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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Still have my TRS-80 CoCo. Haven't plugged it in about six years, but hey.
Apparently the TRS-80 CoCo is a totally different (and incompatible) machine to the original TRS-80 being discussed here. They're not even based on the same processor...
While I appreciate that they probably wanted to keep the brand recognition, it's slightly confusing that they reused the exact same model number on incompatible machines with entirely different architecture. You'd have thought (e.g.) "TRS-100" would be similar enough without the obvious- and incorrect- implication that both lines were part of the same family.
For what it's worth, the Dragon 32- a very close relative of the CoCo- celebrated its 30th anniversary this week.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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).
Cassette tapes unreliable storage? That's one of the kinder ways to describe it. :) But seriously, I taught myself programming with the Z-80 assembler/debugger and would make multiple backups to tape to counter the occasional read glitch that rendered the tape contents lost for all practical purposes. (Although in a pinch attempting to read it in over and over with fingers crossed hoping that one time it would work was occasionally successful, at which point you wrote it out to a new backup tape.)
Wrote Double Deck Pinochle as my first program, later rewrote for DOS (is freeware out there somewhere), rewrote it in Java a few years ago (seriously proper OO architecture, but an interesting experience to rewrite 8086 to Java), and just so happens am now rewriting from Java to RPG for my IBM i (iseries AS/400) web server. Again an interesting experience. :)
For those who might wander about RPG looks like these days, I have open sourced a couple of projects:
http://code.google.com/p/rdwrites/downloads/list
(the ascii source downloads can be viewed in a text editor.)
And I have the TRS-80 to thank for it all. So happy 35th, 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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
I learned Pascal on one.
No reason why someone couldn't do the same today.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
> 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 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!
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.
Oh God yes!! True geek porn in every issue. I miss that magazine.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
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.
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.
Let me guess, you code in Python now, do you?
(just kidding, I love Python)
No sig for the moment.