It's the 40th Anniversary of Radio Shack's TRS-80 (smithsonianmag.com) 301
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?
10 PRINT "FIRST POST" (Score:5, Funny)
20 GOTO 10
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The first PC I programmed, using Logo. And I didn't have to come in at midnight to find an empty console. 1977.
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Re: Oh! Oh! oh! Me to! (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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. S
Re:10 PRINT "FIRST POST" (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, he's describing the LDIR instruction, which was useful for block copying or filling memory.
See: http://z80-heaven.wikidot.com/... [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.
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He's not thinking of djnz, he's talking about LDIR [wikidot.com].
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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 [wikipedia.org] or do you mean machine language?
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Machine Language.
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shudder......
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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" (Score:4, Informative)
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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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
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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.
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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" (Score:2)
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.
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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" (Score:2)
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.
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That's the weakest attempt at a pedanticism I've seen all week.
Pro tip: synonyms are synonymous.
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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.
Nothing like nostalgia! (Score:2)
My first experience with trek was on a trs-80. Dual floppies!
Re: Nothing like nostalgia! (Score:2)
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.
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cassette drive...
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Oh right, the one I used was Model III, with the floppies. I'm getting old, the memory is starting to lose cohesion . . .
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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
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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 c
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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!!
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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.
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If you only experience games, are they not your reality? Is reality not real?
Mine had 16k (Score:2)
Learned both HW and SW on that puppy.
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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. Th
Re: Mine had 16k (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
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. [wikipedia.org]
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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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Specs (Score:3)
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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
Gawd, I hated that thing... (Score:3)
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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?
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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...
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It was no Roland MT-32 but it sure was better than the standard internal PC speaker.
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ALL the early microcomputers sucked. It was the 1st generation, for Pete's sake. Working around the flaws was part of the "fun".
Epson PX-8 Geneva (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
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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.
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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
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TRS-80 (Score:2)
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.
IMSAI 8080 (Score:2)
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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 (Score:2)
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).
Remember when even Superman used a TRS-80? (Score:5, Informative)
He and a couple of whiz kids saved Metropolis [wikia.com] with it!
my first sneering love (Score:2)
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:
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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.
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From The custom TRS-80 & other mysteries" [archive.org]
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Oh Yes... (Score:3)
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!!!
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A friend had one... Good for its time. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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I guess you're not very confident about your statement since you hide behind a mask...
Never really saw a functional one (Score:2)
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.
Basic (Score:2)
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.
One of the "1977 Trinity" (Score:2)
[ 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.
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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" (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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
I bought one ... (Score:3)
... 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! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
"Trash 80" (Score:3)
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.
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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... [polymorphi...puters.com]
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 8
My first programming book (Score:3)
https://archive.org/details/Computer_Programming_in_BASIC_for_Everyone_1973_Houghton_Miflin [archive.org]
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!"
Ermm... editing? (Score:3)
Easy to surpass a cautious estimate. Harder to surpass a wildly optimistic one.
Still have my TRS-80 (Score:4, Interesting)
Moving coal, and assembly programming the hard way (Score:2)
Thexder at Rat Shack (Score:2)
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 wer
Memories? (Score:2)
Memories (Score:2)
Re:Preceeded by IBM? (Score:5, Informative)
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/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Preceeded by IBM? (Score:5, Informative)
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100 [wikipedia.org], 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." [wikipedia.org]
Thus, no, it was in no way, shape or form a personal computer.
Re:Preceeded by IBM? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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I guess that would be no surprise as IBM and Deutschland have a long history [wikipedia.org]...
. . . 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 . . .
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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-1/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-2/
great read
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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.
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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.
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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.