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Back when Moby Dick was a minnow (ca. 1980) there was an article in 80 Microcomputing magazine about bubble sort.

I wrote it in BASIC and the project was extremely useful, amazing, and fun, for a hobbyist working to grok the programming idea.

The TRS-80 Model II was the business version of the early Radio Shack computers.

We bought one in 1979 and used it for for five years until we bought one of the first Macs in 1984.

The Model II had a word processor, database, and spreadsheet program.

http://www.trs-80.com/wordpres...

I've always thought they should have combination printers which can both add and take away material. Imagine this, something similar to those old multi-pen plotters, but with an arm that has a very large range of motion. And instead of just picking up pens, it could pick up various tools. There could be tools which extrude plastic, metal, and other materials, as well as cutting and sanding tools. You could build completely finished products using robots.

computers are available for just a few hundred $, even portable ones.

Just as they were 30 years ago:

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/files/nodes/1210/vic20.jpg

http://www.trs-80.com/adver/ad-model-102-computer-%5B26-3803%5D-(rs).jpg

http://www.ganjatron.net/retrocomputing/zx81/cc128207a.jpg

Another JavaScript TRS-80 Model III emulator (with non-obscurified code): http://trs-80.com/
JavaScript Apple ][: http://www.megidish.net/apple2js/
JavaScript Linux PC: http://bellard.org/jslinux/
etc.

(also the C64 emulator mentioned above)

JavaScript is the new 8-bit emulation hotness!

I still have my old tandy with whopping 4k of ram somewhere: http://www.trs-80.com/images/computer-pc5x300.gif Boy I miss that thing. I remember writing little programs for my physics class. It was also handy to write out equations "long hand" to make sure I entered them properly. If I buy a cell-palm-top, am I just trying to relive junior high? Maybe I won't get beat up so much this time.

Several readers have already commented on some things that made programming natural for us in the olden days of yore.

As for point 5 in the parent post, he's (she's?) right find documentation written for beginning programmers.

The Level I Users Manual by David Lien (1977) has been considered the gold standard in teaching beginners how to program. You have simply got to read it to appreciate it (putting it in the context of small machines).
    http://www.trs-80.com/trs80-hw.htm
    http://www.trs-80.com/cgi-bin/linkmehw.pl?Level_1_ Users_Manual_(1977)(David_Lien)(pdf).zip

Several colleges made their comp sci students buy this book, to show them how to write manuals, years later....

I used this thing when I was 10 and very quickly learned computing and programming without any other outside help.

Computers were simpler back then. Kids' expectations for computers were, too.... So was documentation.

David Lien did an incredible job with this book and I don't believe his craft has ever been duplicated.

Several readers have already commented on some things that made programming natural for us in the olden days of yore.

As for point 5 in the parent post, he's (she's?) right find documentation written for beginning programmers.

The Level I Users Manual by David Lien (1977) has been considered the gold standard in teaching beginners how to program. You have simply got to read it to appreciate it (putting it in the context of small machines).
    http://www.trs-80.com/trs80-hw.htm
    http://www.trs-80.com/cgi-bin/linkmehw.pl?Level_1_ Users_Manual_(1977)(David_Lien)(pdf).zip

Several colleges made their comp sci students buy this book, to show them how to write manuals, years later....

I used this thing when I was 10 and very quickly learned computing and programming without any other outside help.

Computers were simpler back then. Kids' expectations for computers were, too.... So was documentation.

David Lien did an incredible job with this book and I don't believe his craft has ever been duplicated.

I could get used to it. My first computer was a TRS-80 color computer (with 16k). This was a fairly early model with a "chicklet" keyboard. Note, mine was like the silver model, not the white one.

Ira Goldklang has collected thousands of TRS-80 programs at trs-80.com but when the authors of some of these programs were tracked down, they admitted that their original source code had been lost - thrown away or media unreadable.

I had one of these! http://www.trs-80.com/images/computer-m80.gif Was the FIRST computer my father bought for his factory and ended up at home around 1989 (for the kids, you know)... Compatibility: TRS-80 Model III / IV CPU: Z 80A Clock: 2 MHz RAM : 48 Kbytes ROM: 16 Kbytes Screen: 16 lines x 64 columns (80 x 24 when running SO-08, CP/M 2.2 compatible OS)

Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?

How rude! That is more memory than my first computer. Remember your somewhat old TRS-80 that had no graphics memory?

Well, even though this is off-topic, i'm going to give a link for any TRS-80 fans out there.

Ira Goldklang's TRS-80 Revived Site

What do I look like, your mother? Use Google!

Here is the ROM:

http://www.trs-80.com/trs80-3m.htm

Here is the emulator:

http://www.trs-80.com/trs80-e.htm

What do I look like, your mother? Use Google!

Here is the ROM:

http://www.trs-80.com/trs80-3m.htm

Here is the emulator:

http://www.trs-80.com/trs80-e.htm

Hehe, went to look this up, hoping to be the first to give that particular bit of refutation. Now I'll just have to settle for giving a link. Came out in 1983, suckas!

I have no idea how old the guy is, but surely he can't be so young as to not remember some of the hoops we had to jump through back in the old, 8 bit, tape-based days?

It's been twenty years since my first exposure to gaming on a tape-based machine; that was typing in lines of BASIC code just to play a simulated game of darts, so the author could be too young to remember the heady TRS-80 days.

Jack

my TRS-80 (Trash 80). It has a whole 16k of RAM, but double the processing power with 2Mhz. An ethernet adapter would seem better suited for this monster.

Tim Mann puts out a TRS-80 emulator for X that compiles easily on x86 Linux and which runs these Trash 80 binary image files. Included in the list is Deathmaze 5000, Labyrinth, and Asylum. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any screenshots for comparison with yours. I'm seem to remember that Deathmaze first came out in 1979, and then the other two games came out in the years thereafter. I think Deathmaze actually does predate 3D Monster Maze, but only by a couple years. Excellent screenshot, BTW. Thanks! --M

Here's an interesting tidbit from the article (emphasis mine):

The hydrodemolition robot is still considered relatively new technology, having first been used in 1984.

That's like saying that my TRS-80 Model 100 (with home-built speech synthesizer connected to the parallel port) is cutting edge.

I guess if the construction industry advanced at the rate Slashdot readers are accustomed, demolition would look like the final scene in One Froggy Evening, where the construction worker of the future is clearing debris with a ray gun (and finds the singing frog cached away by his 1950s counterpart).

That was written by Thomas J. Ryan. Yes, I'll grant you the story seems terribly implausible today. But, I also feel obliged to point out that the story is Copyright 1977. Let's assume it took about a year to write, edit, and publish. That puts its writing BEFORE the time that the TRS-80 was introduced! So, I'll grant the author some artistic freedom.

FWIW, my copy (dated 1985) has this on the back cover:

"This is the best novel about artificial intelligence that I have ever read. When I finished it, I felt that I, like Gregory, could sit down and 'hack out' an artificial intelligence program. And so I did." - Lloyd Johnson, co-creator -- with Fred Saberhagen -- of the computer games "Berserker Raids" and "Wizard War".

And, I must confess that the idea of being able to do something like that was quite a motivation in my own career in computers. Not that I ever did it, but it opened my eyes to possibilities that I'd never even contemplated before.

If this wasn't a problem for us geeks 20 years ago, why is it a problem now?

And yes. I was a heavy duty PC4 user. Mine is dead now, but I keep it on my desk at work as a memento.

I also bought one of the tiny little ones, and still use it. Mine is labelled as per the subject line even though it doesn't have a Z-80 in it, and the keyboard layout is a little different than yours: see a picture of it here. According to that page, mine was introduced in 1980, but I bought it in 1983 when the line was discontinued for the whopping price of $CAD 65 (including the soft case and cassette interface).

Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 3~

The Model 3 didn't come in a laptop. It was a battleship-grey "desktop." The Model 4 they had a luggable version (the 4p: p=it will rip your arm right off!).

The TRS-80 laptop line started with the Model 100.

Well, for battery life, you could port Linux to this.

no, it really is dancing demon. i even downloaded a trs-80 emulator last year just so i could see the thing again.

you guys could just read this and stop bickering.

-b

I spent countless hours with that system. most of my ability to approach problems and solve them (technically, at least) came from the time I spent hacking code (and hardware) for 'my personal computer'.

back in '78 or so, when it first came out, personal computers were a novelty and fascination. and you felt special if you posessed one of these in your home. you wanted to spend all your available time with it, and with so many hours comes a level of 'grok' that can only be attained by hardcore overtime.

I found that since I was in my early teens when I got my first computer, learning to relate to the box at its level became second-nature to me. by the time I was college age, the computer science classes were almost trivially easy and the lab assignments were unchallenging as well.

I fully believe that getting exposed to computers very early gives people such a huge advantage later on - especially if they go into that very field. the radio shack trs-80 was the first system to be so widely available to anyone who wanted it, and it had a 'cool factor' that, at the time, was undenyable. give a kid one of those and if he really gets into it, he's just found himself a high paying and secure career for life.

--

On the Coco 3, you could press Ctrl-Alt-Reset and an image of three employees at MicroWare (the company who produced the ROM for Tandy) would appear. Apparently it took 6k out of an 8k ROM, which upset some of the penny-pinchers at Radio Shack.
More Tandy Easter Eggs can be found here: http://www.trs-80.com/trs80-pm.htm#easter

Most versions of Rogue (at least the Coco and BSD versions) had a point where you typed in a password to give Wizard mode, or something (I forget, eh?). The password was stored in the game using a two-way encryption function; I wasted an afternoon once with the source, working backwards, to find that the word was "bathtub".

The whole LCD and battery idea is a nice one. Type all you want, then go back to a computer, and hit a button that dumps the buffer as normal keystrokes.

You can type out a 100-page masterpiece on it, then connect it to your keyboard port and hit send. These were given to kids at my high school so that they could type reports at home, even if they didn't own a computer, then transfer them to the computers at school to print.

I don't remember those particular games, but if you want to play them these days, there's emulators for the TRS-80's that have been avaliable for a number of years. Try Tim Mann's TRS-80 Page for xtrs, an emulator for the Models 1,3, and 4 systems running under X. There's links to other sites for COCO and Model 100 emulators, running on various operating systems (well, DOS at least...). Most of the old software can be had at Ira Goldklang's TRS-80 Revivied Page; they're in a disk image format that most of the emulators can understand.

Chris "Bob" Odorjan

It was advertised in good 'ol 80 Microcomputing with nothing more "explicit" than a attractive woman with subtly suggestive cleavage. (None of the "WWF World Class Implant" thing games selleers use these days...)