Radio Shack TRS-80 Vs. Commodore 64: Battle of the Titans

Nerval's Lobster writes "The one and only Jeff Cogswell is back with a new article comparing the two biggest competitors in the home-computing business: the Commodore 64 and the Radio Shack TRS-80. What does he have to say about these absolutely cutting-edge machines? The TRS-80 simply can't stand up to the awe-inspiring Commodore 64, which features the latest processor from MOS Technology, the 6510. Best of all, the C-64s graphics processor can display up to 16 colors simultaneously, and it can create a full screen made up of 320 x 200 'dots.' But the TRS-80 has some good points, as well, including a whopping 512 K of memory (not that you'll ever use that much, anyway). As Cogswell writes: 'Let's cover these two bad boys and provide a totally unbiased review unencumbered by any alleged kickbacks (including a brand new daisy wheel printer and a case of Schiltz Beer) from Commodore, the maker of the awesome machine known as the Commodore 64.'"

Comments

Missing Option

[Unloaded]

Once again the TI 99/4a gets left out. Anybody want a Jello Pudding Pop?

Hah!

[operagost]

And to think all my friends and family said that conversational Klingon course I took was a colossal wast of time!

Re:This is as funny as anal warts

[91degrees]

For all you know he may find anal warts hilarious and is enjoying April Fools Slashdot.

Childhood memories...The C64

[lazycam]

My mother and father were programmers, so they came up with many creative uses of the C64. In his free time, my father would program math-based games to teach us multiplication tables and would allow us to play chess. Mom was the only one to get copies of games for us to play. In general, I have many warm memories of sitting in front of the tv playing games on the ol' C64 with my siblings. I also remember solving boring math problems. In all, I played plenty of games and excelled in math enough to obtain a PhD. I have admit the C64 played a big part in that. I know nothing about TRS-80, but I'm sure my childhood would have played out the same way. As a professional, I understand the technical differences between the hardware, but still...

Re:TRS-80 all the way, baby!

[Lumpy]

I used to upset my C64 friends... The CoCo's casette deck would load a program FASTER than the C64 Floppy drive. C64 was cool, but the CoCo was the real hackers computer. I had 4 banks of ram that I could easy switch to, and with the completely exposed Address and data bus it was brain dead easy to interface the computer to things in the world. I had built a XY plotter that interfaced to the cartridge bus and even built my own eeprom cartridge that would take advantage of the paged ram I added.