Limiting the scope of what you're seeing is no longer a luxury, it has become a necessity to get any work done but this tendency to want to understand everything is hard to get rid of and a huge time-sink.
Couple that with the speed with which formats, protocols and technologies are obsoleted and you end up with an even more frustrating situation.
I suspect the next level of major real progress will come from simplification or a total reboot.
Even amongst actual TRS-80's, the Model I is only partly compatible with the Model III and Model 4.
The most useful thing I learned was my first security hack. Floppies (all we had) could be password-protected. The teacher's disks (with the video games) were password-protected so we couldn't copy or alter them. So put in your disk. Enter "current password". Replace it with teacher's disk. Enter "new password"...
