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Happy Birthday TRS-80

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40hz:
RadioShack's much loved (and unjustly maligned) TRS-80 turns 35 this year.



This amazing computer was one of the earliest affordable PCs that actually allowed small businesses to get serious work done. I installed a Model III in my sister's company back when dinosaurs (and me :mrgreen:) roamed the earth. With a 2Mhz Z80 chip, a whopping 48 kilobytes of RAM, dual 5" floppy drives, a butt-ugly silver/grey case, and a built-in and slightly fuzzy B&W TV screen (later replaced with a 'real' aftermarket amber CRT) for a monitor, it was a formidable beastie for its time. Other machines (including my beloved C=64) had panache and pretty graphics. My sister's had VisiCalc for spreadsheets, Electric Pencil for wordprocessing, a surprisingly complete and robust  GL/AP/AR accounting package - and Zork for when nobody was looking. This all cost her about $2700 in 1981 - which would be roughly $9500 in today's dollars.

Anything else you may have needed got taken care of the way most things did back then - by you writing a program (in BASIC or Z80 assembly) to handle it. Radioshack had a particularly nice version of BASIC and a decent monitor for assembler. Which was a good thing. Because sooner or later, you'd end up using one (or both) of them.

For tech "support" you had your local "80" club, the nascent "Trash-80" BBS community (via Compuserve), and a fantastic magazine called 80 Microcomputing.

Although it may not sound like much today, back when big sister had this rig, she was one of the most "computerized" small businesses in her neck of the woods. :Thmbsup:

Nice article entitled Please Don’t Call It Trash-80: A 35th Anniversary Salute to Radio Shack’s TRS-80 can be found here.

Note: Check out this 80 Microcomputing cover from 1980. Seems like judicial sanity still prevailed back then - even though the editors might not have thought so. (How times have changed!)



 8)

mouser:
We never owned a trs-80, but i have very fond memories of programming on it extensively in the early 1980s, writing games for myself and friends.  The blocky black and white graphics were beautiful.

Also, the Trs-80's that I remember all looked like this (not like the above photo), from wikipedia:



According to Wikipedia, the photo in the first post is for the TRS-80 Model III, where mine is the model I (which used a cassette player to save programs not a disk drive).

mouser:
Here's what a very advanced trs-80 full screen graphics game looked like back in those days:

Renegade:
Here's what a very advanced trs-80 full screen graphics game looked like back in those days: (see attachment in previous post)
-mouser (August 05, 2012, 09:33 AM)
--- End quote ---

I remember playing games like that! :)

40hz:
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According to Wikipedia, the photo in the first post is for the TRS-80 Model III, where mine is the model I (which used a cassette player to save programs not a disk drive).
-mouser (August 05, 2012, 09:25 AM)
--- End quote ---

It is the Model III. IIRC the Model I got yanked from distribution by the FCC because of excessive RF emissions. Radios supposedly used to make all kinds of weird noises if put too close to it.

The Model III was succeeded by the Model 4 (no more  Roman numerals!) which was a real nice version. White case, better hardware (128Kb RAM + 4Mhz CPU, nicer 'real' monitor (80x24 vs the old 64x16), larger capacity floppy disks, etc. ) and could run CP/M or an alternative 3rd-party souped-up version of TRSDOS called LDOS. You could have used LDOS on the Model III too although it really came into its own with the faster CPU and higher capacity floppies on the Model 4.

Radioshack also did something called a Model II (and later the Tandy Model 12) (see below), which was their "big iron" offering .

       

 It had two Shugart 8" floppy drives (expandable to 4) and ran CP/M or TRSDOS right out of the box. But you could also get add-ons (hard disk controller, graphics card) and a co-processor board with a Motorola 68000 chip and 512k of dedicated RAM which allowed you to run XENIX on it. That was a popular machine for midsize businesses looking for a relatively inexpensive system to run UNIX-based accounting and payroll apps. It was also popular with what used to be called "data-entry firms" because certain Model II/12 disks could be read by IBM and other minicomputers.



This machine was 'serious business' through and through and competed favorably against some of the lower end DEC and Commodore minicomputers from that era. Which just goes to show how far we've come since then. Especially when you consider any moderately technical hobbyist can assemble a supercomputer quite easily, and for far less money than my sister paid for her single-CPU TRS-80 desktop.

 :)

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