For today’s comic I used this handy ASCII art generator.

While I was there I also used their teriffic favicon maker. A favicon, if you don’t know, is one of those little images that appears next to the URL of some sites who have them in the address bar and favorites listings of most browsers. These are a pain in the butt to make for various reasons, or at least they were until I found this site tonight… very cool thing to find.

Thanks for the inspiration to Dave Steinlicht for making the first Soapy ASCII art in the comments here, which is much funnier. Dave did his ASCII by hand, the old fashioned way, and I bet it isn’t the first time, considering his other interests. Do yourself a favor and check out David’s comics at allsmall.net and cornercomic.com.

My first computer was a TRS-80, back in the early 80’s… here is what I used for a reference to go off of for what it looked like…

http://computermuseum.50megs.com/images/collection/trs80-III.jpg

It had no graphics. No internet. The only program I remember having for it was a haunted house text game that we had on a casette tape (the computer’s only storage was a tape recorder hooked up to it). The TRS-80 was a Radio Shack computer, affectionately and appropriately referred to as the “Trash-80” by computer geeks.

Soapy is actually not the first cartoon character to own a TRS-80… that honor goes to Superman! Superman starred in some comics in the 80’s with the TRS-80 Whiz Kids… they had piles of these for free in the front of every Radio Shack. And now you can read one for free online!