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It's the 40th Anniversary of Radio Shack's TRS-80 (smithsonianmag.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Smithsonsian:
It was with minimal expectations that, on August 3, 1977, Tandy Corporation teamed up with Radio Shack to release the TRS-80, one of the first personal computers available to consumer markets. While Don French -- a buyer for the Tandy Radio Shack consumer electronic chain -- had convinced some Tandy executives of the need to release a personal computer, most felt it was unlikely to gross substantial profits. This bulky item with complex operating procedures would never sell, they thought, more than 1,000 units in its first month... As it turned out, the TRS-80 surpassed even the most cautious sales estimates by tenfold within its first month on the market; the burgeoning prospects of a new era in personal electronics and computing could no longer be denied.
It had no hard drive and four kilobytes of memory, according to the article. Radio Shack's $600 PC was preceded by the MITS Altair, as well as PCs from both Apple and IBM, but "the TRS-80 was one of the first products that came fully assembled and ready to use, bridging the gap in accessibility between hobbyists -- who took interest in the actual building of the computer -- and the average American consumer, who wanted to know what this new, cutting-edge technology had in store for them."
Does this bring back any memories for anyone?
It had no hard drive and four kilobytes of memory, according to the article. Radio Shack's $600 PC was preceded by the MITS Altair, as well as PCs from both Apple and IBM, but "the TRS-80 was one of the first products that came fully assembled and ready to use, bridging the gap in accessibility between hobbyists -- who took interest in the actual building of the computer -- and the average American consumer, who wanted to know what this new, cutting-edge technology had in store for them."
Does this bring back any memories for anyone?
He and a couple of whiz kids saved Metropolis with it!
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What microcomputer had IBM released before August 1977? The Apple II beat the TRS-80 by a few months, but I thought IBM didn't get into the microcomputer market until four years later.
There you are: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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The TRS-80 wasn't my first computer but a friend had one which I used. It was a good intro to concepts for it's time.
The first 'personal' computer I used was a KIM-1 which was a motherboard with a hex keypad and hex LED output. So the TRS-80 was a huge step up from that.
My second computer was the Apple I at school which was very barebones but again a step up from the KIM-1.
I bought a Z-80 based Exidy Sorcerer which came with minimal memory that I boosted by piggy backing the additional memory chips literally on the backs of the built in memory and doing a little soldered wire wrapping to reroute a few signals.
But the first computer I used was a mainframe at UNH at Keene, NH. That was punch cards. So all of the above were huge steps up from that. Mostly because of time. With the university mainframe one only got a little bit of time to use the system. With a home computer one is able to really work with it, mod it and learn.
So while many people diss the TRS-80, calling it the Trash-80, they are missing the point. For it's time it was a good intro to computing.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100, that is classified as a "Professional Computer" (probably because the cost was "From $8,975 to $19,975"). And the processor was "an entire circuit board containing 13 square metal-can bipolar gate arrays, 3 conventional DIP transistor-transistor logic (TTL) parts and 1 round metal can part."
Thus, no, it was in no way, shape or form a personal computer.
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The target market was people who didn't even have access to real computers back then, as the summary states. Those who did referred to it as the TRaSh-80. Almost nobody programmed it in assembly. It had a BASIC interpreter in ROM, which is what you were in when you powered it on. People know how to program in assembly today. BASICally, you just got snide acting superior when you clearly lack even a passing knowledge of the subject matter. Good Job!
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Actually Ohio Scientific was the first to license Microsoft floating point BASIC in ROM, written for early (pre-June 1976) 6502s that didn't include working right bit shift instructions ROR
later upgraded it to 48k (the max, 16k was used by the display)
No, it wasn't.
The base Model I supported 16 Kilobytes it the main unit, another 32 Kilobytes could be added to the Expansion Base.
The video display in the TRS-80 was character-based, and displaying 16 lines of 64 characters did not occupy 16 Kilobytes - the base model only had 4 Kilobytes.
Ken
There were a lot of little m/l routines floating around in the magazines. It's just that most people typed in all those decimal numbers from the program listing, in a POKE loop with a few PEEKS to get data. Sometimes, the articles even explained what they were doing so if you were interested you could hand-assemble some little thing and POKE it yourself.
Did you know that the Z80, while being Intel 8080 compatible, also had several unique instructions? One was very useful - a single-instruction block move. Set registers pointing to the beginning of the block, the target, and the length of the block. Go. 4 instructions. Useful for running tape-based m/l software (which always loaded at address 0) like Tape Scripsit in a DOS system (where user memory started a bit higher) while saving up for a disk-based replacement; append the little routine to the the executable file and set the entry point in the program header to that, then just run it. When done, reboot. 8080s couldn't do that.
You seem to be unaware that you could poke assembler code into ram and then run it. BASIC was just a step in what turned out to be a long long journey.
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It's a matter of terminology. Technically it was a personal computer since it wasn't a timeshare or batch system. It was certainly NOT a home computer, which is what most people think of when they hear personal computer.
On my planet peek and poke could only access memory locations. Assembly is a language where those get replaced with mnemonics. Peek and poke don't give you that. Assembly also has a bunch of other things it can do relating to variables and registers that you can't do with peek and poke. You could use peek and poke to write an assembler, but it would be a sucky one.
When we wanted to do something using peek and poke, for those of us who actually used it, we had to look up the memory address of the peripheral and read/write our values there. You can do many things that way, but only things that map to memory locations. The real utility isn't that you can do assembly, because you can't. The human looking up the memory addresses is the assembler in that situation. Instead the value is that these micros had relatively few pins and used memory-mapped IO for peripherals, so you could access the low level functions of whatever third party chips you had installed, like a sound or graphics chip. It was the only way to access certain graphics modes from BASIC.
Nope, he's describing the LDIR instruction, which was useful for block copying or filling memory.
See: http://z80-heaven.wikidot.com/... for more details
And Initially, programs storage was achieved via saving and loading to/from cassette tap. The use of floppy disks was only enabled later via the Expansion Interface, which needed the Level 2 ROMs (which included a version of Microsoft Basic, not the Tiny BASIC that the Level 1 models had).
I think you're the one doing the babbling.