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Happy Birthday TRS-80
Renegade:
Anyone ever use a PET?
40hz:
Anyone ever use a PET?
-Renegade (August 05, 2012, 11:17 AM)
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Me! ;D (I'm a lot older than I look.)
Loved that trapezoidal monitor casing it had. Hated the little chicklet-ty keyboard, although it had a nice professional adding machine touch to it. Definitely more geared towards data entry functions than touch typing. And at least the numeric entry pad was full sized. Looked something like a modern cash register. Saw one abandoned by the trash bins outside an old office building recently. I would have grabbed it except the monitor and insides had been smashed up. Quite recently too from the amount of glass all around it. Probably done by some passing kids who didn't realize what a collector's piece it was. *SIGH*
Used a DEC Rainbow too! That packed both a Z80 and an Intel 8080 chip in the same box. It could run CP/M 8 or 16, and also could be used as a straight data terminal too. I forget if it was VT-102 or just straight ANSI.
Commodore duped some of that design with their elegant C=128 which packed an 8502 plus a Z80 chip and allowed for three separate modes of operation: the traditional C=64, the jazzed-up C=128, and CP/M mode.
cranioscopical:
mine is the model I (which used a cassette player to save programs not a disk drive)
-mouser (August 05, 2012, 09:25 AM)
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That damned cassette player!
I still recall the pain of huddling all night over a TRS 80, producing the worst kind of spaghetti code in order to beat a deadline. Finally, as dawn broke and before sending it to cassette, I just had to stretch and in so doing inadvertently kicked the power plug out of its socket.
Ouch!
TaoPhoenix:
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)
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I remember playing games like that! :)
-Renegade (August 05, 2012, 10:28 AM)
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I remember programming games like that! (Different system, different gameplay, still just sayin')
Okay, I'll get off your lawns now.
40hz:
mine is the model I (which used a cassette player to save programs not a disk drive)
-mouser (August 05, 2012, 09:25 AM)
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That damned cassette player!
I still recall the pain of huddling all night over a TRS 80, producing the worst kind of spaghetti code in order to beat a deadline. Finally, as dawn broke and before sending it to cassette, I just had to stretch and in so doing inadvertently kicked the power plug out of its socket.
Ouch!
-cranioscopical (August 05, 2012, 11:31 AM)
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Ah Chris...you're bringing back memories. ;D Bad ones!
I always HATED this thing:
I had the same thing happen to me once with my C=64 and a 1530 Datasette drive. 4 hours of assembly programming using HesMON down the tubes! Went out and bought the 1541 Floppy Drive unit the following weekend.
Of course that drive had it's own problems if you too frequently loaded games off it. Electronic Arts and Origin games used deliberate bad sector/track tricks for copy protection. It used to cause the read/write heads to "slam" themselves dozens of times while loading Seven Cities of Gold, M.U.L.E. or Ultima III. You could actually feel it vibrate the tabletop sometimes. (It was usually four or five minutes of: Takka-takka-takka-takka *grind* whip-zip-zip-zip *grind* - and then... abrupt silence! It was scary.) All that head banging caused major alignment problems after a while.
Half-ass recalibrating these drives wasn't difficult if you had: a screwdriver and a few other tools, a special 'calibration' floppy disk, and the matching utility software. (A 'real' calibration required the above plus an oscilloscope so it was always good to have a friend or family member who was also a ham radio operator living nearby.) It was sort of a C=64 power user's rite of passage doing one of these. You had to crack the drive case (and void your warranty) to do it. But it was no harder than setting the dwell on a pre-fuel injection automobile engine. A little practice and a light steady touch were all that were needed. Most of us left the drive cases unscrewed and only elastic banded together after doing a few of those.
Fun times! Sure don't miss them. ;D 8)
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