playing with Xander upstairs and all of a sudden remembered this one Saturday, when I was probably 11 years old. Dad ordered pizza from “The Curve,” - a restaurant down the street from us on highway 121. That place went through more owners than you could count.

Anyway, this pizza was the first I ever had with ham on it, and I loved it. The crust was a bit chewy, and I remember something like corn meal on the bottom, probably there to help keep it from sticking to the pan.

The pizza memory leads to that same day, watching Doctor Who on WILL channel 12. It was a big thing for me, because I was watching my favorite show, eating ordered-in pizza (a rarity) and I was even allowed to eat it sitting on the floor in the living room. We usually made those Chef Boy Ar Dee pizzas from a box mix in the store. I think those were great!

WILL TV Logo

1983 WILL Station ID

The Doctor Who memory leads me to later, when the show was over, and the WILL station identification came on with some cool synth music. I will never forget that sound. In fact, before I started this post, I downloaded Anvil Studio for Windows just so I could compose that station identification sound to add to this post. It is attached here as an MP3 file. If you see a big “Play” triangle like on a VCR, you can click it to play the MP3 straight away.

Coco Ad

The WILL memory leads me to the TRS-80 Color Computer. That’s because I bought the plug-in Speech and Sound Pack at one point.

Speech and Sound Pack

That pack allowed you to create music in up to four tracks at once, which was a big deal at the time, on 8-bit computers! It had a built-in speech synthesizer, too. I sat for hours programming in ones and zeros to make the sound pack reproduce the WILL Station ID sound. It literally was ones and zeros, too. I learned about registers, instructions, etcetera from that card, because the only way to program it was in direct machine language. That was not fun, but very educational and has benefited me to this day.

That’s really all I have to say. This post was purely about reflection on the past. It really is a chewy memory, again from a time when I thought that with my computer and some due diligence I could pretty much rule the world.