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?

Comments

10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Anonymous Coward]

20 GOTO 10

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[jlowery]

The first PC I programmed, using Logo. And I didn't have to come in at midnight to find an empty console. 1977.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[twalk]

You couldn't afford an assembler back then, too many $$$. The Z80 chip was actually pretty easy to work with for machine language programming and it was also easy to just embed that into a basic program as a "boot loader"

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Zero__Kelvin]

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!

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[sjames]

That may have been the target market, but programming in ML happened frequently enough on the TRS80 as well as C64 and other various home computers. It's what an advanced elementary school kid did when ready for the next step but parents weren't loaded.

It's fair enough to say that MOST stuck to BASIC but well more than "almost nobody' programmed the things in ML.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[mikael]

You could program in BASIC, but you could also create little bits of assembly language in BASIC using DATA statements to store the binary values as ASCII text, READ and POKE them into the memory space of a string found with ADR( STR$), then call the binary code with a USR(STR$).

Other way, were to use boot loaders on disks and tape cassette. Many articles were written on home brew assemblers for 8-bit computers.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Zero__Kelvin]

I was writing assembly for the Apple II back when the TRaSh-80 was being sold, and I also had access to the TRaSh-80. I didn't say it didn't happen. I said the same thing you used different words to say. As with the Apple II, almost nobody wrote in assembly language, because again, it had a BASIC interpreter in ROM. There was a significant barrier to writing in assembly, and the vast majority did not do it. It is true today and it was true then. Almost nobody writes in assembly language. You should know that given your SlashID.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[BarbaraHudson]

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.

Re: 10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[joe75979]

Well said. Access to a new technology be people who would not have otherwise had access was a key point to the value of these early computers. I learned programming starting with BASIC, tinkering with ML and then assembly. Was I good at it? Did I change the world? No! But it changed me. It was the foundation for the next few decades.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[ralphsiegler]

The 6502 was cost reduced inferior chip from the point of view of capabilities of architecture and instruction set compared to the Z-80. A science teacher and a few of us students formed a computer club. We sold boxes of "TV Time Popcorn" and bought a TRS-80 Model 1 and the assembler package. So I (and one other member) learned and only programmed in the Z-80 assembly, we couldn't be bothered with BASIC, though the other two members and teacher did mainly that.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Aighearach]

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.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Aighearach]

That is binary code, but it isn't assembly. Assembly is when you can do those things with non-binary source code.

Or rather, assembly code is the input to the assembler, not the output. Here, you have to hand assemble the output, due to lack of an assembler.

Re: 10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[mikael]

That's what the home brew assembler articles were about. Thinks like hashed lookup tables to convert the text assembler opcode into the actual binary.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[The Optimizer]

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.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[sjames]

He's not thinking of djnz, he's talking about LDIR.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[sjames]

I think back in the day it was FAR more common than you think (or we may be splitting hairs over words). There was a lot more payoff for it back then. Even compilers of the day did a bad enough job that hand coded assembly would be faster. With an 8 bit processor running at under 2 MHz, that made a difference.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[93 Escort Wagon]

My first paying job, as a high school student, was running a TRS-80 that the owner of a local music store chain had purchased. I wrote, in BASIC, some software for tracking instrument rentals and handling billing.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[rfengr]

Actually it's machine code, or machine language.

Re: 10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[rfengr]

Maybe meant Machine Language

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Zero__Kelvin]

You seem to be unaware that peek has nothing to do with it as that is reading a location, when you poke you are writing machine code to a location not assembly, and you need to use call if you want any of this information to be of any use, which you left out completely.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[flargleblarg]

That may have been the target market, but programming in ML happened frequently enough on the TRS80 as well as C64 and other various home computers.

Do you mean ML or do you mean machine language?

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[ralphsiegler]

yes 6800 series a great architecture. but I was just saying the Z80 was great chip for me and many others, principles applied well to later chips, we used library for floating point but none of us had interest in sound or animated graphics at the time. The floating point library was sufficient and calc time irrelevant.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Zero__Kelvin]

What the FUCK does that have to do with anything? Are you actually trying to tell us that the TRaSh was superior to the Apple?

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people over the age of 15 have learned to control their emotions. Seek professional help.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[sjames]

Machine Language.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Aighearach]

That's the weakest attempt at a pedanticism I've seen all week.

Pro tip: synonyms are synonymous.

Re: 10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Aighearach]

Man, I totally wish I had had those articles as a kid in the 1980s. I could have had separate tables for data and opcodes, instead of just a big list of memory locations and values.

If you're doing graphics the way I was, and you want to change one pixel, it could take hour.

Re: 10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

Right you are, Joe. It changed me too. Having access to one of those things and learning BASIC programming made me "the guy who knows about computers" before they were common in a business environment. It gave a huge leg up over the next few decades.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[sit1963nz]

Oh god 6800...I still have nightmares having to write a printer driver for a Heathkit 6800 trainer board as one of my course requirements. Hand assembling the code and entering it onto the damn thing via a hex keypad.
shudder......

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[rfengr]

No it's not pedantic. WTF is binary code? It may as well be octal or hex? The next step below machine code is microcode; the code interpreting the opcodes.

Re: 10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[mikael]

I did Atari 800 player missile graphics in 6502 assembler. Wrote clones of the Combat hame cartridge.

  Each line of assembly was hand converted into opcodes; 104, 104, 141, 6,0. 96. Practically remembered all the one line instructions.

Still used it until around 1988 when I got a desktop PC.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Anonymous Coward]

I can relate to not affording the assembler. I spent hours writing assembly-language programs on paper and then and then hand-generating the opcodes before typing them into the machine (at least I had a little helper program for that). There were also a lot of sequences where I would add up the number of clock cycles a given block of code would take in order to find the most efficient method or to know what kind of timing I'd have for iterations of the loop.

That sure got a lot simpler when I finally got an assembler!

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Aighearach]

Yeah right, you were busy herding cows or something, coward.

What sort of kid would write an assembler, instead of making stupid games? Did your mother have any children who lived?

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Aighearach]

Right, you came to realize it doesn't have a narrow meaning, but you failed to understand that that means it can be used loosely.

And yes, that sort of attempted correction is entirely pedantic. Which I don't mind. But when you're being pedantic, be right. Or don't try it.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[goose-incarnated]

I was writing assembly for the Apple II back when the TRaSh-80 was being sold, and I also had access to the TRaSh-80. I didn't say it didn't happen. I said the same thing you used different words to say. As with the Apple II, almost nobody wrote in assembly language, because again, it had a BASIC interpreter in ROM. There was a significant barrier to writing in assembly, and the vast majority did not do it. It is true today and it was true then. Almost nobody writes in assembly language. You should know that given your SlashID.

The barrier to writing in assembly was not that significant, but the payoffs were relatively large enough that many programmers did it, and not just for the TRS. The smaller the chip the larger the payoff for assembler.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[adrianhensler]

Regarding clock cycles, the largest bit of software I wrote (in BASIC) on the Coco3 was to calculate and draw a mandelbrot set. This took between 12 hours and a full day. I found many tricks during programming to speed this up. For example, assigning a value of "." as in "a = ." was faster than using "a = 0". I've forgotten the rest of the speed tweaks. Well, except POKE 65496,0 and Poke 65497,0.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[RedMage]

Really, too much cost? I had a friend with the EDTASM assembler for the Trash-80 Mod 1 ("16K" required!) and don't recall the price for the assembler being too much. Now, getting that required 16K RAM was fairly expensive, and if you wanted more then it was REALLY expensive because of the expansion case.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[david_thornley]

$300 for 16K memory, and the Expansion Interface (which had the floppy disk controller, a spot for the RS-232 board, sockets for the other 32K memory you could use, and a parallel printer port) another $300. I bought 32K of memory from a third party, at about $240 total, since it was so cheap.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[david_thornley]

Like everything else, the TRS-80 vs. Commodore PET vs. Apple II had advantages and disadvantages for each. Many of the advantages of the Apple cost additional money, and this was about a factor of four inflation ago. The $1000 I paid for my first TRS-80 (Level 2 BASIC - the standard Microsoft variety, as opposed to the 4K integer-only Level 1 BASIC, and 16K of RAM rather than 4K) is far more, inflation-adjusted, than most computers nowadays, and that's before adding all the other things.

Wikipedia lists the price of an Apple II as $1300 on launch, and it couldn't do everything a somewhat cheaper TRS-80 could do. A sufficiently expensive Apple could do pretty much anything the TRS-80 could.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[david_thornley]

Bear in mind that we're talking 1977 technology here, and a maximum memory capacity of 48K. I don't remember when the first disk drives were available, but they could store about 40K each (IIRC, the 1771 FDC was replaced in later versions by the 1791, allowing 80K floppies). There was a very limited selection of computer languages, even with the later models. I never saw any reference to ML at the time.

Re: 10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[david_thornley]

The screen on the original TRS-80 was memory-mapped, and had only 7 bits enabled to save money. A later upgrade (not available early on) was to add another 16K bit chip and a new character generator, making it into a halfway decent word processor if you got LeScript and a daisy-wheel printer.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[david_thornley]

Binary code is the same as octal or hex. It depends on how it's written, but it's 8-bit numbers in memory . The normal practice back then was to express 8-bit numbers in decimal and POKE them into memory locations.

The Z80 was not microcoded, IIRC, but rather executed the instructions in hardware.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[sjames]

You should try stuffing machine code into REM statements on a T/S 1000 some time!

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Askmum]

Nope, not the kind of people getting access to a TRS-80. And even if they did, it booted into BASIC so the first thing you did was write in BASIC. Even peeks and pokes were something advanced.

I remember them from highschool. First computer I ever touched, the craze was a stupid little program that let you move the full cursor on the screen using the arrow keys making it basically a drawing program. I had that program memorized and would type it in for the kids that were not that "tech savvy". I don't remember doing other programs but I must have because I tried to use the cassette recorder to store programs.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Muad'Dave]

OMG I remember that well. Lots of poke statements followed by a call to kick it off. I had a reasonable oscilloscope-like program running in 'chine language there for a while.

Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST"

[Muad'Dave]

IIRC, on the Z-80 peripherals where I/O space mapped using IN and OUT instructions, not memory-mapped (aside form the screen).

Nothing like nostalgia!

[fortfive]

My first experience with trek was on a trs-80. Dual floppies!

Re: Nothing like nostalgia!

[bigwheel]

75kb floppies and the ability to write an infinite loop without draining my university account for cpu time. It was a big deal at the time.

Re:Nothing like nostalgia!

[Anonymous Coward]

My first experience was with a woman, but different strokes for different blokes, I guess.

Re:Nothing like nostalgia!

[rfengr]

Telengard here.

Re: Nothing like nostalgia!

[Nutria]

You're posting AC because you're ashamed to put your name by obvious rubbish like, "Bought 16k mod 3 with cassette in 79" when EVERYONE knows that the Model III (not "3") wasn't released until late 1980!!

Re:Nothing like nostalgia!

[BonThomme]

cassette drive...

Re:Nothing like nostalgia!

[fortfive]

Oh right, the one I used was Model III, with the floppies. I'm getting old, the memory is starting to lose cohesion . . .

Re:Nothing like nostalgia!

[JoeCommodore]

I think it was probably the first home computer I got to touch, the local RS dealer was showing it off at a school open house (the school went with PETs) In high school they got donated a TRS-80 and I got to borrow it for a few months (so technically, first home computer too), That cheezy cheapo monitor I think added character to it... Had level3 BASIC to play with it as well as some other stuff, was kinda fun made me appreciate the PETs BASIC editor though (bith the TRS-80 and Apple II both had some weird key gymnastics needed to edit a program line.

You know, they have a version of Flight Simulator for it too, not too bad - graphics were blocky but it was balanced out by a nice frame rate.

Re:Nothing like nostalgia!

[Aighearach]

If you only experience games, are they not your reality? Is reality not real?

Re: Nothing like nostalgia!

[Aighearach]

At that age, only being off by 1 is doing pretty good.

My friends had the TRS-80, so did my cousins. I only had a Timex/Sinclair 1000; no tape deck.

Re:Nothing like nostalgia!

[sit1963nz]

The first computer I ever saw was a TRS-80 M1 that had cassette tape only, I played backgammon on it.

My first computer I owned was a Dick Smith System-80 (TRS-80 M1 clone) that I then upgraded to 48K of RAM, still with cassette only. 20 minutes to load "asylum"

Got a genuine TRS-80 M3 after that, the joys of 1200 baud cassettes....lol.

My first computer with Floppies was an Amstrad PCW8256. I also owned a Kaypro 4. Ahh the joys of CPM 2.2 and CPM 3

I now own about 400 old computers ranging from Casio calculator style through to a PDP11-23.

Re: Nothing like nostalgia!

[Nutria]

The sarcasm zoomed right over your head.

Re:Nothing like nostalgia!

[bigwheel]

And the ability to use the cassette on-off switch with some hw/sw hacking, to generate pulses to simulate dialing a rotary phone and connect a 150k baud modem. Note that this was before modems got smart enough to do their own dialing.

Re: Nothing like nostalgia!

[Aighearach]

I'm not sure what you hallucinated, but I didn't contradict anything so it wouldn't make any difference if there was sarcasm or not. I mean, sarcasm is what idiots substitute for humor, and I don't mind that, idiots have a right to humor too. But why would I care? Why would it change what I say about my own experiences?

Re: Nothing like nostalgia!

[DavidApi]

My high school had two TRS-80s with tape drives in 1981, running CP/M. Then a third came with this weird looking device called a floppy drive. I was highly sceptical. Still am :-) Had to get to school early to beat anyone else to get onto them. But only a small number of students even knew they existed! Good time.

Re: Nothing like nostalgia!

[david_thornley]

CP/M required floppy disks, which were somewhat affordable by 1981. The first TRS-80s in that series (i.e., not the Model II, which was something different) that were able to run standard CP/M were the Model 4s, which came out in 1983. I never heard anyone refer to the ROM as an OS, but if you got a floppy disk you could run TRS-DOS.

Re: Nothing like nostalgia!

[david_thornley]

Most home computers had some sort of cassette storage system in those days. I had some friends come out with some air combat games that were cassette-only because anything on a disk drive could be copied.

Mine had 16k

[Snotnose]

I later upgraded it to 48k (the max, 16k was used by the display), added an expansion board, floppies, and updated the character ROM.

Learned both HW and SW on that puppy.

Re:Mine had 16k

[mysticgoat]

I lucked into a used Apple ][ I could afford in 1980, but I hung around with kids who were using Trash-Eighties. They all had major problems with keyboards and were expert at fixing them. I had major problems with the limitations of Applesoft BASIC and envied their BASIC (it seemed more capable). Also the TRS-80 didn't put worms on any nearby TV the way the Apple, with its lack of shielding, did.

Whether Apple or Trash-Eighty, we all got hooked on the incredible high of getting a 100 line program to run. The TRS-80 demented a lot of kids, turned them into programming nerds. The Apple also, but it cost much more so its impact was less. Looking back, the TRS-80 was better designed, but the Apple was better built.

What was way-cool was that around 1984 someone was making an extension card for the Apple with an 8088 CPU and firmware CP/M, that used the Apple IO devices and memory. I taught myself WordStar on that, and did several papers on an Okidata dot-matrix printer using laserperf pin-fed paper. Bursting those sheets was kind of fun. Turning in computer printed assignments when all my classmates did their work on the school's IBM Selectric typewriters was neat.

Re: Mine had 16k

[kenh]

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.

Re: Mine had 16k

[kenh]

Also the TRS-80 didn't put worms on any nearby TV the way the Apple, with its lack of shielding, did.

The TRS-80 had a modified TV for a monitor, the Apple ][ typically used an RF modulator (the do-called Sup'r Mod was very popular) to put it's display on a TV.

The issue wasn't the Apple ][ and it's lack of shielding, the TRS-80 was equally unshielded.

Re: Mine had 16k

[kenh]

What was way-cool was that around 1984 someone was making an extension card for the Apple with an 8088 CPU and firmware CP/M, that used the Apple IO devices and memory.

It was a Z80 card, it was called 'Z-80 Softcard' and it was released by Microsoft.

Re:Mine had 16k

[pepsikid]

Of course, the first thing colleges and high schools did was forbid the use of word processors and computer printers. None of that laziness here, no sir! :D

Re:Mine had 16k

[i.r.id10t]

My typing teacher in 8th grade, when the TRS-80 was still fairly new, thought all printers were dot matrix, and you could only get greenbar paper.

She'd assign us to type a sentence repeatedly as homework.

My daisy wheel printer used the same print heads as one of the typewriters that RS also sold.

One for loop, single feed some typing paper, and homework done.

The "check your typing speed" program was written in BASIC as well... so of course the copy I was loading was slightly modified...

Re: Mine had 16k

[hawk]

There were actually almost 5k, not 4k.

4k of DRAM, but 1k of 7 bit SRAM for the display--1 bit for whether it was a character or six pixels. An eighth could be piggybacked to allow lowercase.

The system ran at 1.78 MHz--bizarrely slow for a Z80 at the time, and well below the rated speed, but that was also the rate a which characters went onto the screen on a line.

One might have thought that this was so that the computer and display could alternate cycles on the memory--but, no; control was simply yanked from the video when the CPU accessed this memory, causing an artifact on the screen. (so it was possible, and many cut a trace to do it, to clock the CPU at a higher speed).

The CPU was also used to scan the keyboard, meaning that the thing slowed down significantly when someone hit a lot of keys at once or put a hand down.

Also, there were a couple of aftermarket ways to expand to 48k without the expansion kit. I think one clipped 32k in a pack to the expansion bus (leaving you with 48k and no disk . . .), and I want to say that there was one that installed internally, but it's been a while.

I had one, hated it, and forced them to take it back.

hawk

Re: Mine had 16k

[jtchitty]

There was a Z80 card and a CPM card. They were different cards. I somehow wound up with both at one time, but never used them. The 80-column card and the 128k memory expansion card got the most use (aside from the floppy controller card, of course). Ah, it brings me back...

Re:Mine had 16k

[ncc74656]

What was way-cool was that around 1984 someone was making an extension card for the Apple with an 8088 CPU and firmware CP/M, that used the Apple IO devices and memory.

You wouldn't have been running CP/M on an 8088, but MS-DOS (or a knockoff thereof). The Applied Engineering PC Transporter had a V20 (faster 8088-compatible), an MFM floppy controller, CGA graphics, and up to 768K of RAM on an expansion card for the IIe or IIGS (not sure if it was compatible with the II+). I'm not entirely sure when it was introduced...probably sometime in the mid-'80s. I got my IIe in '85, so I'm a little bit vague on what was available earlier.

If you were running CP/M, it would've been on one of the many Z80 add-on boards that were available.

I taught myself WordStar on that, and did several papers on an Okidata dot-matrix printer using laserperf pin-fed paper. Bursting those sheets was kind of fun. Turning in computer printed assignments when all my classmates did their work on the school's IBM Selectric typewriters was neat.

I used native apps...first Apple Writer, then AppleWorks with some of the TimeOut addons. One of those addons enabled multiple fonts and higher-quality printouts. The papers I handed in looked like they could've been written up on a Mac.

Re:Mine had 16k

[Wolfrider]

> I taught myself WordStar on that

--FYI, the 'joe' (Joe's Own Editor) package in Linux has 'jstar', which is a text editor that is mostly Wordstar key-compatible. Good times.

Re: Mine had 16k

[mysticgoat]

The Apple ][ used wide, unshielded, parallel cables between the computer and the external floppy drives. The worms were worst after I added the first floppy box, and much worse after I added the second one. Made the TV 2 rooms and 30+ feet away unusable, even when watching Betamax tapes. (My mother-in-law would record Sesame Street for her grandkid and STNG and some other shows for her daughter and I; we were living out in the boonies where there were no local TV stations and a satellite link would need a honking big dish that we did not want on our hobby farm).

Re:Mine had 16k

[mysticgoat]

"Z-80" sounds right. It was definitely running CP/M. I bought it because by that point I was well aware that Apple was going for a high end market that was too expensive for me. Much as I wanted to get into Pascal, I could not justify the cost of the hardware.

When I was forced out of my first career by a broken back, I got an early no-name IBM PC clone and learned DOS down to the "Int 21" level. I developed saleable skills in custom building IBM clones, and with several varieties of DOS, and Windows from 3.0 to Win98. But early on I recognized that I did not want to hitch my waggon to Microsoft, not when they deliberately did not fix the bug in the Win30 Calculator app when Win31 came out (and it was still there in Win311, and the sexy little vampish MS Rep with the supertight teeshirt and jeans was telling my boss that this was a sales feature to encourage customers to buy Excel).

By about 2005 Linux had matured enough to do everything I needed, and wanted, and much more. I've been using one or another variant of Ubuntu since then and I haven't looked back. I am now retired but I am still occasionally asked to do the magic guru thing and get someone's machine out of an MS hellhole and back into working order. I usually do that by installing Ubuntu MATE as a dual boot, and showing them how to open the MS based files and save in an ODF format.

Consumer ready; but still mod'ed

[NetAlien]

Upgraded 4K to 16K... WOW! :D Punched holes in floppy jackets to double-side them.

Re:Consumer ready; but still mod'ed

[Trax3001BBS]

Upgraded 4K to 16K... WOW! :D Punched holes in floppy jackets to double-side them.

It was the fact only programs sold by Radio Shack were available (not having but BBS's and AOL types), little avenue for what you really wanted.

Re:Consumer ready; but still mod'ed

[72beetle]

When we upgraded my CoCo to 16k we got to swap out the button on the top of the case. It was a magical moment. Back then 16k was TUFF STUFF.

Re:Consumer ready; but still mod'ed

[david_thornley]

If you bought the Level II (i.e., Microsoft) BASIC, you could type in all sorts of BASIC programs. I've still got some from the time period that were apparently designed for teletypes on time-sharing systems. Later on, there were plenty of programs for the system.

Specs

[hcs_$reboot]

"four kilobytes of memory" ... and was running Windows 0.00000010

Gawd, I hated that thing...

[Type44Q]

I was stuck using "Trash 80's" through middle school; hell, my first computer was a direct descendant (the deliberately crippled and non-standard Tandy 1000EX with proprietary memory, proprietary video and audio and floppy drives that popular disk-copy utilities wouldn't support, etc).

Re:Gawd, I hated that thing...

[DontBeAMoran]

But you still had Tandy Color Graphics and Tandy 3-voice sound. Weren't most people of that era stuck with CGA graphics and a crappy internal speaker?

Re:Gawd, I hated that thing...

[Type44Q]

Comparable PC's were at least equipped with EGA (similar to Tandy 16-color but an actual VESA standard) and some (IBM PS/2 series) with VGA.

Re: audio, I don't recall the built-in speaker in my 1000EX putting out much in the way of hi-fi...

Re:Gawd, I hated that thing...

[DontBeAMoran]

audio, I don't recall the built-in speaker in my 1000EX putting out much in the way of hi-fi...

It was no Roland MT-32 but it sure was better than the standard internal PC speaker.

Re:Gawd, I hated that thing...

[Tablizer]

ALL the early microcomputers sucked. It was the 1st generation, for Pete's sake. Working around the flaws was part of the "fun".

Re:Gawd, I hated that thing...

[Dan East]

Wow. Exact same experience. I used the TRS-80 in middle school, and we also called it the Trash 80 (this was in Ohio - was that moniker really that universal I wonder?). I was really bummed, because that class had TI-99/4A computers, which is what I had at home, so I was ready to kick but in some TI-BASIC programming. They just got the TRS-80s and they were brand new when I took that class. :( I remember it having one of the worst BASIC implementations, and the most convoluted, nasty way of editing or entering lines. It was strange and confusing was what I remember. I think pretty much any other computer would have been better. The teacher also had a very hard time with them, having been used to the TIs and having to switch to an entirely different computer which they did not know very well. TIs might not have been perfect, but there was one thing you could count on from Texas Instruments - professional, commercial quality consistent design. The TRS-80s felt like a hack job.

Re:Gawd, I hated that thing...

[david_thornley]

I don't remember the EX designation, but the 1000 series was designed to be better than contemporary IBM PCs. There were versions of some business software for it (like Visicalc and some word processing program), and the color display was far better than what IBM had at the time. This was before we had IBM-compatible ROMs, so any non-IBM computer was nonstandard to some extent.

Re:Gawd, I hated that thing...

[david_thornley]

Entering BASIC programs on the TRS-80 was absolutely standard. There was nothing strange or confusing about it, if you were familiar with Microsoft BASIC or the original time-shared version. It actually had a somewhat superior Microsoft BASIC compared to many computers, since it had 12K rather than 8K ROMs.

The original TRS-80s were a hack job, because Radio Shack was taking a chance on them. The second production run was sized so that, if it proved a bust, there'd be a TRS-80 for each Radio Shack store, for use for inventory or something. The TI-99/4 was introduced a couple of years after that, and the TRS-80 Model III the year after that.

Preceeded by IBM?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Preceeded by IBM?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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/...

Re:Preceeded by IBM?

[Nutria]

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.

Re:Preceeded by IBM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that same wikipedia article contains this:

"BYTE in December 1975 stated "Welcome, IBM, to personal computing". Describing the 5100 as "a 50-lb package of interactive personal computing""

Re:Preceeded by IBM?

[Type44Q]

Was it only available in Germany? I guess that would be no surprise as IBM and Deutschland have a long history...

Re:Preceeded by IBM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personal Computing had a different definition back then. If you could pick it up without a fork lift and you could program it, it was a personal computer. If it could be used without being connected to a mainframe or large mini, it was a personal computer. PDP/8S and LINC/8 were marketed as, in effect, personal computers because they were programmed and used by a single person, not a priesthood servicing (using the agricultural term advisedly) its customers. By those criteria, a 50# (and therefore portable by one person, though with considerable effort) piece of programmable lab controller equipment was a PC.

Re:Preceeded by IBM?

[sjames]

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.

Re:Preceeded by IBM?

[ganjadude]

was recently reading about this over at ars

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-1/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-2/

great read

Re:Preceeded by IBM?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I guess that would be no surprise as IBM and Deutschland have a long history...

. . . that attempted lawsuit scam gained no traction . . . or do we see IBM making any payments to anybody . . . ? It was an SCO / Linux thing . . . who was behind the whole matter . . . well, who had to gain in the story . . . ?

. . . and no, it wasn't the victims . . .

Re:Preceeded by IBM?

[Nutria]

Is there a difference between "expensive single-user computer designed for the professional world" and "personal computer"?

Re:Preceeded by IBM?

[msauve]

Yes, there is. The 5100 was not a personal computer. And, they were often referred to as microcomputers or home computers, not just PCs.

PCs, as the term was most commonly used, were not PDP-8s, or DG Novas, or IBM 5100s, or HP 9100As, et al, as the GP/AC claims, but computers which a person could reasonably afford, not ones which would be used by a single person but normally bought by some enterprise.

The Altair was first, then a bunch of S-100 copies (IMSAI, NorthStar, Poly, etc.). There were also the lower cost educational trainers - KIM-1, SYM-1 (VIM-1), AIM-65. But it was when the TRS-80, Apple ][ and Commodore PET came out that they really started to sell to the general public, and not just techie hobbiests.

Re:Preceeded by IBM?

[david_thornley]

Note that inflation has been around a factor of four since then, so the lowest-cost one would cost about $40K in today's dollars.

Re:Preceeded by IBM?

[david_thornley]

The PETs of the time had crappy keyboards (even by the microcomputer standards of the time) and were limited in the amount of memory they could have. One novel feature was the all-in-one case that had the chicklet keyboard, cassette drive, and display. For general use, the bus wasn't unusually good, and it lacked in other factors.

I did some comparison shopping in late 1977. I might have gotten an Apple if they were cheaper.

Epson PX-8 Geneva

[DesertNomad]

At that time, I had near-constant access to an IMSAI 8-bit computer with a Micropolis dual drive and a Xerox Diablo printer. I got on board the notebook craze a while later with the PX-8. Mine ran BASIC and had a mini-cassette tape drive for long-term storage, It had a serial port that tied into a 2 meter ham radio transceiver and I could do text messaging via amateur packet radio. Was so cool.

Scared the shit out of me

[rfengr]

I was 5 or 6 and in RS with my dad. Wondered over to one sitting out and pushed the orange button. Scared the shit out of me with a bunch of buzzing and clanking. Must have been 8" drives. Thought I had broken something. Few years later we had some in the school computer lab (really a closet). Learned to program on those. Only 1 had 5" floppies, and the rest were networked via the cassette ports via a cool rotary switch box. You could upload your basic code to the server and save to floppy. The sever did have a punch card reader, which some older kid got working when the school paid him $100.

Re:Scared the shit out of me

[Nutria]

Only 1 had 5" floppies, and the rest were networked via the cassette ports via a cool rotary switch box.

The exact same thing was in our school, where I learned to program.

Re:Scared the shit out of me

[Nkwe]

Only 1 had 5" floppies, and the rest were networked via the cassette ports via a cool rotary switch box. You could upload your basic code to the server and save to floppy.

That box with the rotary switch was more of an audio distribution device as opposed to what we would call a network today. The main computer would save a program and the switch box would send the audio that would normally go to a cassette recorder to all of the other computers. (Everyone had to load at the same time.) The rotary switch would select which computer the master would get the audio from and the process would be reversed, one computer at a time. Actually worked pretty well for instructor to send everyone a starter program, have the students modify it, and then one by one get the results back from the students.

The sever did have a punch card reader, which some older kid got working when the school paid him $100.

Wasn't a stock piece of TRS-80 equipment then as they didn't sell punch card readers for the TRS-80 line. If true, then that would have been a cool hack. Parallel and serial ports were present, so certainly possible.

Re:Scared the shit out of me

[rfengr]

May have been an optical card reader; don't recall. It did have the silver/black color scheme of the early Tandys, but don't recall if it was Tandy branded. In any case no adult could get it working so they challenged the students and some senior (textbook computer nerd); I was only in grade school at the time. Yeah, I remember setting all the PCs to "load" prior to class, and the instructor sending all the data. One of those boxes was on eBay recently. Fun times.

TRS-80

[DontBeAMoran]

My first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 with 64KB of RAM and tape drive. About eight minutes to load the game "Popeye" if I remember correctly.

Re:TRS-80

[david_thornley]

The CoCo was a sweet machine, particularly the 2 which had a halfway decent keyboard.

IMSAI 8080

[QuietLagoon]

From 1975, another of the early S-100 bus microcomputers. https://www.imsai.net/

Re:IMSAI 8080

[QuietLagoon]

Forgot to mention, the IMSAI 8080 was my first computer... :)

Re:IMSAI 8080

[Trax3001BBS]

Forgot to mention, the IMSAI 8080 was my first computer... :)

My TI-85 calculator has better. Z80, one step up from the 8080 ;)

Kind of a Kludge

[DumbSwede]

Never owned one, but was using an Apple ][ at the time. Spent a lot of time back then going to various computer stores and obsessing over things like the Commodore PET (before the Commodore VIC20 and C64). Couldn't believe how enthusiastic the Radio Shack employees were as cheerleaders for the thing. Me, I couldn't get past the fact you needed to boot it from a cassette drive to use a floppy drive (at least when demoed to me at the time).

No, that was the Commodore PET

[Anonymous Coward]

"four kilobytes of memory" ... and was running Windows 0.00000010

Commodore was the first licensee of Microsoft Basic, which was Microsoft's first product, and the PET 2001, also with 4k of memory, came out in October of 1977.

So you were almost right.

Re:No, that was the Commodore PET

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Microsoft made Basic for the Altair as well.

Re:No, that was the Commodore PET

[Anonymous Coward]

> Actually Microsoft made Basic for the Altair as well.

You might even say BASIC for the Altair made Microsoft!

Re:No, that was the Commodore PET

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Remember when even Superman used a TRS-80?

[elrous0]

He and a couple of whiz kids saved Metropolis with it!

my first sneering love

[epine]

My high school purchased the original 4 kB version, and then upgraded it to 16 kB the following year. The school generously allowed me to take it home on weekends. There were two Apple IIs in the lab as well, with actual floppy disks. I chose the TRS-80 simply because I could get more time. The Apple IIs were busy playing games most of the time. Did anyone learn to actually code on those machines? Not that I noticed.

This was my first actual computer. In my first week of programming, I tried to write:

    if 0 <= i < 100 ...

I was shocked when this didn't work as expected. Man, I thought to myself, these things are even more brutally literal-minded that I had ever imagined, and I had already been reading about computers for years.

After that, I constantly had at the back of my mind: just how broken is this language?

Well, you can write a for loop. Inside the for loop, you can call a subroutine. Inside the subroutine, you can write next. This takes you back to the for loop. Then inside the for loop, you can write return. This takes you back to the subroutine. Only don't do return again, your call stack is empty. You need to get out again with another next statement. Yes, I actually wrote this program using the TRS-80 BASIC.

It wasn't long before I wrote a skeletal Z80 disassembler in BASIC and then reverse-engineered the ability to load machine language programs directly from cassette tape.

After that, I didn't program in BASIC very much.

I still have a TRS-80 reference manual with the full schematics.

Re:my first sneering love

[epine]

This takes you back to the subroutine.

I got that wrong in my mind, didn't I? It takes you back to the call point. Oops. Difficult business, this is, dredging up memories from once-upon-a-forever-ago.

I'm pretty sure I wrote that program for maximal obfuscation, so there could have been another for loop in the subroutine, and I really was ping-ponging wildly.

Re:my first sneering love

[epine]

From The custom TRS-80 & other mysteries"

One of the most maligned aspects of the TRS-80 is its cassette loading procedure. Interestingly, it is a lengthy and skillfully designed piece of coding, a victim of a combination of poor hardware (an inexpensive cassette recorder), the inclination personal computer owners have to purchase the least expensive tapes they can find, and the lack of foresight on the part of the engineers designing the routines. But there's no question that with a good tape recorder and reasonable tape, it works well.

...

Overall, these routines give the appearance of being reasonable and reliable, and they should be. What, then, gives rise to the tape problems? Mostly the timing loop in the 0235/0241 subroutine. The values placed in the B register at 0248 and 024F are too short for low-grade audio processing. Simply stated, the audio waveform coming in from tape 'rises' too slowly for the fast bit-check loop at 0251 to catch. A 'one' might come through, but it comes through too laggardly for port FF to have flipped into place.

I found that quickly because I can still recall the entry point 0x1BB3.

Re:my first sneering love

[RoverDaddy]

My SIG is very relevant to your comment, but I encountered it learning to program IBM Advanced Basic (BASICA.EXE) in 1982.

Oh Yes...

[LVSlushdat]

One of these was my first computer. Bought at the Yuma Arizona Radio Shack store sometime in 1977. I was in the Army at the time, stationed at the US Army Yuma Proving Grounds. Paid $795 for one of the Level 1 4K systems. Hard to believe today that you could actually *do* anything on 4K of ram, and an integer BASIC, but I sure did.. Wish I still had it, although I do still have my 8K TRS-80 Model 100, and it still works!!!

Re:Oh Yes...

[wwphx]

I still have my 24k Model 100, aside from some corrosion on the battery contacts it works fine. I also have the disk/video interface and the 3.5" floppy somewhere. Wonderful computer. I understand they're still very popular in marine biology: easy to seal in a big Ziploc and you've got a great keyboard to type on. I was discussing it just recently and someone pointed me to an M100 emulator: why would I want to bother with an emulator when I have the real thing?

A friend had one... Good for its time.

[pubwvj]

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.

Re:A friend had one... Good for its time.

[RoverDaddy]

I still have a 64KB memory card for the original IBM PC (5150), which has chips piggybacked on top of each other. It looks as if all 16 pins on each chip are connected, so I've always wondered whether the chip on the bottom is different from the chip on top, perhaps to have a single inverter on one pin so it responds to the address strobe differently from the chip it's mated with.

Re:A friend had one... Good for its time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a concept: it's means it is.

Re:A friend had one... Good for its time.

[pubwvj]

I guess you're not very confident about your statement since you hide behind a mask...

Re:A friend had one... Good for its time.

[hawk]

There are a couple of ways to do it.

Everything but the DI & DO (Data in & out) lines could be sobered together, to create two bits in that socket. Or, I think some chips at the time may have had a combined data in; it's been a while.

Or, if the chips had tai-state output, all but chip select could have been soldered together.

hawk

Re:Fond Childhood Memories of the TRS-80 Pocket

[The Grim Reefer]

I forgot all about having that printer. It had three or four different pens that it would use one of at a time. It had to go the the far left in order to switch colors and could only rotate the pens in one direction.

Never really saw a functional one

[Octorian]

When I was growing up, I think I was exposed mostly to whatever survived this era. The Apple IIe was commonplace, as were similar machines. However, the only place I ever saw a TRS-80 was as a bunch of disassembled components stashed in the corner of someone's office.

Video Genie

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to spend my lunch breaks in the local Tandy (British for Radio Shack) store programming one of these. The manager looked over my shoulder quite often and was impressed enough to offer me a job (I declined)

Later, I had a Video Genie which was a clone of the TRS-80. 16k RAM, and 1k of 7 bit (seriously!) video memory. A Z80 at 1.73MHz (I think). Fairly decent keyboard, built-in tape cassette drive. I expanded the RAM to 48k by the (then) common method of soldering additional chips on top of the existing ones. Those were the days when you could fully understand a computer, and could easily learn to hack hardware if you felt like it.

I spent many, many happy hours programming it, and became fairly adept with Z80 assembly - a skill which later became significant in advancing my career. I was driven to understand how it all worked, so wrote myself a disassembler and studied the ROM BASIC. Learned a few tricks for making code fit into limited memory, and saw a few things that were... questionable.

Damn it - computing was fun back then.

Re:Video Genie

[rfengr]

I don't know if it's no longer fun because we are old, or computer tech is boring. I still have a C64 and Apple II set up, so I'm thinking it's the latter.

Re:Video Genie

[david_thornley]

The TRS-80, initially, had no way of making sound other than the tape relay, which was not a good musical device had had the potential of wearing out the relay. (I no longer have my technical manual, so I can't tell you where the relay was or what it was actually supposed to do).

Basic

[superid]

My brother had one with a serial number in the 500's. Out of the box, the first generation had a version of basic that supported only two string variables. $a and $b. That was all you had to work with until you got the upgrade a few months later.

Re:Basic

[david_thornley]

Another thing about $A and $B was that there was that you could type the strings in and print them out, and do absolutely nothing additional with them. I thought the most interesting thing about the TRS-80 Level 1 BASIC were the error messages: WHAT? (syntax error), HOW? (runtime error) and SORRY (ran out of memory). There were (IIRC) 26 16-bit integer variables, the two strings (limited length, maybe 16 characters each), and one array A[] or A() that took up the rest of memory.

One of the "1977 Trinity"

[darthsilun]

Wikipedia says

[ the Apple ][ ] was one of the three "1977 Trinity" computers generally credited with creating the home computer market (the other two being the Commodore PET and the Tandy Corporation TRS-80)

So what did Apple do right (haters need not comment here)? Or What did Commodore and Radio Shack do wrong?

Yes, it's really more of a rhetorical question.

Re:One of the "1977 Trinity"

[shmlco]

The Apple had about a half-dozen expansion slots and Apple published the schematics and circuit board diagrams. That openness encouraged people to expand it, and even let Apple expand it with the floppy drive controller, serial cards, parallel cards, and RAM cards.

The Pet and the TRS-80 did not.

In fact, I still have an original Apple ][ "red" book...

Re:One of the "1977 Trinity"

[itsdapead]

So what did Apple do right (haters need not comment here)? Or What did Commodore and Radio Shack do wrong?

Yes, it's really more of a rhetorical question.

As well as the expandability mentioned by others, Apple had far better graphics than the TRS-80 (huge blocky 2x3 character-based things for pseudo-pixel-based graphics) or the PET (no pixel-based graphics, just the distant ancestors of emoji...) ISTR they also got a boost from being the original platform for Visicalc the first successful spreadsheet (I'm sure it had antecedents) and probably the first truly "new" application of the microcomputer age.

However, Apple may have been the market leader (at least in the US), but Commodore, Radio Shack, the numerous CP/M-based small business systems and many others had a sustained run of success - and Apple can't claim responsibility for their demise.

Commodore did better in Europe/UK (where Apple charged silly prices), SInclair, Acorn, Commodore and Amstrad dominated in the UK. There was a bit of a shake-up in the early 80s which killed off most of the also-rans, but the big 3 got though that. Then the IBM PC Clones arrived at home/small business/hobbyist prices (I don't think IBM alone would have got that far - remember the PCJr?) and squashed everything... and would probably have squashed Apple if that young lady hadn't burst into the auditorium and thrown her hammer at the screen.

The Mac, or maybe even just that ad, is probably the only reason we're not saying "Anybody remember Apple? What happened to them?" today is the Mac, and maybe even more specifically that famous 1984 advert.

Re:One of the "1977 Trinity"

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mac, or maybe even just that ad, is probably the only reason we're not saying "Anybody remember Apple? What happened to them?" today is the Mac, and maybe even more specifically that famous 1984 advert.

I think the effect of the ad faded pretty quickly. It's more likely the 2 reasons we're not saying "remember Apple?" are the LaserWriter and Aldus PageMaker.

Re:One of the "1977 Trinity"

[Tablizer]

Two things allowed Apple to survive while the others withered. The first is that the first microcomputer spreadsheet, VisiCalc, ran on Apple first. Why the Apple II was picked has a lot of conflicting stories behind it, and may just have been happenstance: one story is the PET and TRS in the dev office were being used by others. Some say Steve Jobs gifted them an Apple II to write for it, but that hasn't been confirmed.

VisiCalc's popularity exploded, giving Apple enough money to pursue GUI's...

And then the Macintosh came along, the first affordable GUI microcomputer. Although it didn't sell that well at first, desktop publishing exploded in the mid/late 80's and everyone wanted a Mac. The others were slow to get GUI's and related software. By the time they did, they were competing with both Mac and Microsoft Windows.

While the Apple II was arguably a better machine, it was also more expensive than PET and TRS and thus had no inherent edge.

If VisiCalc were written for either of the other 2, tech history may have been significantly different and you may have had a TRSphone in your pocket right now.

Re:One of the "1977 Trinity"

[Tablizer]

Apple may have been the market leader (at least in the US), but...

Apple was not the leader per units sold until VisiCalc came along. TRS and PET traded placed I believe until VisiCalc. Then Commodore 64 ruled even Apple II in the home market until the PC got cheap enough for home use.

Re:One of the "1977 Trinity"

[david_thornley]

What happened was the IBM PC, which soon took over the industry. The old Apple II and TRS-80 computers stayed in production for some time, but couldn't sell in nearly as great numbers. The PET had long gone by the wayside.

The three of them tried making their mark in different ways. Radio Shack tried coming out with a line of IBM PC-like computers that were superior, but this was before IBM-compatible ROMs, so they died in the marketplace, and Radio Shack continued making PC clones for a while. Commodore came out with the 64 and later the Amiga, which were innovative, very good, and didn't last. (IIRC, Commodore wasn't as committed to the industry.) Apple fumbled with the Apple III, produced the Lisa that was too expensive for home users, and finally the Macintosh, which was successful as the only real competitor to the PC and PC clones in the marketplace.

Re:One of the "1977 Trinity"

[david_thornley]

Visicalc was offered for the TRS-80 (I had a copy), but it came out first for the Apple, and got identified as Apple software. Accountants were spending their own money on Apple IIs and bringing them into work, and although that had to happen with some of the other computer types I never heard about it. It gave Apple a boost, and some business cred, but wasn't decisive.

Re:One of the "1977 Trinity"

[Tablizer]

It gave Apple a boost, and some business cred, but wasn't decisive.

Apple's GUI-related R&D took a lot of cash, and they were still straining. Woz complained about Mac/Lisa hogging all the R&D away from Apple II improvements. The hardware of the time was just barely up to the task of handling a GUI. If not for the VisiCalc revenue boost, the Mac (or equiv) very likely would have been late, lame, or cancelled.

Re:One of the "1977 Trinity"

[Tablizer]

the first piece of disk-based software I bought was Visicalc. It definitely was available for the TRS-80; if Apple had an exclusive it didn't last long.

I didn't claim it was exclusive. It was released for Apple II first and took a while to perfect on other platforms. As you know, "getting it to work on" and running well are not the same thing. The practice of writing in say C or PASCAL and using API's to simplify OS interaction portability was not widespread on small computers back then, in part because of the hardware overhead of doing such on slow 70's era processors. (Even though it was the early 80's, the architecture in the 3 were already obsolete, but kept largely for compatibility.)

Apple II's version of VisiCalc was ahead of the curve, and made Apple's sales jump ahead of PET and TRS for a while, where they had been trailing before. PET and TRS were cheaper such that without a software advantage, people bought them first. Apple never tried to be a "volume dealer" the way Commodore wanted to be (and succeeded great at it for half a decade). Tramiel and Woz even had a little public debate about it, per "for the masses versus classes".

Apple II's were indeed nicer than the other two, but at a price. I remember the experience of first trying an Apple II: the look and feel was just better. Job's touch "worked" in that regard.

Re:One of the "1977 Trinity"

[Tablizer]

Accurate sales-figures are hard to come by and Apple spins their sales figures. I'm going by my memory and quotes I find in books about the industry. For example, PET folks interviewed described being in panic by the burst of Apple II sales from spreadsheets and went into Sputnik-Response-Mode to either catch up or switch strategies and try to be a consumer-only company.

Either way, it could be argued that Apple II and Apple Co. outlived TRS in large part because of spreadsheet momentum. What-If histories are always subject to debate. In people's minds, Apple II was synonymous with spreadsheets for a while regardless of at-the-time merit.

Re:One of the "1977 Trinity"

[david_thornley]

The Apple II was not going to keep Apple going indefinitely, so the Mac/Lisa project was Apple's main hope. I read some cases where Apple didn't improve the II in certain ways to avoid cannibalizing sales of Apple IIIs. (If you're thinking "Apple whats?", you've got a good grasp on its overall success).

When the Lisa was introduced, Epson introduced (IIRC) the QX-10, which was an attempt at a Macintosh interface using a Z80A instead of an M68000. It was not, in fact, a success.

I bought one ...

[CaptainDork]

... in February of 1978.

It was the first in my area.

I wrote articles in Kilobaud Microcomputing and 80 Microcomputing.

I attached an A-D converter to build a temperature probe and a battery tester.

I also wrote a primitive word processor that inverted the normally all-cap keyboard.

It was a great starter kit.

I had two of them!

[sbaker]

I had two of them (both "model 2") with floating point BASIC and more memory. I did the popular "lowercase conversion" to both of them - the standard model ONLY HAD UPPERCASE. Amazingly, all you needed to do was add an addtional RAM chip to store the extra bit in the frame buffer and everything else "just worked"! The OS and the character generator ROM were all compatible with that! This strongly suggests that Tandy had originally intended it to have lowercase support - but decided to "cheap out" and save the cost of that extra RAM chip.

I built a wire-wrapped floppy disk controller (5" drive) and adding an external ROM with code to read and write files from disk.

I desperately wanted to port CP/M on to the TRS-80 but the way the boot ROM was placed in the address space made that impossible.

I wrote a couple of machine-code games for it - and sold maybe 100 copies of one of them (a side-scrolling space shooter)...which seemed like a lot at the time! Sadly, mass-producing tapes using a standard audio tape drive was kinda flaky and I ended up sending out replacement tapes to a lot of customers which meant I didn't make as much profit as I hoped.

It wasn't a *great* machine. The Apple ][ was better - but it was what I had, and I loved it.

Re:I had two of them!

[david_thornley]

If it needed a lowercase conversion, it was the retroactively designated Model I, not the Model II which was a large box with 8" disk drives. You may be thinking of Level 2 BASIC, the Microsoft stuff.

Radio Shack offered the 8-bit character expansion after some time, which involved soldering a memory chip piggy-back and replacing the character generator.

There was a special CP/M version for the TRS-80 Model III, but the Model 4 could run standard CP/M software and that's what I got.

Re:I had two of them!

[sbaker]

Yes - you're right! My bad.

40 years is a long time for the small cluster of brain cells who's only purpose in life was to remember that fact ! :-)

"Trash 80"

[PhantomHarlock]

The nickname for these was "Trash 80" and it was quickly eclipsed by better offerings from Commodore and Apple. As the personal computer market took off, they were seen as the bottom of the barrel in terms of performance, software offerings and curb appeal. But it was a start. We did have a lot of them in my Jr. HIgh and that's what we played Oregon Trail and some math programs on, before Apple became very aggressive about placing their machines in schools, and Apple IIc's and IIe's started to show up. I was a commodore user at home, starting with the Vic-20, then C-64, 128, then every flavor of Amiga, while PC's were still in a pretty sorry state for graphics and sound. (CGA, EGA, and good sound only if you could afford a Roland sound card, and had games that supported it)

Did not migrate to PC's till the Doom era of the mid-1990s, although I did teach myself basic on a PCjr (286) in the early 80s my dad had access to at his work.

Re:"Trash 80"

[No Longer an AC]

The nickname was indeed "Trash 80" but it was kind of snobbish of some of us to call it that. I was fortunate. There was kind of a cyber-race when I was growing up. I had the first computer in the neighborhood.

It was an orange toaster (Poly88) which we later upgraded to an 8813 http://www.polymorphic-compute...

But by then my friend had a TRS-80 and later I got an Apple ][ which remained the most advanced computer in the neighborhood until this other guy's parents bought a Lisa.

I still respect the TRS 80 as well as that old orange toaster. Were it not for those simple machines I probably would have had an entirely different career - which makes me wonder if that's really a good thing, but it is what it turned out to be.

My first programming book

[mfnickster]

https://archive.org/details/Computer_Programming_in_BASIC_for_Everyone_1973_Houghton_Miflin

Tandy executive: "We don't have time to get a book written on TRS-80 BASIC, so just take this book written for modem teletype time-sharing programmers and slap a TRS-80 on the cover. Done!"

Re:My first programming book

[euroq]

This book is epic! I love the section called "How to recognize a computer."

Ermm... editing?

[seven of five]

"surpassed even the most cautious sales estimates by tenfold"

Easy to surpass a cautious estimate. Harder to surpass a wildly optimistic one.

Re:My first PC

[rfengr]

2400 baud? Hell, it was 1990 until I had one of those. My first one was 300. External modems were cool; flashing lights and all.

Text Adventures!

[BinBoy]

Had a model III and later a 4P. I used to obsess over the text adventures Bedlam and Raaka Tu. I'd sit in school thinking about how to get past a certain point (the darn dog!) for when I got home... and also try to write my own in BASIC. Later I learned Z-80 so I could make faster graphics based games. Good times.

Two Words

[stilbon]

Dancing Demon.

Still have my TRS-80

[cheryltisland]

I still have mine in the original box with the original price sticker. I bought it with my babysitting money in 1981 when I was 11 years old. I hung out at Radio Shack often back then and put it on layaway until I paid it off and brought it home in 1982. I hooked it to my small black and white tv and my cassette player and started learning BASIC. Went on to become a software engineer and general geek for about a 30 year career. I have never been able to part with it.

Moving coal, and assembly programming the hard way

[K. S. Van Horn]

I was a junior in high school when my father said he'd buy a TRS-80 if I moved a (literal) ton of coal from a basement room to an outdoors shed. I did, and he did, and I've been programming ever since. Aside from BASIC, I learned Z-80 machine language programming on that machine -- and because I didn't have an assembler, I manually converted my programs to the numeric machine instruction codes and POKE'd these into memory.

Coco 3 was my baby

[him4919]

One day I will rebuy one for nostalgic purposes.

Re:Coco 3 was my baby

[david_thornley]

If you were into assembly language programming, the CoCo had a sweet, sweet 6809 from the start. Loved that chip.

Thexder at Rat Shack

[drinkypoo]

I don't remember which model of TRS-80 it was, I want to say CoCo 2, but they used to have one with a Thexder cart plugged in at my local (Capitola, CA) Radio Shack pretty much perpetually. They would also let you play with it pretty much endlessly so long as you were polite, which I was. I don't understand why more shops don't have that policy, because it serves as a demo. Software Etc. used to let me play with their Amiga 500 and that actually turned into a sale, eventually. The CoCo could have, if it were worth something. But it was horribly outdated by that time.

brings back memories for sure

[Anonymous Coward]

My exposure to a 4k model I one day a week in a middle school gifted program resulted in an obsession with computers that led to me neglecting all other studies, barely graduating high school, dropping out of college, and becoming a multimillionaire. So yes, it brings back memories!

Re: Oh! Oh! oh! Me to!

[Trax3001BBS]

TRS-80 III, cassette backup that was impossible to reload small programs. I would spend a full day typing in a basic program listed in a Magazine I forget the name of now, it taught me debugging; and the fact that no matter how perfect it looks, let someone else have a go to really make sure.

Radio Shack wanted to sell me a 300 buad modem for $300 "I go to AOL and start printing out the news, go upstairs and have dinner when I'm done the news is almost finished printing". The clerks hardest selling point.

Re:My First Computer

[xevioso]

The TRS-80 is how I got into computers. My mom bought me one, and I used it to learn to program. Now I really feel old.

Dopn't forget the first "laptops".

[thadtheman]

Eventually some of these morphed into the first real "laptops" as opposed to luggables.

Memories?

[MoarSauce123]

Yes...the memories where we went to RadioShack because they had merchandise we wanted to buy. Before RS went belly up they could not even get you a plain simple diode unless you bought one in a grossly overpriced kit.

My first computer

[approachingZero]

It had LeScript (kind of a mark-up language word processor) and most importantly VISICALC. That TRS-80 was one hell of a computer.

Re:Not Bad For Its Time

[pepsikid]

I sure agree about those manuals! Before I could program, I sat down and read them front to back, the same way I read Dungeons & Dragons spellbooks. Then I loaded up some programs and I could look at the code and know what it did! My family started out with the TRS-80 I but then we got a Lobo Max-80 with LDOS (before RS bought it to base their later versions of TRS-DOS off of) which also ran CP/M.

Memories

[DaMattster]

My first computer was a TRS-80 Model II. It had 64K of RAM and a 10mb SCSI external hard disk drive. It was a beast that also had the external disk array. I learned BASIC on it. We also had the Tandy Daisy Wheel and Dot Matrix printers.

Mine Still Works

[mrbumptz]

I got my Model I TRS-80 in 1979, and it still works like a charm. I just fired it up last week. I never got the disk drives, so it's the cassette model, 16k Level 2 Basic. I have the expansion interface, but it's not hooked up. I learned assembly on that thing, played Scott Adams Adventures, Big Five arcade games, Microsoft's Flight Simulator. And just last year I started learning how it actually works (I know/knew nothing about hardware) by watching Ben Eater's amazing videos. Better late than never!

Re:My first PC

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

Knowledge of the Hayes command set was fundamental to geek cred.

MEMORY SIZE?

[jamesjw]

The TRS-80 was the first computer I used and I still have my fathers working TRS-80 sitting boxed up, had it up and running last year with the original Radio Shack monitor - still a runner!

Hanging out at Radio Shack

[Mad-Bassist]

That brings back memories hanging out at the Radio Shack in town, learning BASIC, and taking the occasional trip to the bigger town up north to play with what was called the Level II. (Ooooh... double-size text that's supposed to happen, as opposed to the occasional hardware glitch when powering up. I always suspected the Level II OS was only one DIP switch away.)

The word "Model" didn't come along for some time, much like the word "Episode" until there was a second Star Wars film. \m/

Re: Oh! Oh! oh! Me to!

[Trax3001BBS]

It was Byte magazine. I still have my Model III in my basement!

No it wasn't byte, TRS-80 something or vise-vers they contained a lot of programs to type in many with peeks and pokes. I've got them in storage as well at the TRS80 and out of reach now.

Getting in late...

[lord_mike]

...but the TRS-80 color computer was the first computer I ever programmed in a community computer programming class. After I was hooked, I would book time at the public library, where they had a model III with a tape drive. You could book it for an hour, which meant you had to be very efficient with your time! They weren't great machines by even the standards of the day, but they worked and some of these software companies (like Big 5 Software) managed to do amazing things with the limited hardware. Recently, Radio shack had a nostalgia auction which included many old TRS-80s. The prices got outrageous, but I sure did want one. 25 or so years ago, there was an old model III sitting on the clearance table at the local Radio Shack for $35. I regret to this day that I did not buy it. Microcomputers were a lot of fun back then. I do miss that era when everything was simple and new.

It was a incredible time period to live through.

[thinkwaitfast]

I was poor as a kid, so would spend hours in the library every day reading every computer magazine and journal and dreaming of things that I could do. I'd basically learned everything that I was expected to know for my EE degree a decade later (at least as far as digital electronics went).

I find computers mostly boring today, but like to spend time playing with my 40 year old hardware and buying up vintage equipment on ebay that I'd read about. I'm still on the lookout for a DG Eclipse. I don't know what I'd do with it, but I could own a piece of history...

Re:One of the first

[BinBoy]

Radioshack's one of those companies that would ask for your address and phone number even all you wanted was to purchase a pack of AA batteries.

Yes, and they would ask even if they had your info already AND they would write it down by hand.

Temple of Apshai

[TomOTooleNZ]

I still remember playing this on my Dad's TRS-80. Galactic Empire and Galactic Trader too. A more simple time.

Re: Oh! Oh! oh! Me to!

[HoleShot]

It could have been 80 Microcomputing, which came out in 1980. TRS-80 Microcomputing was another newsletter that came out once in awhile. 80 Micro was the mag that was a monthly and had the best content for the TRS-80. I still have every issue but three I lost.

Trash it all you want .....

[zoid.com]

I spent many many many days at Radio Shack on saturdays programming a TRS-80 model 1. There was a whole group of us doing this. The TRS-80 was a huge part of the revolution.

Eliza

[tsa]

We had one at school, back in the early 1980s. I learnt some BASIC on it and we played Eliza on it. Good times. It was the only computer we had at school so we couldn't spend hours and hours on it. Later we got a classroom full of Commodore 64s and a clueless teacher. He did his best and was interested in learning to program them but he also taught physics so he just didn't have enough time for that.

TRS-80 had best line editor of early 8bit micros

[Gumby]

My main memories of the TRS-80 was that it had a fancy line editor, quite a bit more sophisticated than Apple II or PET. Also our school lab had a copy of Eliza running on the TRS-80 which was pretty fun for 5 minutes :)

Went to a TRS-80 Computer Camp

[indytx]

I went to a Tandy TRS-80 Computer Camp one summer in the early '80's which I think was meant to get kids to berate their parents into buying a TRS-80. The camp was a waste of time, but at least it made the sales pitch for an Apple IIc easier. I still have a TRS-80 note pad floating around in my shop.

Have to get it out of the box

[jlv]

It's been in storage for 31 years. I'll have to open it up and see if it can still turn on and boot up NEWDOS.

Off By A Year

[AlleyTrotte]

I have one in my basement manufactured in 1976, so this article is off by a year. Perhaps it was intro'ed in some stores as a test market.

Oh yes

[shaitand]

These were ridiculously obsolete by the time I had one. The first Pentium chips were already in the world by that point. But my grandfather was an auction barn fanatic, when I said I wanted a computer he brought me a TRS-80. It had the power adapter and nothing else. The next week he brought me a couple C64's with power and floppy drives. Somewhere in there was a book on BASIC for neither one.

I remember not knowing how to even save and load programs to disk, especially since I didn't have that option on the TRS-80. I wrote my first programs with pen and paper and meticulously typed them in for every run. Later a friend gave me the BASIC guide for the C64 and I essentially stopped messing with the TRS-80. It blew my mind, suddenly I had subs not just goto, I had sprites and graphics character codes, and though it took a bit longer to find their beauty I had the peek and poke commands for probing and manipulating memory. Of course, I still had no applications written by others but I did write a word processor (I couldn't print the output of course) and I wrote some "cool" graphics applications. I even figured out how to use the memory on that second floppy drive as a sort of hard drive. Eventually I even got a manual on C64 assembler when the local library became part of a state wide exchange.

At some point my mother saved up and got me "a real computer" with Windows 95 which I broke and repaired on a seemingly daily basis. In poor rural Illinois word spread that I "knew computers" and living up to that reputation quickly meant learning to rebuild 386, 486, and even Pentium systems with all the quirks that came with the assorted hardware, dealing with IRQ conflicts, the evils of Packard Hell, DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11. I started in on old Macintosh systems and Amigas. Of course I also discovered Pascal, C, and brought my ASM knowledge with me finding there were always insights into the languages and how they worked that gave me an advantage. By the late 90's I was 'l33t' with a solid Linux CLI understanding, using javascript to hack yahoo chat in netscape, and a contact list in ICQ filled with Russian and eastern European reverse engineer contacts that supported my warez hobby with cracks and keygens for EVERYTHING. Warez were essential for a poor kid from the middle of nowhere who wanted no limits to what he could do with his computers.

Of course, as I grew older I realized how far from 'l33t' I was. Over twenty years later and I've yet to run out of new areas of technology to explore and learn or things to hack on (which has nothing to do with cracking).

Re:My first PC

[david_thornley]

The Model II was Radio Shack's attempt to get into business programming, with 64K RAM, a large screen, 8" disk drives, and an impressive price tag. The Model III was a considerable improvement on what retroactively became the Model I.

2400 baud networking? Kids these days. The original TRS-80 had a 300 baud serial port, if you paid enough to get one.

Re:My first PC

[david_thornley]

The really fun thing about the 300 baud acoustic modem was that, when the phone wasn't plugged in but it was on, I could whistle to it and it would whistle back.

That brings back some memories

[FatRatBastard]

In the late 80s when my high school library got brand new IBM PCs the computer class was still taught using TRS-80s (networked to a single TRS-80 with dual hard drives).

Our computer team would show up toting these machines, when ever other school had state of the art PCs. We kicked their asses.

Wrote the obligatory Snake game for it. Had it been a decade earlier it could have probably made a little money (I did take some personal satisfaction in a couple of kids almost failing out the class because they would play it instead of listening to the teacher).

Oddly, one of the projects I'm still weirdly proud of was writing a networked Battleship program that used the rudimentary network. It was a class project for the 2nd year of CS. I wrote the networking code. It was a ball of hack, but damn if it didn't work.

Re:That brings back some memories

[FatRatBastard]

DOH. Dual floppy drives...

Re:Cassette tape I/O system

[david_thornley]

If there were 8K TRS-80s (I'm not quite sure) they were pretty darn rare. The sizes they came up with normally were 4K and 16K.

Re: Oh! Oh! oh! Me to!

[Trax3001BBS]

It could have been 80 Microcomputing, which came out in 1980. TRS-80 Microcomputing was another newsletter that came out once in awhile. 80 Micro was the mag that was a monthly and had the best content for the TRS-80. I still have every issue but three I lost.

It could have been 80 Microcomputing, which came out in 1980. TRS-80 Microcomputing was another newsletter that came out once in awhile. 80 Micro was the mag that was a monthly and had the best content for the TRS-80. I still have every issue but three I lost.

Had a contest for the best one line program? Peeking and poking took center stage, but some amazing stuff was sent in.