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Radio Shack's TRS-80 Turns 35
harrymcc writes "On August 3, 1977, Radio Shack announced its TRS-80 microcomputer at an event in New York City. For the next several years, it was the world's most popular PC — but it never got the respect it deserved. (I still wince when I hear 'Trash-80.') Over at TIME.com, I'm celebrating the anniversary with some reflections on the machine and why it was so underappreciated."
Got that straight. The TRS-80 Model I was for sale in stores in August of '77 [I was when it arrived], available as a retail purchase when Apples were just kits.
Still have my TRS-80 CoCo. Haven't plugged it in about six years, but hey.
The TRS-80 model II was my very first computer, and I learned basic coding on it. I can't remember the language, but there was a way to create your own games, like Snake and Pong, by using a cartridge, that only loaded the language and a basic compiler.
I suspect that you could teach folks how to do some basic coding by using one of these old machines as an example. I have fond memories.
nothing but good memories for the TRS-80.
They had a room full of Trash 80s in the local Boys and Girls Club when I was growing up. While other kids were playing fooseball I was getting into the BASIC code for the bowling game and hard coding myself as the all time scorer on the high score board. They caught on when I started having scores higher than 300. 1,000,000 just sounded better.
Good times.
Well, if you've got a bunch of 'em...
What can you really do with a TRS-80 these days?
As much as you could ever do with one, I'd say.
Blank until
Wasn't it a TRS-80 that Kurt Russell was playing chess against at the beginning of "The Thing"?
That totally cracked me up: "Cheating Bitch!" then poured his scotch into the case - I wanted to do that so many times when playing chess against that damn computer! Granted, at that time I was drinking Koolaid, but the sentiment was the same.
"Murderer? Well, that's a harsh word. I prefer to think of myself as a Mortality Technician."
I owned a model 1.
calling it "Trash-80" is exactly what that hack deserved; it was significantly behind what most hobbiests at the time would have cobbled together on the same parts budget.
It's tough to choose a favorite design flaw, whether saving four bits by only using 7 video chips instead of 8, even though the character generator had lower case . . . Running the processor bizarrely slow, the same rate as characters appeared on screen, but yanking control away and creating a glitch on the screen with each read or write . . .
My choice, though, is using the same connector for the power supply and video output, toasting the board for those who unwittingly just reached behind to plug them in . . .
hawk
The TRS-80 model II was my very first computer, and I learned basic coding on it. I can't remember the language
Yes you can.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Have fun with them?
Entertainment is one of those ageless things if you find something you like. People like old movies, music, books, etc, why is it difficult to think about people enjoying old computers? Some like the games, some like poking at software some like hacking hardware, heck some like me like it all.
I never had a TRS-80, but I had the technical manual. I learned how a computer was made from that manual.
I believe that computers only exist because of space exploration. This article makes it sound like history is far more complex than that, I don't believe it. As we all know, nothing existed before 1969 and all people were stupid. As soon as test pilots landed on the Moon, we got computers, Tang, Teflon and the wheel.
I remember them being terribly slow (895 kHz), glitchy, having poor video quality and the storage being very unreliable. The Apple ][ was vastly superior. But that's just my memory...
>>>What can you really do with a TRS-80 these days?
Not much. While loyal Commodore=64 owners have continued upgrading their machines to do internet web browsing, and of course gaming as if it was a classic NES console, the TRS-80 has been neglected. It's really just a tool to practice some BASIC programming (like I did in my high school class). Same with the Apple II and Atari 400/800 machines from the early 1977-82 era.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
The model 100 was a great machine. Got me through HS and college in the 90's. Lightweight, runs forever on 4 AA batteries, stores 32k text worth of class notes. And the key for me, no distractions like sol.exe, no network access. Transfer the notes to PC vis serial port at home and you've got room for the next day's notes.
And its even still available and supported at www.club100.org
The TRS-80 model II was my very first computer, and I learned basic coding on it. I can't remember the language
Yes you can.
Oh God! Someone please PLEASE Mod Parent up!
It's obvious he's referring to the "LEARNED" programming language!
The fascinating thing about this period of time is how close Apple came to disappearing altogether.
While early sales of all personal computers were slow - sales were measured in thousands - it looked like the battle was always Commodore vs Radio Shack. Some magazines ignored Apple because they sold so few machines.
What changed everything was the development of Visicalc. According to Brian Bagnall's "The rise and fall of Commodore", Dan Bricklin wanted to develop Visicalc on a Commodore PET but they were too popular for him to get any time on them. He used an Apple II because no-one else wanted to write software for it and so it was always available.
Visicalc went on to be the application that changed personal computing forever - business' bought Apples by the bucketload to run visicalc- and elevated Apple from being insignificant to being the dominant selling machine.
While Visicalc saved Apple, Dan Bricklin has always denied that Visicalc had any effect on Commodore or the TRS 80, and that they were responsible for their own demise.
Having read the Commodore story (Bagnall) and Apple's story (too many books to mention) I look forward to reading the book mentioned in the article - 'Priming the pump' and getting another perspective on that period of time.
I had a different (6502 based) system but my dad bought me the TRS80 BASIC programming book. It was the only BASIC reference I had so I effectively learnt programming from it. Six months later I had exhausted the possibilities of BASIC and got into machine code.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
And I quickly outgrew it. Had to upgrade it to 16K L2 - then the EI, modem, speech input, disk drives. I had the whole 9 yards.
And yes, the lowercase mod was simply a chip piggyback - did it myself.
With Level 2 BASIC I learned to poke short routines into memory so they'd run faster.
It was more popular than the Commodore PET, which was also available in the late 70's, but I don't think it ever matched the popularity that the Apple ][+ (and later, 2e) achieved in the early 1980's.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
you can browse the web on an apple II tyvm
We had 8 of them in my Jr. High math class. Not content playing Oregon Trail, I started learning BASIC and transferred over to my dad's IBM PC. That was my beginning of a wonderful career in IT.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Written by the last of the TRS-80 fanboys. And why did it not get the "respect it deserved"? From the authori's own article:
Now I must admit when it appeared in the fall 1977 Radio Shack catalog, I was excited at the prospect of being able to purchase a pre-built computer. But then as an owner of an Atari 2600, and while waiting to save the money for a TRS-80, brochures for the Atari 800 came out, and I of course waited for that. 8x the resolution, color, hardware scrolling, hardware sprites, four-channel sound, and (gasp) pixel addressing (as opposed to 2x3 "pixel" blocks of character graphics on the TRS-80).
The TRS-80 model II was my very first computer, and I learned basic coding on it. I can't remember the language, but there was a way to create your own games, like Snake and Pong, by using a cartridge, that only loaded the language and a basic compiler.
If it took a cartridge, you probably had a TRS-80 Color Computer and not a TRS-80 Model II, which was the version targeted at businesses. I had great fun learning programming on the Model III and 4.
My first computer was the TRS-80 Model II bought in December 1979. I lugged that heavy son of a bitch home from the office at night so that I could learn how to program. It had one "8 floppy drive that stored 300K. And I felt very lucky. I used it until 1984 when Compaq came out with their luggable.
What can you really do with a TRS-80 these days?
Learn to appreciate the value of abstraction.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The TRS-80 model II was my very first computer, and I learned basic coding on it. I can't remember the language, but there was a way to create your own games, like Snake and Pong, by using a cartridge, that only loaded the language and a basic compiler.
I suspect that you could teach folks how to do some basic coding by using one of these old machines as an example. I have fond memories.
OK dude, either you are really screwing with us or you need to be screened for Alzheimer's disease or your enjoying your third or so Scotch - which I can really respect.
10 PRINT "I just learned that mine (I was using it in the late eighties) was just one of the many models of 'TRS-80 Color Computer II'"
20 PRINT "It was this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TRS-80_Color_Computer_2-64K.jpg"
No sig for the moment.
I actually have a TRS-80 Model III (the one with the built in monitor) setup in my game room. The graphics aren't much (they're actually quite blocky), but they really did put a lot of love into those games. The TRS-80 version of Zaxxon is particularly impressive, and plays better than some of the versions on more capable systems (do a youtube search for it, it's worth checking out).
I found my TRS-80 on the side of the road in a garbage pile in the middle of nowhere Ohio while on a camping trip. I picked it up and took it home (over the wife's objections) and found that it still worked perfectly (initially it looked like it didn't work, but it turns out that the brightness dial had just been turned down all the way and was frozen in place). I guess my TRS-80 really IS a Trash-80.
Because Woz is a tech genius while Jobs was a kind of Prometheus who could mesmerize people so they perceived how so much better the Apple ][+ was.
But then, why people created software for the TRS-80?
Because Woz is a tech genius while Jobs was a kind of Prometheus who could mesmerize people so they perceived how so much better the Apple ][+ was.
No, you're not drunk or suddenly gained doubled vision: people back then wanted a computer to do serious work -- which implied the Apple one was unfit, because it was so incredible it would look like a toy amid the dumb terminals we had back then. That was another era, people, early adopters were a rare kind then.
Also, Woz is even more of a genius because he used a joke of a processor, the el-cheapo 6502... a frustratingly elementary calculator. Real developers were crazy about the Intel 8080/8085 and the much superior Zilog Z-80: it was the Darth Vader of the processors. Mind you, I love simple, but that was not the case of the 6502. It was darn braindamaged. Of course, for guys like Woz this wasn't much of a problem...
Living that age was great.
It must have been the best investment in history. I learned to write code on that machine (including assembly). It led to a still continuing history of nearly seamless gainful employment.
Thank you Tandy!
I still have it, In the garage, in a box.
I never thought the Apple ][ was first. But the TRS-80 wasn't either. The PET was available before either of them.
Why would you mention Exidy (the Sorcerer)? It came after all these computers. Where I was you could get an Apple ][+ before you could get a Sorcerer.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Oh, I fully appreciate hardware abstraction at the OS level, protected memory access, and the whole slew of modern improvements.
I even appreciate how programmers did so much with so little.
That wasn't really the question though.
(Also, "offtopic"? Really? Remember kids, "-1 offtopic", and "-1 troll" are not substitutes for the missing "-1 don't like" moderation. :D)
The question is if the celebration of this hardware's 30th aniversary of hitting store shelves really deserves more than just a small bit of nostalgia, and some idle curiosity, such as one gets from a museum.
I was asking if you could really do useful work on a TRS-80 model 1 these days.
As far as I know, you really can't.
ScarfMan and Super Nova were pretty sweet.
The TRS-80 model II was my very first computer, and I learned basic coding on it. I can't remember the language
Yes you can.
Absolutely friggin priceless sir!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Good to see that Commode users are upholding their fine 30 year tradition of trolling every unrelated computer discussion.
Leininger created a prototype of the computer, wire-wrapping it himself on six Radio Shack breadboards (he described this construction stage as a “one-man show”). The prototype used a modified television for the display and a standalone keyboard for input.
One of the benefits of working for a company that sold electronic parts.
I use it to control my robot arm.
http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lv3lq4fCmT1qhpy7q.jpg
It helps to pass the time.
I don't like nostalgia unless it's mine. Lou Reed
That said, I was born in 75. My first two computers where the TRS-80 Model 1 Level 2 (it was about 8-9 years old when I got it), and a Mattel Aquarius my grandmother won at bingo or some such.
My Tandy had just the monitor and cassette drive, and I did not have the game expansion for the Aquarius. Using both I taught myself basic programming, and I even had some programs on tape for the Tandy that had C-64, Pet, and Apple versions on the same cassette, I became adept at telling the difference by ear to find the my version.
I still remember the two asterisks in the corner, one solid, the other blinking when you were loading a program, and having to adjust the volume and tone (and once or twice the tape head..early hardware hacking), to get it to read correctly.
Sigh...now I click a button on my web browser, and since my phone is also logged into our Google overlords, the app pushes through the ether and magically appears on my phone, which is at least an order of magnitude more powerful. And the phone is made of such small components, I cannot replace a fried cap or resolder a lose port. Where did the fun go?
Silence is a state of mime.
You should always have a pre-1985 computer laying around somewhere to show your kids. Computers have turned into magic, indecipherable boxes. The first home-computers were great, precisely because they were so god-damned slow. They were so slow, you could actually watch them run and understand what was happening.
My very first computer was a TRS-80 Model II. It weighed in at a whopping 70 pounds with those huge diskettes. I even had the early SCSI HD which required you to load drivers via the TRS-DOS before you could access it. I also had the floppy disk expander - that huge unit with four or five floppy disk drives in it. Ah the memories .... I learned to write really simple programs in BASIC on it. My dad gave away the Model II, HD, and Floppy expansion units to the Smithsonian after being in storage for many years. The amazing thing is that after 24 years in storage, it booted into TRS-DOS and the hard drive was accessible. They don't make technology like they used to.
actually you can. It's called accounting, word processing, printing, hell you can even run a spreadsheet. Of course keep in mind that the documentation that came with the TRS-80 m4 included all of the internal circuit designs. This wasn't the PCB design but the electronic circuit themselve including the chip functions. We used one for busienss purposes for over a decade (got in 1982) before we finally moved to a Tandy 1000 (IBM AT compatible).
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
My first ever computer was a Radio Shack Pocket Computer, back in 1980. It taught me a lot about programming, and it actually had a decent (for the time) implementation of BASIC, in some ways superior to that on larger PC's (indirect addressing for instance).
That thing taught me a lot about writing spare programs too. It had 2K of total memory, 1.9K of which was available after the system took it's chunk. But I actually used the thing quite successfully in my job as a Taco Bell manager, it was awesome for running the calculations we had to do during these big store inventories. It cut at least 2 hours out of my long nights.
I look back fondly on all those old systems I had: an old strange Wang thing that programmed only in assembly, a couple of Timex-Sinclairs that I learned to do some Z80 assembly on also (you had to embed the assembly inside of long text strings). I had 3 different TI-99 4A's (which I did some pretty advanced graphics on, I will have you know), and every iteration of intel: PC, PC-XT, PC-AT, Went straight to the what, 480SX or something like that, ran all the DOS variants from 3.1 to 4.0, then Win 95, 98, etc. I never had a PET or a Commodore, always wished I had.
They sure got better fast, didn't they?
Budgets and financial statements in Visicalc, address labels, frogger, W2's, payroll, sniff them......they smell so goood!
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Why does it need to do anything related to "work" for it to be "useful"?
As evidenced here, this mythical box survives in the heart & souls of those drawn to it's call. For yours truly I picture as yesterday, this artifact sitting alone, unused for months, in a small northern California valley the feds stole from the Yukis about the time of the first .com boom circa 1851. My super krusty 8 fingered (for reals) typingteacher was it's protector. Or was it seven?
In any case, it was imperative I find a crack in the security to learn it's secrets. Thusly I hid under a desk as the bottle glassed grump instinctively scanned the
perimeter. The lights went off, I slipped in my floppy, & the green glow lit up my eyes late into each night as I harvested it's promises. Do, you, want, to, play, a, game?
Isolated from the greater Arpanet on this abject island of a single node net, I ended up writing an early trash80 three.bs port. These many many lines of basic were designed, amongst other things I've since forgotten, to take down an ascii airliner with an ascii lightening bolt for the zorkesque flight sim. I left this easter egg for whomever might finally access this box should the faculty ever find the means to deploy it. The beast was officially powned.
With this covert training worthy of the Mossad's finest, the d&d dm.lib on my friend's Atari400 was an inevitable fate to be fulfilled. It is rumored that Crunch
picked up the machine for 20 bucks at a Foothill college Ham meet & Easywriter was subsequently ported to Radio Shack's bastard child. This much is most certainly a lie. The valley is now cratered with single wide generic Adderal plantations supplying regiments of grad students in the city states to the south. The fate of the this mystery machine, however, will forever remain unknown.
I remember my Model III fondly as well, I was so jazzed to get a Model 4. My family used them for our tax and bookkeeping business with great success. The Tandy 1000 was my first "compatible." It had a 32MB HD inserted in one of the expansion slots, GAWD that was awesome.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
My first job was working at a music store - basically I was their (very low paid) in-house programmer, except during the start-of-school crunch time when I helped sell instruments like every other person in the store. I wrote stuff like payroll and inventory software that ran on their TRS-80, and had to serve as the data entry clerk as well. That beast had dual floppy drives... good times, good times.
#DeleteChrome
Agreed.
I suppose that since it has all the circuits defined in the manual, and has serial ports, a TRS-80 could be used to programmatically control lights, the air conditioner, house fans and a few other neat things like that.
But then again, you could do all that with a raspberry pi using a usb serial cable at a fraction the size, heat, and power...
I do consider entertainment to be a "useful" application, so I suppose that designing a system of homebrew upgrades and other fun things for nerds would make the TRS-80 a useful platform for entertainment... (I did a thought experiment on how to implement an LIM-EMS addon for a PC-Jr using the cartridge slot once, and it was fun. Hardware limitations make things more interesting.)
So, I guess there are some useful things you could still do on one, but I still don't see the need for fanfare.
*shrug*
I wouldn't hesitate to make it a center-piece in my home. Reminds me of a time I -- as a lifeform -- entered the final moments of, where things were built by people who knew damned well how to build things. That's all I have to say, other than it's the first time I've seen one.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Back in 8th grade (1985) I was introduced to the TRS-80 CoCo II. Our school had a lab full of them (two students per computer), and we were taught keyboarding and some basic programming. Now, up to that point, my computer experience was already pretty extensive. I owned a TI-99/4A, and the highlight of each month was receiving the next edition of Compute! so I could type in the BASIC / Extended BASIC programs. I had already written thousands of lines of BASIC code from scratch (from the time I was 10). I had a lot of experience on the Apple II and the C-64 as well.
Now, 30 years later, I can't remember enough specifics to state the technical reasons, but as a 12 year old, I absolutely hated the CoCo II. I was not a TI-99 fanatic (I had great appreciation for the C-64, for example), so I didn't dislike the TRS-80 because of some external factor- I didn't like it simply because of what it was.
Odds and ends I remember is that the performance was laggy and sluggish (even in the day, compared to the machines I mentioned already). BASIC syntax had some convoluted stuff going on (probably related to graphics and sound) and code editing was a chore. The hardware felt cheap.
To compare to the other machines I was familiar with, the TI-99/4A felt very professional and refined throughout. Both the hardware, and the software. It felt more engineered and like something a scientist would use or something. lol As a 10 year old, I felt I was using a machine intended for real adults to use. It was serious and real. It had a certain rigidity that was authoritative. The CoCo felt like a toy or a gimmick in some way.
The Apple II was similar. The hardware felt very high quality, and the OS was refined and consistent.
The C-64 gave the impression there was always something deeper and lower-level, just waiting to be exploited. It was complicated (just loading a program off of the disc required these weird, non-intuitive parameters that neither I nor my 10 year old friends understood, like "why do you have to put ,8 after the filename?"). Compute! listings had all these pokes and peeks, directly manipulating memory. You could change the color of text using these weird keyboard combos - no other computer of the day had nearly the flexibility or flashy pizazz of the C-64.
So as a 12 year old, there simply weren't any redeeming factors to the TRS-80. I knew that other computers of the era did various things better and were more fun to program and use than the TRS-80, and I complained often to my classmates, lamenting that we couldn't have TIs or C64s because they were better computers.
Better known as 318230.
TRS-DOS was written by Microsoft so was buggy and lame. NewDOS-80 gave us much more power and control. I had a EPROM burner for my Model I that I used even after the IBM PC came along. The Model I was the first in the series. The Model 4 (and 4P) could be loaded up with 128K of RAM and bank switched in 32K chunks, allowing you to put any chunk in any position. Great for disassembling copy protected games. Also the ROM could be switched out giving you 128K of pure RAM, thus allowing it to run CP/M and all the software that was developed for that, and at 4MHz too. The Model 3, 4 and 4p could display 80 x 24 text simultaneously with graphics and the graphics board RAM could be increased as well. Anyone calling the TRS-80 a Trash-80 never discovered how much power these computers really had. Even the Model I would run Pascal with almost all the features of the IBM 360 version. All the languages of the day were available; Forth, Prolog, Lisp, Pascal, C, Fortran and, of course BASIC. The Model I with the expansion interface had a RS-232 port with a serial interface. Mine ran a BBS. Crude sound was possible by cycling the cassette port. Although a RTC wasn't built in, there were plenty of after-market choices. The diskette drive interface was industry standard so it was easy to connect up 4 double-sided, double-density diskette drives. All that and a Z-80 processor with an alternate register set made it a good piece of gear for the time.
I learned Pascal on one.
No reason why someone couldn't do the same today.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Guess what? This story is not about you, or your attention-seeking behaviour.
Please go die in a fire. (Or at least grow the fuck up.)
Thank you.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I'm younger, but still in the "old" generation.
My first computer was dad's IBM PcJr. Lack of ISA, bizzare IRQ scheme, freakish sidecar bus, chicklet keyboard and all.
But hey, it had EGA graphics, dad's had the rare Racore second disk drive, memory and DMA controller upgrade, and it had a primitive synthesizer for multichannel audio instead of just a tweeting internal speaker.
I spent many hours playing with ROM basic on it. I have very fond memories of that old fishtank. I fully understand where computers have come from, and recognize the pioneering from the altair days, as well as the nostalgia people have for old computers.
But would I whip out JrPaint on cartridge to make pixel art? Certainly not!
In high school this was my first computer. The Apple 1 wasn't available for me at the time and so I grew up on the TRS-80 models as they evolved, eventually, into the Model III with built in screen all looking very slick for the time. By the time my school had built a computing lab and filled it with Apple II's I had my own machines at home. When the Model IV arrived I'd moved on to other machines and was looking to my first PC (with help).
I remember when I had to write lines (the teachers chosen method for entry level discipline - before detention and the cane) I learned the Agile approach to software by asking them things like "would you like the lines numbered?". I then created a short three or four lines of BASIC code and let it print for the selected amount of lines. So to me the TRS-80 was an incredible time saver.
It also made me money, whilst all the other kids were tooling around trying to figure out if they'd be mechanics carpenters or hairdressers my choice of computing career (my geek fate was sealed!!) let me do other things, like charge the other kids money to do their computing homework.
So thank you TRS-80 and happy birthday!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
> You are inside a pyramid, there are openings to the N, S, E and W
> _
10 PRINT "I just learned that mine (I was using it in the late eighties) was just one of the many models of 'TRS-80 Color Computer II'" 20 PRINT "It was this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TRS-80_Color_Computer_2-64K.jpg"
It's not complete without
because that's what all of us preteens did when we first learned BASIC. I learned BASIC on a CoCo, and although I have never coded in BASIC since the 1980's, I still feel it was a very formative learning experience. Thanks, Radio Shack.
I can still fire up the ol' Tandy Color Computer 2 and put those 64Ks through their paces with a rousing game of Pooyan, Demon Attack, or Dragonfire.
Many models of Color Computer II?
I think there was just one, with maybe a few different options for how much RAM you got.
There were two different looking versions of the original Color Computer though, as I recall, one silver and one beige, with maybe different keyboards. But the Color Computer 2 (roman numerals were for the Apple) looked pretty much like the Color Computer 3.
I think the biggest application that I saw for them were the MTABBS BBS program that was written for the model 4. They worked pretty well for what they were. I think they even had hard drives hooked for them. I think it was only on a handful of BBSs around the St. Louis area.
They played mugwump pretty well too.
1) Get yourself some mod points and use them as you see fit.
2) Metamoderate more often.
3) STFU
They tried to sell me a 8 GB USB stick for $80 USD.
I can still remember how the Model I smelled.
Zoid.com
The TRS80 model 1 was my first store-bought computer -- I'd built my own "microcomputers" up until that stage.
Compared to the Apple it had some real strengths: A BASIC with double-precision math, a Z80 processor (the 6502 is wicked-good but once Page 0 is used up you lose so many of those cool addressing modes so the Z80 works better in a "store-bought" machine with ROM firmware), plenty of support in magazines, and later, a brilliant disk OS in the form of NewDOS80
I had most of the Tandy micros: The Model 1, the Model 2 (with 8" drives and later, CP/M), the Tandy 100, the Model III and later, the seldom mentioned Tandy 2000 with its Intel 80186 processor at 8MHz. That thing just blitzed all the 4.77MHz 8088-based PC clones that were around at the time.
But those were different days.
Before the advent of the IBM PC, every machine was wildly different and exciting. Once the "PC-compatible" virus hit, hardware became rather undistinctive and "samey".
Good days!
OMG, I'm so f'ing old!!!
While they are cool from a history point of view, and many did very clever hardware hacks and tricks to increase performance with less silicon, really they aren't much more than museum pieces.
What can you really do with a TRS-80 these days?
This is not off-topic. I really am sick of how badly people use their mod-points these days.
1) Get yourself some mod points and use them as you see fit.
2) Metamoderate more often.
3) STFU
While Slashdot's current moderation system deals with trolls and flamebait ok, it also misses on too many interesting posts that would otherwise have spawned a truly enjoyable read.
WTH is wrong with a little nostalgia? People who were there, taking their time to write about and share first-hand personal experiences, often with obvious fondness, of bygone eras - is basically worthless? This "forum" would be less interesting and dry without such pieces.
You know what you could do with it before? Yeah, pretty much the same deal. Unless it's broken.
"What can you really do with a TRS-80 these days?"
Run a business. As it happens I have a complete TRS-80 payroll system on audio cassettes still in shrink wrap and ready for someone's brilliant startup plans.
As Farmer Tim says, they'll still do what they did then, but people change and have less patience. Nostalgia can only carry you for a short time.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Oh great... NOW the mods learn how to properly mod an off-topic post.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
When I was in High School, I was in the computer club (yes, we had computer clubs back in 1980; lol). Our school had just one computer; it was a TRS-80. lol
Amazing at that time. A year later, Dad got me a CoCo and 2 years later a CoCo3. Fantastic computers they both were for the time. Learned some Basic and had fun learning. The exploration is probably what keeps the hackers interested now, but the personal computer was still more then in it's infancy when I was in High School. Fun time; now we have to worry about things that folks back then didn't even have a clue about. Oh well. :)
I did my first programming on an HP-67 handheld calculator when they first came out around 1972 when I was 12. My dad brought one home from work (NASA) to show it to me and I had fun with it on the weekends - even got to write some programs he would use in the office. That first exposure to programming got me excited but I could never afford a machine of my own.
When the TRS-80 was announced I was excited and had to save my money up to be able to afford it. I remember putting $100 down to reserve my machine and then had to wait eight weeks for it to show up.
The "computer stores" at the time were very interesting to me. The ones where I grew up near Annapolis usually looked like a hoarder's den with electronics, parts and manuals spread all over the place. Most of the people I knew who had home computers back then were quite comfortable opening them up and "fixing" them. That was just part of the experience.
There were pretty good games (good gameplay, bad graphics) for even the TRS-80 model I. There was a company called big-five that made low res clones of robotron, asteroids, space invaders and other games (with different titles of course).
I wrote my first program ever on a TRS-80 color computer. It was a community computer programming course that they ran from a local school. We had to write out our programs at home on special graph paper and type it in during class. I was immediately hooked on computers and programming.
I used to book programming time at the local library for their TRS-80 model III. It was a lousy machine compared to its contemporaries, but, it was the only reliable access I had to a microcomputer, so I cherished the few precious minutes I had available to program. I was only able to book one hour at a time, so I had to work fast and leave enough time to save the programs to tape. I remember programming some games from David H. Ahl's "More Basic Computer Games--TRS-80 Edition" which was modified to use the primitive TRS-80 graphics. I tried making a light cycle game, but failed at that attempt pretty badly. I never got it to work right. If only I had more time...
In the early 90's, I stumbled upon an old Model III sitting on the clearance table at the local Radio Shack. They were asking 30 bucks for it. I really wanted to buy it, but my wife would have none of it. To this day, I still regret not acquiring that classic machine. Yeah, it wasn't great, but it still was an important piece of computing history... and my own.
Cassette drive roulette:
>cload
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.........eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.........eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee........
Not me. I set about using the semi-graphics mode of my TRS-80 MC-10, my first computer, to make my own version of Pacman. The resolution was insufficient for any kind of animation but I did get it to the point where you could move the man around a maze.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Three words; Dungeons Of Dagorath. I wore out a keyboard on that game.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
My 1st computer was a TRS-80 Color computer 2. I still own it and its still in use hooked to a Tandy "Plug 'n Power" X10 controler. It runs some outside lights and the attic fans. As long as it keeps working i have no real reason to ever replace it. It just sits in the basement doing its job year after year.
I also have another CoCo2 hooked up to my bigscreen and DriveWire4 in the living room. Every once in a while I'll fire it up and play some MicroChess or Bedlam.
Believe it or not there is actually a small but active community of TRS-80 coco users. The Drivewire project is pretty active ( https://sites.google.com/site/drivewire4/ ) and so is the coco mailing list ( http://five.pairlist.net/pipermail/coco/ ). Cloud9 is still in business coming up with cool new hardware and support services. ( http://www.cloud9tech.com/ )
I have to return some videotapes...
I also had a TRS-80 Color Computer as a young child. I mostly played games on it, but my father apparently did actual work on it as well. I can't imagine how much it cost him (he didn't make much money), but his willingness to spend that money fundamentally altered the course of my life. The TRS-80 was the first computer I ever used, and it sparked a passion for technology that's still with me today.
I was too young to come up with that. I think my first BASIC program just repeated "hello" or something similar.
I modded mine with a double sided, 80 track disk drive, man, it was an awesome amount of storage, all for finding the 40s in the OS and changing them to 80. What fun.
Any IBM prior to the late 80s pales in comparison to ANY of the early 80s computers as far as functionality goes, nevermind documentation on the design.
PCs have always been 'blackboxish', many of the early hobbiest computers however were documented to the point where any amateur could in a week or two do something useful with them (hardware design-wise, software would take you an afternoon.)
My TRS-80 was actually a clone, the Video Genie EG3003. With built-in cassette recorder no less. Got mine defective from a friend who had a lightning strike nearby. I clipped all TTL chips and replaced them. To my luck, the ROM, RAM and CPU were still intact! I later expanded the system with a floppy controller, ran NewDOS-80, LDOS and TRS-DOS on it.
There were two ways to expand the memory. You could piggy-back 4116 DRAM chips on top of the original ones, or you could clip the original ones and insert 4164 DRAM chips for those. I believe if you went the second route, you had to remove capacitors and cut some traces, as one of the 4116 power pins had changed to an address line on the 4164..
Ohh the memories ;-)
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Lacking software I would type in programs from the magazine MICRO-80; taught me how to program, Basic and Assembly.
:}).
6 hours typing in a program then run CLOAD (Before CSAVE) and lose everything, I did it
so often I'd just chug a beer and start all over like nothing happened. Just one of those things.
I still have mine, never use it again but it's a reminder of better times (being younger
When I was in high school my dad's office had a couple of TRS-80 model 2s (cassette tapes!) and a model 3 (8" floppies!) and after school I'd go to his office and spend ages playing The Asylum (see http://www.trs-80.org/asylum/) It was awesome. Even more so than the school's sole Apple ][, the "trash 80" introduced me to programming and I taught myself z80 assembler in an effort to write my own version of Scramble (see http://www.arcade-gameover.com/scramble.asp) as I quickly realised that BASIC was never going to cut it. I ended up nearly failing year 12 because I spend most of that year writing a text adventure game I called The Cave. I was forced to abandon it eventually and get my grades back up so as to get into university. I also spent a lot of time playing Taipan on the model 3. (see http://cymonsgames.com/taipan/)
I moved on to the Apple ][ after that, and then, at uni, the PDP 11, and then the Mac in 1984. Messed about with BBCs, Acorns, Apricots, and a bunch of other machines I can't even remember the names of but never left the Mac since then. Friends had Vic-20s and Commodore 64s and Ataris but I never really got into those. Nice to see there are TRS-80 emulators for the Mac at http://sdltrs.sourceforge.net/
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
It's probably just as fast as an equivalent system running on a modern PC, too. The big problem is that as PCs have got more powerful, more crap has been added in that no-one ever uses.
I'm prepared to bet that all bar a handful of Microsoft Word users don't do anything they couldn't have done with WordStar in CP/M.
You know, I was talking about this to someone the other day. They wanted to demonstrate how TCP/IP works, but obviously everything happens so quickly all you see is a couple of lines in a wireshark window and it's done.
So as a demonstration I set up soundmodem on two machines, and set up TCP/IP using AX.25 as the link layer - 1200bps audio tones, rather like the tape tones from early 80s home computers. You can even adjust them to sound slightly different while remaining in spec to give the two computers slightly different "voices". Instead of hooking them together using radios, I just used cables, and left the PC speakers hooked up to so you could hear what they were doing. Then ping from one to the other, and "BLEEEBLORP BLEEEBLIRP" - there goes the ARP request and response, "BLEEEBLURBLURBLURP BLEEEBLIP" - there goes the ping and response, and so on.
Doing SSH over it is very, very slow to get going but tolerable once it's started.
From the article:
Exchange "Apple II" by any current Apple product, and that line might be found as well on Slashdot today.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
This is what I still remember ... commands like "Peek" and "Poke"
Back in those old days, we used to comb through the user manual, from the first page, to the last, and to try out every-single-command there is to see what they do
CP/M, Sinclair, Osborne, oh my, all those things do bring back sweet memory
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I recall the real fight was between the Z80 and 6502 camps; the original RISC vs CISC discussions. The 6502 was certainly simple to program with its I/O being memory mapped. But as things evolved CPM certainly shaped up to be more of an operating system than what Apple's Basic Language OS variant.
I was routing for the 68000 to be the next step, but when Apple announced that the MAC was going to be a closed system (Pay for the SDK) I, as did many, jumped ship to the PC's 8088.
like so many others I got my first programming chops & computer knowledge from the TRS-80 my dad brought home. Did anyone else try copying the software from the back of the old compute magazines?
I remember soldering a speaker wire up to the unit since there was no computer speakers back in the day. I described that one day to my much younger sister, and realized how silly it sounded 30 years later were a pair of speakers are $10 and actually sound good.
Best was when we got a disk drive instead of the tape which was such a hassle.
My dad has it still in the closet and kids that it is part of my inheritance. Figures in another 10-20 years it will be worth something.
God I feel old, Now get off my yard!!!!
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
embedded /industrial controls.
stuff that z80 is used for nowadays.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80
you could for example us it to run elevator logic fairly easily. nobodys going to hack it over the internet at least.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
to connect it to the main board. 2 screws and pressure on some pcb contacts and springs kept it in contact.
or not.
"download errors again. damn. hang on, let me reseat my rs232 board again. can you call me back in originate mode in 5 minutes?"
not sure if that was worse than the CLOAD audio front-end that needed extra wave-shaping. there were circuits (I built one) that rejected most of the cassette audio noise and created new clean 1/0 pulses for the CLOAD program reader to better detect. with such a box, you didn't need to keep the playback volume between 4.5 and 5.5; it had *much* more leeway and would still load the program without errors.
hey, I got a good load. let me do some CSAVE's on different brand of tapes just to be sure.
(sysadmin, and what we cared about back then)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
No.
>>>I don't think it ever matched the popularity that the Apple ][+ achieved in the early 1980's
They meant the TRS-80 was the "most popular of the 70s". It was not the most popular after it had become old & replaced by newer machines. (See my other post.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
A TRS-80 Model 1 was my first computer. Of course that lead to a long history of gadgets and hacks. Back then, high-school teachers wouldn't accept a paper printed on a dot-matrix printer. So a fellow TRS-80 owner and I bought a nifty little gadget called a Dynatyper which was essentially a box of solenoids that you mounted over the keyboard of a regular typewriter. And of course, we couldn't afford a real floppy disk drive (5.25" true floppies, btw) so we bought this thing called a Stringy Floppy. it used these little cassette tapes that operated on a similar principle to 8-track tapes. And back then I was big into graphics so I bought this rather expensive hi-res graphics board. And we used to stick AM radios next to the machine to get "sound" out of our games.
Your link only seems to refer to the point that the Apple ][+ was not the actual leader, and does not show its ranking relative to the TRS-80 after 1979.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I certainly understand the importance of comparing only PC's of the same generation, but the Apple ][+ was actually introduced in 1979, and itself could reasonably be considered part of the same generation of desktop PC's as the TRS-80 itself. Nonetheless, for a number of years after the Apple was introduced, the TRS-80 continued to sell... and the Apple was not overly superior to the TRS-80 on a technological level such that the latter could have been considered replaced by the former. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, the TRS-80's declining desktop viability in the 1980's was much more affected by the increasing variety of choices that people were starting to get as various manufacturers came out with their own PC than it was because newer machines that came out during that same time period effectively replaced it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
>>>Guess what? This story is not about you, or your attention-seeking behaviour. Please go die in a fire. (Or at least grow the fuck up.)
You first. Demonstrate how a grown-up acts, rather than lashing out like an immature college kid.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
TRS-80 beat it by about 3 years.
Table-ized A.I.
Real programming nerds didn't use PRINT in basic :)
we used ?
5 ? "penis"
10 goto 5
? did same as print and was less typing :P
there were a lot of tricks like that you could do to substitute words for symbols even in early basic.
I didn't get a TRS-80 at first.
my first pc was a Tandy 1000 EX, it had 256KB ram, 1 5 1/4" floppy drive, came with a RGB monitor, Dos 2.0 and Deskmate.
I had a subscription to Home and Office computing that had basic programs on several pages for different flavors of basic from apple to gwbasic etc since some versions were slightly different.
But I saw an article in the back for a floppy disk with a new compiler on it... I was so tired of writing basic, had wrote a program with tons of data lines to create a bouncing sphere on the screen which I won a contest at state FBLA competition... I ordered that new disk with this new compiler I had never heard of. Was $50 and came with a white book..
I was so happy when that disk and book came in... the disk "Power C" and the book was the famous White Power C book which I still own to this day.
being able to write C on a Tandy 1000 EX was awesome, compiling took forever for anything half complex, but I was so happy to have an EXE binary and finally done with line numbers, load/run/tron/troff :P
I was given a TRS 80 as a gift but it was after the Tandy 1000 EX, I had a Commadore as well but my Tandy 1000 EX was my favorite and was used even after obsolete until my next pc was a IBM PS/2 then a 286.
They were so slow, you could actually watch them run and understand what was happening.
Try this if you want a computer so slow that you could actually see it running.
The machine itself was not the problem-- it was the seller that led to its downfall.
Fresh out of high school in 1978, I was hired by a local RS specifically to become an expert sales rep for the TRS-80, due primarily to my modest knowledge of computers and programming. But about the time I had to embarassingly ask for a customer's name and address for a 69-cent battery purchase for the umpteenth time, I realized it was a lost cause. Never sold a single computer. And I eventually quit pestering customers for their info and started filling in names and addresses selected randomly from the phone book after the customers left the store. Even that was not enough to contain my disgust and I quit. The upside was my experience with RS led directly to going to college. Never did retail again.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see how GP is "lashing out like an immature college kid". Maybe if you did not deserve to be treated that way, I could see it. But given your reputation, I am (not) sorry to say that you most certainly deserve such treatment.
The TRS-80 model II was my very first computer, and I learned basic coding on it. I can't remember the language
Yes you can.
Somehow that's like a reverse-twist version of the panflute flowchart.
35 years ago? Crap, despite a decade of denial now I can't seem to keep getting reminded how old I really am.
Not three years - two and a quarter. The Trash-80 came out in August of 1977. The Atari 800 came out in November of 1979, and along with the 400 immediately dethroned the TRS-80 as the best selling computers. Radio Shack never regained their footing in the market, and for good reason. The Atari 8-bits made them look like junk, and while the CoCo at least sported decent processor performance when it came out in 1980, the graphics were crap. It couldn't even compete effectively with the VIC-20, let alone the Atari 8-bits or, later, the C64.
So, I'm cleaning out my dad's workshop today *gasp* and I came across a 33 1/3 mini record produced by the Escort radar detector people.
Not true, at all. I started out with an Altair 8080 that I built. It was programmed by stepping through the memory location one at a a time and setting the byte stored there with paddle switches. When I got a TRS-80, I could type just fine and really liked creating code that I could show anyone how to read. Yes, you could substitute symbols, but why do it. If you knew how to type, then it was better for readable code.
Same here. My idea of fun was to make the computer print multiplication tables until it crashed
No sig for the moment.
Three words; Dungeons Of Dagorath. I wore out a keyboard on that game.
Which, incidentally, you can dig up and run on Linux in all its incredibly crappy old school goodness. It really takes you back.
Thank you all for the trip down memory lane -- so many things I had forgotten!
The TRS-80 Model I was my first computer. I saved my money from working at summer camp to buy one during my freshman or sophomore year of high school.
Typing in programs from Byte magazine! Dealing with that temperamental cassette recorder for storage.
I took that thing with me to college. That's when I really started experimenting with it. I soldered the lowercase mod. Bought a used expansion box from another hobbyist, taking it up to 48K. Graduating from the 300 baud to the 1200 baud modem. Connecting to local BBSes to talk to other hobbyists in the area.
Finally getting two floppy drives and using a hole punch to make them double sided.
I played games and wrote school papers on it. I even bought custom carrying cases for it -- two black plastic attache cases, one for the monitor and the other for the keyboard and expansion box. I kept it running for years after college. And I am still kicking myself for abandoning it in the basement of my apartment building when I left Boston.
Loved the TRS-80, where I learned to program in 1979 or so. But it got better:
In my high school we had a full LAN of 10 or so Model III connected via serial cables to a Model 1 with 2 (count 'em 2) dual sided disk drives, so 4 full floppy dives, I think 0:, 1:, 2:, 3; (and fun with SuperZap !) plus shared printing. All via custom ROM someone had written.
I lived through high school on this system - loaded up my reports from the shared storage disk (even had my own private disk as I was the senior computer student), edited with ScriptSit, printed, etc.
Nothing real that a modern LAN doesn't do that we couldn't do decades ago - load/save files from any machine, print, and even some security as I recall. Was fast, usable, and fun. Plus programming; wrote my first commercial software, a dating system to match boys/girls from surveys (migrated to a Dec 100 for more power), a sports scoring and stats system that let us almost win the state championship that year with computerized per-athlete stats for any opposing team, etc.
Ah, the old TRS-80 . . .
I have that cart... and I always wanted to get into it but never could. Maybe its because I didnt have the manual and I was always just guessing at what the commands / syntax could be.