0063 A boxed CoCo 1 and a fun read-through of a 1983 Radio Shack catalog

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#theshack
On today's SMMC, we have a couple 8-bit computers and an awesome Radio Shack 1983 computer catalog. Let's check out the computers and then check out how expensive things were in 1983!
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2 окт 2024

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Комментарии : 341

@laserhawk64 Год назад

Good to know that Radio Shack's exorbitant price markups have existed since the beginning of time, ha! Also, fun fact -- the _corporate_ Radio Shack stores are all gone, but franchise-owned stores (rare, but they _do_ exist) had the option to stick around... the one in my tiny NC town actually is still in operation, and still a Radio Shack.

@gabrielleeliseo6062 Год назад

AND they still have an online presence, including offering electronics classes.

@laserhawk64 Год назад

@@gabrielleeliseo6062 Justin Bieber also still has an online presence. I think he has about the same degree of relevance, too...

@markgburnet Год назад

I could get a 10 percent commission on the 50 % gross margin of a TRS80 in 1983. The Radio Shack company stores came in 3 flavors then; Radio Shack Computer Centers (B to B, Education with training classroom) Radio Shack Plus Computer Dept. and regular "shack"stores. The reason for "Mercedes Silver" 😅 was that we got a good price on a silver monitor for the model 1. From then on, everything was painted silver. That paint was so crappy that the color shifted to cream, which in time sunburned into "cat piss" yellow.😂 I remember that catalog from my outside sales back then. We had about 3000 outside sales reps in the US back then.

@jaycee1980 Год назад

It's interesting reading about the TRS-80, because this sort of expense was exactly *why* Sir Clive decided what the world (or at least the UK) needed was a cheap home micro that would give you some useful computing power but under £100... hence things like the ZX81 :)

@EnglishMike Год назад

The ZX81 was powerful enough to run a nuclear power station, according to Sir Clive, anyway...

@wayland7150 Год назад

@@EnglishMike As long as the RAM pack did not wobble I expect it could.

@wayland7150 Год назад

He was actually right, unfortunately. There was a price at which these would sell and Sir Clive achieved that. So many things could have been a lot better had he been able to sell them for more.

@Jody_VE5SAR Год назад

I really enjoy the vintage catalog tours - totally reliving my youth with those!

@GrantMeStrength Год назад

The ZX81 was my first computer, and I loved it. Recently I found a project called "ZX Wespi" which uses an ESP32 installed internally to provide a web server that can store and load games into the '81. If you add the ZX Wespi, an internal 16Kb memory expansion, a new keyboard and a composite video mod then you have... well, frankly you have spent more time and money that you probably should have, but it's so cool to see the ZX81 running again.

@CooChewGames Год назад

Don't knock the ZX81... it allowed me and my older brother to have a computer; without it my life would have been very different. Forever thankful to Sinclair for making it affordable and allowing those of us in the shitty end of a city to pool something together to get a computer in the Christmas of 1982, having scored an old B&W portable from someone in the pub.

@SimonEllwood Год назад

I do not mind people knocking it. It was educational in that you could learn about computers including BASIC but otherwise was compromised in just about every way imaginable. With the wobbly 16K RAM pack you could write quite large programs however. The US version had 2K of RAM by the way.

@oliverw.douglas285 Год назад

In the larger markets, Radio Shack had exclusive Computer Centers, and they had moderate success. It catered mainly to small to mid-size businesses. Larger companies elected to go with mainstream IBM systems. When I worked at Radio Shack in the early 1990's, they had gotten away from dedicated computer store model, opting to go with normal Radio Shack stores to sell a variety of computer systems. In their day, Radio Shack had group of sales & maintenance staff, to service the business accounts, separate from the consumer-level stores. Unfortuantely, High Pricing, & their inability to 'break the ice' with the larger commercial customers, ultimately led to the end of the exclusive computer business.

@cambridgemart2075 Год назад

@@SimonEllwood The UK spec was fitted with 1kB of RAM; there was actually a playable chess game that ran in that 1k!

@SimonEllwood Год назад

@@cambridgemart2075 I wrote a program to drive a Maplin Speech Synth add-on in 1K back in the day!

@evansdm2008 Год назад

I had the computer, my brother had the tv, we had the ram pack between us. We weren’t poor but my parents were tight. I actually understand why that’s right these days. I make my kids do chores for any money. But yes , changed my future too quite possibly.

@craigrotay3732 Год назад

It's simply awesome when you review old printed media. Loved it!

@microknigh7 Год назад

agreed

@jeffreyphipps1507 Год назад

It's really fun to look at old catalogs for those of us with perspective - an 8MB drive from back then was large, but would only hold (at best) ONE MP3 song today!

@nickwallette6201 Год назад

We weren't a particularly well-to-do family when I was growing up, but looking back on my childhood, my dad apparently dropped some serious coin on computing equipment! From memory, we had a ZX-81, TRS-80 Model 3 (16K cassette only), Commodore 64 (with disk drive, printer, and a Montgomery Ward TV/monitor), and then a 386DX/40 w/ 4MB RAM, 1024x768 NI monitor, and an Okidata OL-400 laser printer. I used them all and learned a bit of BASIC programming beginning with the TRS-80. It's just insane to think about how much this stuff actually cost. Knowing how -cheap- err.. _frugal_ my mom was, I can't imagine how he got away with buying all of that. Not to even mention software. A dozen or so C64 carts? GEOS? WordPerfect 5.1? I always laugh when I see this quote: "My biggest fear is that, after I die, my wife will sell all my things for the price I said I paid for them."

@johnklein338 Год назад

My Dad bought a lot of Tandy and other computer stuff too, some of it new and early so it was definitely expensive. He could fix a lot of things around the house to save money, however. He had the Model 100 laptop, and I remember Mum mentioning she was kinda peeved at how much it cost.

@JeremyLevi Год назад

Fun fact: A lot of TRS-80 Model 16s ended up as dedicated email servers on the early open Internet due to them being available used for peanuts by that point and just capable enough to host a basic sendmail instance.

@rabidbigdog Год назад

Here in Western Australia, our local provider used a Xenix TRS-80 Model 16 as a dial-in host for nearly 10 years.

@CygnusTM Год назад

The computer shop in my hometown in the 80s actually used a Timex Sinclair 1000 as a door stop.

@sn1000k Год назад

Power move

@Colin_Ames Год назад

😂

@Coderjo. Год назад

That decollator at 28:00 just separates the layers on multi-copy paper. So lets say you had paper that printed on two layers at the same time, you would use that to separate a long printout into two separate stacks. The one in the catalog was a manual version, but there were ones that were motor-driven. There was another machine (I don't know if Radio Shack had one, though) called a "burster", which would separate the pages and could remove the tractor feed edges.

@russellbrown1138 Год назад

Ah the "Burster" at my first IT job, took about 8 hours of fine tuning over several monthly statement runs to get it to perfectly rip and split the fan fold paper. Once setup, it did not move for 2 years incase it changed shape and had to be adjusted again

@YARC-1981 Год назад

Hi, Adrian. I realize you probably don't have time to watch other RU-vidrs' channels, but I've been doing a series on the Sinclair ZX81 / Timex Sinclair 1000 and maybe you might find it interesting. If nothing else, I show how to mod them to give them 16K internal RAM (which is, frankly, dirt simple considering how they're designed). You'll never have to rely on the wobbly expansion unit again. Of course, you can always use blue tack. Here's the link to the playlist so far. ru-vid.com/group/PLTMrrNKwByD3M0PCDovhPlYVfgEYQY2mm I've still got a couple of videos to do on them, but, as usual, I'm waiting on parts. 😁 BTW: the TS1000 came with 2K. The ZX81 only came with 1K.

@tim1724 Год назад

Wow, those prices! Is it any wonder the Apple IIe sold so well at $1,395 in 1983? (Or $1,995 bundled with a Disk II floppy drive and controller card, Apple Monitor III, and an Extended 80-Column card.)

@poyuuu8061 Год назад

It’s crazy to think the other way around: $4,000 today is ~$1,300 in 1983!

@Okurka. Год назад

The C64 was half that price.

@sdrc92126 Год назад

I think I saw my first computer (Apple) in the 4th grade. I knew i had to have one, so I scoured the want ads in the newspaper until I found one. I called the guy up and asked how much. He said 35. I was so excited. That was a lot of money but seemed like I could do it. So, $35, where do you live? No, 35hundred. :( I had to ask my mom what that meant :(( Needless to say, it took a couple more years to make that much.

@markgburnet Год назад

But the Apple did not do payroll or accounts receivable. These were business machines that were competing against low end mini computers like DEC.

@criggie Год назад

@27:23 looks like a gestetner or a banda graph. I bet it smells wonderful too, and only copies in blue.

@richkh Год назад

Back in the 80s, you could use a particular shade of auto touch-up paint to fix your CoCo: Mercedes silver. That exact shade from that era is probably no longer available, but at the time that shade was recognized enough that '80 Micro' (a TRS-80 computer magazine) had a regular column featuring a character called... Mercedes Silver.

@timothyp8947 Год назад

Adrian’s teeshirt says ‘Forgotten Machines’ which seems very appropriate when unboxing a CoCo which he couldn’t remember receiving 😊 My hardware lecturer at college used to say the 6809 was the best microprocessor to work with & program (for embedded, at least), although at the time (mid ‘80s) the 68k machines were just starting to appear. Later, when I started work, a friend of mine used to how great his Dragon 32 was, but 6809 systems basically passed me by. Apart from the CoCo and Dragon, the 6809 was too late to the party for the home computer revolution, but maybe I’ll do some digging to find out how good it really was 😊

@Trenchbroom Год назад

In 1984 my middle school had 14 model IVs and one model III that all streamed data through the Tandy network interface from the teacher's model IV (dual disk drives) at the back of the room. Great memories playing the same limited supply of games during lunch and after school every day. One day the computer teacher left the storage cabinet open and we found a cassette drive with a bunch of CLOAD magazine tapes buried in the back. It took a while to figure out how to get the cassette drive working but once we did we doubled our game collection, very exciting!

@tss20148 Год назад

Radio Shack had 4 versions of the Network Controller. Versions 1 & 2 used the cassette port to interconnect up to 16 systems. Version 3 used RS-232 to interconnect up to 16 systems. Version 4 used twisted pair wiring, ran at 1Mbs and could connect up to 64 systems. Besides the Model 3 & 4, version 4 cards were available for the Tandy 1000 PC line. Version 4 was based upon Corvus Omninet which was an early cross platform lan system which briefly saw some success during the early to mid 80s due to a much lower cost than ethernet systems of the time.

@Adam_Boots Год назад

Probably why they continued to sell the V2. People who didn't have an RS-232 card could still network computers. That and the V3 only worked on the Model III and the Model 4 (in III mode).

@stonent Год назад

I seem to remember some kind of network board that Tandy sold that had screw terminals on the back to connect the wires.

@K-o-R Год назад

I looked up a "decollator" and it looks like it's for when you feed multiple sets of paper with carbon paper in-between into the printer. The decollator separates it into individual stacks of paper and discards the carbon paper.

@Dreamshadow1977 Год назад

Those Tandy boxes bring back memories. I had five or six of them as a kid. I stored Legos and other toys in them. Dad worked for Tandy in mid 80s to around 92.

@gregwilliams2658 Год назад

Adrian, in my high school, we had 12 of the mod 3 computers attached serially to a single trs-80 mod 3 with dual floppy drives. All ran via that serial cable back to the extended board that sat next to the 'mother' computer. All drives were single sided 5.4" floppies and all could be accessed at the same time. Thanks for the excellent content as per usual!

@melkiorwiseman5234 Год назад

I remember toward the end of the CoCo era, a program was published which allowed you to turn the 64K CoCo into a serial printer buffer. It used bank switching to "turn off" the ROMs and place itself right at the bottom of RAM so that it could use most of the 64K as the buffer. But if I remember correctly, it could only either receive or transmit so you had to first fill the buffer with the complete print job and then switch it to transmit to dump the buffer to the printer. The whole idea was to deal with slow printers, but that's no longer a problem and serial printers have pretty much gone the way of the dodo.

@kellyfrench Год назад

I think there were some late Model III’s with the white paint.

@markgburnet Год назад

Yeah, I sold a system like that in Virginia Beach to a high school for $35K.

@SC-CAJUN Год назад

Hi Adrian! Just a reminder that the Lisa also came out in 1983 and was also $10k. Imagine spending $10k on a Model 16 vs a Lisa???

@adriansdigitalbasement2 Год назад

Lisa certainly seemed way more cutting edge! Although on the other hand $10k on the Lisa likely didn't come with the hard drive? And no multiuser. It's just amazing how much power you can get now for so little money!

@rabidbigdog Год назад

The Model 16 had some pretty significant multi-user office solutions, including Multiplan. In the very 1990s we still had a real-estate company client running on Model 16s and terminals across three office sites. Worked well.

@MrKurtHaeusler Год назад

The Model 16 would have been the better choice, unless you wanted to write Mac software. Any software development effort invested into (xenix on) the model 16 would be easily portable to any future unix system. The Lisa was a dead end

@50shadesofbeige88 Год назад

Oh, thats really cool! It has to be rare to find a CoCo with the box.

@boardsort Год назад

The 16 was not sold in your typical Radio Shack retail store where you would usually see the consumer and home business based machines. However at the Tandy Computer Center (I worked at both) you could tour the heavy hitters that TRS had to offer. We were never provided a demo of the 16 however. Had we sold one (I doubt we did) it would have been special ordered direct from Ft. Worth and probably delivered straight to the customers address.

@adriansdigitalbasement2 Год назад

Do you know how many of those Computer Centers they had? I grew up in Los Angeles in the 80s and never saw one. (There had to have been at least one there.) I do remember seeing computers at the RS but they were always the consumer ones.

@VanceStrickland Год назад

Joel had a working TRS-80 Network 3 setup going as a demo last year sometime at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Retro Computing meetup. I don't remember how many computers he had attached. Communications was all RS-232 (Serial). It was targeted at schools, the teacher could create lessons and tests and the students could get files, submit files (homework) and take tests. Some of the software had special versions to work with the setup. Joel had some pieces of the specialized software, but is trying to track down the rest. I *think* he was going to demo it at a VCF, but I don't remember.

@wendyhilliard8148 Год назад

Yep, my husband found the software on eBay and built a working setup. He has a ton of details on his site but YT doesn't allow those types of comments.

@david4368 Год назад

Thanks for the awesome trip down amnesia lane. I built and used a Sinclair ZX-81 in 1981. Huge pain, but it made me appreciate the VIC-20 I got in 1982.

@EnglishMike Год назад

I was lucky enough to be able to save up for a BBC Micro Model B in 1981. Took months to arrive, though!

@inbarraz Год назад

Tim's letter is written in the same font used by Monkey Island, isn't it?

@grahamjones7814 Год назад

The network interface box, with the nob, used the cassette port. You could send data out to all the PC's and to get stuff back, you would select the Computer and transfer back to the main PC. It's what we had when I was at School.

@tinyBigGAMES Год назад

Wow, CoCo 1, the computer I learned how to program on. Good times, good times! Yea those prices were unreal, but all that tech in 1983.

@tenminutetokyo2643 Год назад

Two excellent machines. I just refurbed both of mine. You can retrobright the CoCo1 keyboard with nothing but sunlight.

@Midcon77 Год назад

This video made me realize what I miss about the 80s and 90s - the plethora of options you had to customize your system in terms of capability. These days, yeah, there are processor and RAM options, but you can buy all kinds of off-the-shelf systems that will all do the same basic things. Back in these days, you had to pick and choose, and it really meant something to buy, say, a modem. That gave you a capability to do something not everyone could do, unlike today. Thanks Adrian and keep up the great work!

@OscarSommerbo Год назад

Add to that the competing architectures and complete lack of real user testimonials outside your friends, and you get the bad old days of computing purchases. The 80s really was the wild west of home computers. I am not claiming that the lack of options we have today is good, but it is better from a customer perspective and customer experience.

@Starchface Год назад

The late '70s and the '80s were what I call the Golden Age of computing. This was the first time non-engineers had a chance to have a computer at home that was useful (I am excluding calculators and machines like IMSAI and Altair). These microcomputers, as they were then known, were all different and mostly incompatible. You chose your computer, and you were committed to the platform. Your software was whatever was available for it, or whatever you wrote yourself. Getting to know each machine and its capabilities was very interesting and exciting to me. Between me, my friends and school, there were about half a dozen different platforms. Here you had, for the first time, machines available to the public that would do whatever you told them to do, the first mass-market general-purpose computers. One person could fully understand the hardware and software. It was a unique moment in history. There was a sense that such technology had the potential to radically change society, but how that might happen was not figured out yet. Today computers are infinitely more powerful, but far less interesting. They've been abstracted into generic appliances with no character. While that is the very reason for the triumph of the PC architecture, I will never forget the competing manufacturers all jostling for a slice of market share. It really was a silicon Wild West.

@DeanHorak Год назад

I had the model two back in the early 80s and when the 68000 expansion board came out, I added that to it and ran Xenix. I used it to develop software for local businesses. While expensive, it also meant my clients that were using them had a little money to spend on software development so it all worked out.

@BobFrancis70 Год назад

My junior high school had about 15 Model IIIs in the computer lab and we had that network connector. The "master" computer had disk drives, the other computers did not. The teacher could send a program down from a floppy for us to start working with. They were all like 5K BASIC programs, so it didn't take all that long. Also, we could - from the client computers - print things out using the printer connected to the master computer. I think it went through the RS-232 interface. It did not connect via the cassette port as we all had cassette recorders at the desks to save our changes to programs we had to write for class (if we didn't finish during the class time).

@8bitwiz_ Год назад

I'm pretty sure you could buy the furniture that's in that catalog too. I wonder if all those office photos were taken at Tandy Towers.

@MichaelEhling Год назад

With those computers (and prices!) Radio Shack was positioning themselves as the local place that small businesses could go for professional computing support. I recall seeing these and similar machines in offices of manufactures, accountants, lawyers, schools, doctors and dentists, etc. RS had a big initial advantage due to all those small local stores. Of course, they lost that advantage as IBM and clones figured out their distribution. Oh, and Lotus 1-2-3. :)

@iteachtime Год назад

Loved the catalog perusal! This channel rocks!

@jonorgames6596 Год назад

One ought to keep in mind, that previous computers were the size of a big room!

@FranLab Год назад

VCF was definitely a blast, and a blur. Great meeting you there Adrian!

@kevinwright7931 Год назад

WOW!! I graduated high school in 1983.

@chrisschanneloftechnology4743 Год назад

I recently was given a bunch of vintage computers including me a really nice TRS-80 that appears to be an almost perfect condition along with some commodore disc drives and a printer. I also ended up with an old terminal computer as well. It's basically you're not going to be able to do anything unless I have the mainframe to hook it up to. I also got some IBM XT models along with some software. I also recently picked up a commodore vic-20 from eBay which needs a power supply a number 9 key and spring and also AV cables to hook it up to a TV or monitor.

@timmooney7528 Год назад

In 1990 I bought a 486-33 tower built by a co-worker from parts he ordered out of Computer Shopper. I wanted to buy a modem card, and I figured Radio Shack sold computers, they'd have modern parts. The local "shack" had older TRS-80 stock in the back, and nothing modern or current. I ended driving another 45 minutes to a mall that had an Electronics Boutique to buy a 2400 baud modem.

@uni-byte Год назад

By 1983 RS had computer centers. The model 16 would almost never be found at a regular computer store, only at those that hosted computer centers. As expensive as it seemed we (at the time I was working for a very large motorcycle dealership that had 5 locations) opted for a PDP-11/73 (basically a miniaturized version of the 11/70). We had looked at both systems and the RS Model 16 won out on price (by a long shot), however I was going to be the one to set-up and run the system so I favored the PDP-11 because I was more familiar with it's operating system and BASIC language. The RSTS/E OS for the PDP-11 was just far better for running timesharing applications at the time than Xenix was. the PDP-11 was also more expandable. more powerful and far better suited to a true multi-user environment. Anyway, that was the market they were playing in.

@BrianRRenfro Год назад

In the mid 90s I bought 3 TRS-80 Model 2s, and 4 Tandy 6000 machines from the high school I went to. Also got the 3x8" Drive expansion, a 35 meg external HD (loaded with Xenix) and a massive TRS-80 Line printer. That was what they had LEFT of their old office computer setup. That would have been, in 2023 dollars, well deep into 6 digit money wise. That school district was also notorious for wasting money!

@ygstuff4898 Год назад

A Coco 1 -- awesome. My first machine was a Coco2, so no worries about paint fade or anything (the "colour" was throughout the the foam plastic). A friend's dad repainted the family with Coco1 with a textured plastic-paint and made it indestructible--that thing lasted for years.

@Psychlist1972 Год назад

The computer lab in my Jr High school had VIC-20s with A/B/C/D mechanical selector switches for printers and disk drives. They had one disk drive and printer shared with four computers. You had to manually turn the dial switch when you wanted to use the drive or printer. With their C64s they eventually got more drives, but I imagine this scenario is similar to what the radio shack "network" was doing. I even saw a dial on one of those units in the catalog.

@idahofur Год назад

Being a big fan of the Shack and CoCo. My first used computer I found at a thrift store was a coco 1. Later I worked for a used Trs-80 Model 1. The computers in the 80's was an investment. You would get 10 years or more out of those systems. Not only was Radio Shack part of the 3 trinity of computers. You need to compare the TRS-80 Model II again mini computers that supported Multiple users for pricing. Also if you take in the fact how much 4 IBM pc's with hard drives would cost. Now it becomes more friendly of a price.

@bruwin Год назад

I really miss Radio Shack. It'd be so cool if it could come back, supplying parts for makers of all types.

@ct92404 Год назад

Unfortunately, local "brick and mortar" electronics parts stores are completely disappearing now. The very last one I know of in my area is closing down next month. Everyone is so anti-social now and just wants to do EVERYTHING online. I hate it.

@EddieSheffield Год назад

The Coco 1 was my first computer back in '82. Mine was like the one in the catalog with the main badge to the left and the memory badge on top to the right. And it's the black plastic - I was on it almost constantly from the time I got it until fall '85 when I went to college and was required by the school to get a PC (IBM PC Portable in my case). I still have it, in the box, along with a couple of floppy drives, a multipak interface (which I think still needs repair after a science fair project when wrong) and that graphic tablet. Didn't pay nearly that much for the tablet tho. I don't think it was a very big seller and they closed it out just a year or so after your catalog. I think we paid about $100 for it. It was...kinda functional I guess. Mine was off going up the left side as I recall. I don't know what's in the interface pack, but the tablet itself is just a big pcb with a bunch of crossing traces and resistors, plus a couple of pots for calibration. I was able to somewhat correct the weirdness with the pots, but never completely. Always wondered if some of the resistors were out of spec and if replacing them with better, tighter tolerance ones would help. Maybe I should make a video about it...

@ClausB252 Год назад

The ZX81 was an amazing machine, the ultimate in minimalism. It did so much with just 4 chips. Yes the keyboard was poor, but the keyword entry method made it less painful. Yes the 16K module was dicey but there were alternatives. I built my 81 from a Sinclair kit in 1982, before Timex sold them, and later expanded it to 16K internal SRAM. Great fun!

@Wenlocktvdx Год назад

I had a load of fun with my CoCo 1 after it arrived in 1980. Mine had the black textured keyboard surround, yours has the smooth silver surround which is around 1981-2. I do recall a comment in Rainbow magazine that Chrysler silver gray rattle can paint was a close match. Btw, the wear in front of the keyboard tells me it’s a high hours machine

@erickvond6825 Год назад

If you're going to paint the TRS-80 I would highly recommend Krylon for plastics. It bonds really well and leaves a good finish.

@sn1000k Год назад

Krylon is terrible for everything else! Source: graffiti writer and otherwise spray paint user

@johanlaurasia Год назад

Bear in mind, in 1983, the IBM PC was only 3 years old, and the PC world was just starting to build computers with 286s. Early PC architecture was pretty crappy too until x86 came along, and Tandy was pretty far ahead of the pack (including IBM) at that moment in time. Like you said, it ran a Unix variant, and with the Z80 as a support processor, it was a pretty powerful system at the time. Yes, they weren't exactly selling like hotcakes, but they did sell when the job required that level of compute power. I worked at a Tandy Computer Center at the time, and it was fun to have such a beast of a machine. That was also the end of the line for Tandy based computers. Everything after that was PC compatible stuff, and Tandy eyed the home/small business market, and never created high end PCs.

@markgburnet Год назад

Still have a sapphire Tandy lapel pin.

@chuckthetekkie Год назад

The first HDD I ever bought was a Maxtor 8.6GB for $150 and my Epson 800 was $200 and 64MB of SIMM RAM for $150 in the late 90's. I was born in 1986 and was never exposed to any of the Radioshack computers. I do remember computers being super expensive. The computer I bought that 8.6GB HDD for was an Epson and was given to me by my aunt who got it from her boss as they upgraded it to Windows 95 and it was BSOD city. That PC got me into building PCs.

@dh2032 Год назад

Remember when 4.1 GB seemed like a huge amount of storage space? Back then, disks had just started to measure in MB and GB, and people would say ‘You will never fill that drive!’ But now, the whole operating system, all your files, documents, internet videos, etc. take up much more space. I wouldn’t even bother with a USB flash drive of that size. What could I possibly use it for?

@Renville80 Год назад

Those certainly were some eye-poppingly redonkulous prices in that catalog. Certainly quite the counterpoint to the pennies they were charging for the electronic components elsewhere in the store. Perhaps the first sign of its impending demise was when they began downsizing that section in favor of consumer goods. Anyway, the Apple ][ or the good ol' C64 definitely must have seemed a far more reasonable investment in comparison!

@ct92404 Год назад

I feel like the slow decline started when they merged with Sprint. By the late 90's, the electronics parts area was getting smaller and smaller and all they were doing was pushing cell phones and toys.

@Tangobaldy Год назад

To be fair this was one of the most useless and uninspiring computers I ever bought the trs80

@MLampner Год назад

Yes companies had model 2s. Radio Shack's computer centers were slick, held classes and small businesses loved them. Located often in a downtown they were seen as a legitimate player in a time where there were no small business systems. In an era where companies relied on service bureaus to process general ledgers and payrolls you could easily save money even at these prices and in the end do no more work than you had to do in prep for the service bureau. They were quite successful till the IBM XT came on the seen. At that point Tandy in attempt to regain the business market introduced the Tandy 2000, with I believe a 186 processor, but it never caught on. After that failure the company began closing the computer centers and focused on the 1000 as a low budget alternative for home use. By the way the small devices on the cover were not calculators but handheld computers. The Tandy 100 which was larger had a several line screen actually caught on with reporters for a while and the most interesting use I have saw took place in a deli, which everyone knew was a hang out for bookies. What Deli had 8 pay phones. One day I was there for lunch because it was a great NY style Jewish Deli near Pimlico Racetrack and I went back to the bathroom near where the phones were. On one of the phones was a one of the bookies with his Tandy 100 hooked up through an acusticoupler and the hand set from the next phone on his ear. I'm not sure what he connected to but it was the era of Compuserve and bulletin boards so maybe he got his race results.

@JamieStuff Год назад

The paint on the original CoCo was the same as used on the original TRS-80 (aka the Model I). I learned the hard way that having insect repellent on my hands while handling my Model I caused the paint to literally melt, looking like the damage on the top of the one shown here. Also, the business machines were generally not stocked/shown at the retail stores. They were at the Computer Centers. As for pricing, in this era, the saying was that the computer you wanted cost $5000. That included most XT clones, so the prices then were really not that extravagant compared to other computers.

@dparks256 Год назад

I was there for VCF east! I didn't want to interrupt you, but you actually spotted me hauling off a TRS-80 and said hey. Thanks for all the great videos, we got it working in no small part thanks to those. I'm just a little late watching this video, hehe. PS my first real job in the 2000s was at a RadioShack, loved that place as a kid, sad to see it go.

@Herby-1620 Год назад

Back in the day... I purchased a 4K CoCo. It lasted at 4K until the drive home, where withthe addtion of 16 16k dynamic rams and a bit of solder, it bounced up to 32k. With some other mods (jumper cuts, and a bit more), I later upgraded it to a 64k unit. The 64k unit would support OS-9 which could handle multiple users. A pretty good 8-bit machine, using a 6809, probably the BEST 8 bit chip, but a bit late to overcome the Z80 juggernaught. Oh, well.

@MattPlachecki Год назад

$1 in 1983 was a little over $3 ($3.05) today. That Model 16 would be over $15,000 today!

@Okurka. Год назад

It actually would be dirt cheap today.

@morantaylor Год назад

Was it Bil Herd who said they took a Z80 from a zx80 that was holding a door when building the C128 prototype?

@desiv1170 Год назад

I have to admit I do have some love for the TS1000/ZX81. Modded my TS1000 for composite video, added 16k internal, replaced the keyboard and the 7805 with a Traco (less heat). I also had to replace the RCA jack, as it was damaged. Yes, it is a SUPER SUPER minimal machine, but I have to admire it for what it is. And some of the "hires" games are surprisingly good. (Well, for a monochrome no sound minimal system). ;-)

@TKomoski Год назад

Those box's in the background look like Trump boxs, are you authorized to have those box's

@Colin_Ames Год назад

The Radio Shack catalog was interesting. In 1983 I was still living in England, and often visited the Tandy store in my hometown of Coventry, just to drool. I used to buy components and other hardware from them, but never got around to affording a computer.

@PatrickDunn13078 Год назад

I played a lot of FS on the 1000, incredible! It was tough but fun still at least my 13 year old past self thought so!

@retropuffer2986 Год назад

In high school I had a friend whose family had Tandys. I have no problem picturing them spending large amounts for Tandy equipment. They knew how to program those machines inside and out.

@mk500 Год назад

I’d love to see the coco in blue. Black seems kind of boring for a “color compute” :-) Might as well have some fun with it!

@lightmagick Год назад

If you put the case of the Coco in a trash bag with rubbing alcohol for several hours(outside in summer heat will help as well) it will soften the paint to remove it. This is an easy way to prep it for a respray, I did the same process before painting a friends Magnavox Odyssey II which came out pretty decent.

@sn1000k Год назад

Nice process!

@brianwieseler5938 Год назад

The silver CoCos would discolor like that if they were stored with the dust cover on it, that RadioShack sold

@cabiv545 Год назад

Taught in a class in 1989 that had 10 TRS-80 Model I - I believe they went through the cassette port. Wrote a math drill basic program and could load to all in the class. :(

@tarzankom Год назад

It's always cool to see the ridiculous prices of computers back in the day. Adjusting for inflation, it's an insane amount of money for something that has very limited functionality.

@markgburnet Год назад

To use a TRS80 network 2: LOAD software program on host from floppy. Type CLOAD (cassette load) on each of 16 networked units. Type CSAVE on the host. This distributes the program to each machine. This is typically for a classroom teacher to load software on each students workstation.

@markgburnet Год назад

The knob on the unit is to select a workstation to upload a file to the host unit. This was typically to save students work.

@JavisoGaming Год назад

I had a Coco 1! I got it new (I’m 57). I since donated it five years ago to a computer museum. I now wish I would’ve kept it. I had the box and manuals. Everything. Fully functional! What a great video!

@horusfalcon Год назад

Your donation made it possible for others to experience the enjoyment and edification that came with your CoCo. Thank you for donating, and for sharing from your life to others.

@godzzwrath Год назад

kinda glad you sent it to a museum instead, wouldve collected dust but is probably on display now for hundreds to see and appreciate :3

@Okurka. Год назад

Relax, it's only a Trash-80.

@melkiorwiseman5234 Год назад

I got one of those a while back. I wrote a machine code program which interfaced with a running BASIC program to allow the program to put text directly onto the high resolution graphics screen. It could be loaded to any available place in RAM and would run from there since it used PCR (Program Counter Relative) instructions for all internal calls and references. I would use the CLEAR command to reserve 6 "pages" of video RAM since the high-res screen needed 4 pages. The other 2 pages would be used by my program. Printing to the high-res screen became a simple matter of setting up a USR call and then calling it with something like: X=USR0(CHR$(26)+"Hello, world!") The CHR$(26) would clear the graphics screen followed by printing the text starting at the top left corner. That was just the start of what the program could do. It could re-define characters, repeat characters and a lot more.

@crabdonkey6381 Год назад

The multiuser system we used was a Digital Group computer using Oasis multiuser software that supported 8 terminals. I personally had a Televideo terminal and a dot matrix printer at my desk. The computer had a 40 GB hard drive to support the 8 terminals [5 GB per terminal if all used.

@sn1000k Год назад

40gb? Surely not

@MrKurtHaeusler Год назад

Yeah, how did they store their 4K movies? He obviously meant TB 😀

@crabdonkey6381 Год назад

@@sn1000k oops 40 MB

@sn1000k Год назад

@@crabdonkey6381 didn't mean to be critical just noting how hard it is to wrap our minds around the limitations back then

@danpedersen55 Год назад

You could take a couple of magnets from an old defective harddrive, glue on the front of a broom, makes it easy to find screws on a dark carpet 🙂 thanks for the videos, much appreciated 👍

@coryengel Год назад

I still remember being appalled at Radio Shack prices. I once went in to get my free battery (Battery Club), and bought a single floppy disk for SIX BUCKS.

@randygreenwood1096 Год назад

Those free batteries were very leaky.

@button-puncher Год назад

Krylon Fusion is pretty awesome for painting plastic. It sort of sinks in. Leaves a really nice finish. Give it a shot. $5k in 1983 would be $15.3k in 2023. Woof. Thanks for another great video. Old catalogs are a time warp. I've got a Grainger catalog from the 1950's. Fun to flip through.

@Okurka. Год назад

You could buy a plot of land in a city for $5k in 1983. Try that with $15.3k now.

@kaitlyn__L Год назад

@@Okurka. I think everybody knows inflation calculations are bad at tracking larger purchases like land or property. Or even cars. The calculations are based around the price of daily goods, not luxury purchases.

@Okurka. Год назад

@@kaitlyn__L Luxury purchases like computers in 1983.

@kaitlyn__L Год назад

@@Okurka. exactly. Computers, hifi equipment, etc don’t track linearly with inflation. Inflation calculations are only a rough guide of buying power. If you really look into it there’s different inflation figures for every single sector, but the government doesn’t have calculators for those.

@ForgottenMachines Год назад

Yes, ANOTHER FG T-shirt sighting...thank you again, Adrian! I shall always thank you every time I see it in a video... OH, and btw, this video is of special interest to me, because I have a story to tell you about a CoCo1 in December of 1982, and a picture to show you...hopefully I can tell that story when we see each other at the next VCF...can't wait!!!

@eformance Год назад

What's hard to process is Tandy using 8" disk drives in 1983. At that time ST-506 interface 5-1/4 inch full-height drives were a common occurrence. Why would they saddle themselves with an oddball 8.6MB 8" HDD? Or 8" floppies?

@DIYDaveOK Год назад

I had nearly every TRS-80 from the model I, then a III, up to an IV. I also had the 300 baud switched manual modem and a dedicated phone line for it. Most of RS's printers were rebadged Centronics units. I went to a local electronics shop to get dual disk drives installed in my Model III, as it was FAR cheaper than the RS ripoffs. The RS Model III basic didn't have function definitions, which was a pain for porting some BASIC games, but you could buy an "advanced" BASIC interpreter *with* functions from third parties. Clunky though they were, I probably owe my career to the start those old classic machines gave me. I actually sold copies of some genealogy and accounting software I wrote in the pre-Internet days.....

@scootdadtx Год назад

My first computer was the Timex Sinclair 1000, I loved it and it gave me my first taste of using computers. We had the RAM expansion and when the games would load we played Frogger and Chess (a technical feat unmatched to this day). After the Timex I had an Atari 800xl which i used for years after and upgraded to 128K with a kit I bought at The Floppy Wizard in Houston. I loved both computers, sadly they are long gone into a landfill somewhere.

@MarianoLu Год назад

Nice you were loaded my first computer was a ZX-81 and my dad and a friend made me a home made memory expansion that I think it was 4k. After that I move to the Commodore camp and got a 128 in 87 or 88

@scootdadtx Год назад

@@MarianoLu my neighbor had a commodore 64 and we would spend our afternoons after school typing in games that were in Compute magazine. Loads of fun.

@16BitDungeon Год назад

I'm pretty sure the correct term is "Computer of color".

@SidneyCritic Год назад

I don't think any car has that fine a silver medallic, so I would look at the cheap standard/general silver spray can stuff, ie, it does look like cheap paint. Spray cans are quick dry, so I wouldn't worry about dust, ie, I just spray outdoors and it's not a problem. If the plastic is making that pattern in the paint, wouldn't the bottom be damaged, ie, it looks like solvent damage.

@tonycosta3302 Год назад

Those prices make the Apple Lisa price a bit more reasonable. In retrospect they seem crazy, but it was all super new tech.

@mattsword41 Год назад

you should give the zx81 a bit of a chance if you haven't - it's wonderful though rubbish. Built reverse engineered clone from a kit recently. Games like 3D monster maze are suprisingly good bearing in mind it's limitations. Sega's Frogger is quite impressive too! There is a highres mode too coded by a guy called Wilf if you modify your ram pack (wont work with the clone I have sadly) There are even ethernet adapters for it and a web browser (zeddyfox)

@DoItMyselfGarage 10 месяцев назад

Just as a comparison, the average new car price in 1980 was around $7500, so yeah, definitely not for home computing!

@TheSudsy Год назад

ZX81 had 1k . Blu tak was the ESSENTIAL ZX81 16k user's equipment and ideally pushed against a wall. There was also a 64k RAM pack !!!

@Rorschach1024 Год назад

I had the printer too which made it extra janky. I cut out a piece of plywood and stuck everything down to it because just the flex from pushing on the keyboard would cause a crash.

@Rorschach1024 Год назад

The 64k was an aftermarket unit, at least in the states. I wanted to build one but the static ram was expensive as hell.

@Miasmark Год назад

My father found a way to use a rubber band to wedge the ram expansion in the machine.

@JPBennett Год назад

I suppose $30K on a fully loaded server isn't too unimaginable. Not sure it's comparable, though.

@uni-byte Год назад

The TRS-80 add-on external drive came with a cabinet with built-in power supply - so worth a little more than a bare drive.

@superslammer Год назад

At two of my schools we had a full token ring (I think) network of TRS-80s. The server read from the floppy and loaded it for each machine one at a time.

@markgburnet Год назад

Cassette tape output port network in early trs80s. Tandy 1000's had token ring cards.

@superslammer Год назад

@@markgburnet We had dual floppies on the main server and it would show on the screen which machine it was currently loading data for. Sometimes class would end before all machines were served. :)

@SobieRobie Год назад

Make a cooperation for the painting operation!

@bigbadhodad3894 Год назад

I love how Adrian keeps telling us he's a diabetic, and they insist on sending candy, ,

@brianv2871 Год назад

He should tell folks he's "clean and sober" so he can get the good stuff 😃

@Vermilicious Год назад

How about a wood grain makeover? *grin*

@BobBell808 Год назад

I used to be a Radio Shack manager and remember looking at the store's monthly P&L statement which explained why those prices were so high: The basic markup on the TRS 80 was approximately 30-40%. Admittedly, I didn't work at the Shack until the 90s. I would imagine that if anything, the markup would have been way higher. If you think about the overhead required to have all those specialized parts distributed to all those neighborhood stores, you would have to have that kind of profit to pay for it. And it worked... until it didn't.

@Clavichordist Год назад

The Visual V1050 came out in the same era. The price for that system, plus the software bundle, was $2495. The software bundle included WordStar, DR Graph, Microsoft MultiPlan, C-BASIC, and Z80 Assembler. When I had my system, I purchased an Epson RX-80 dot-matrix printer that worked forever and lived through multiple PCs before I gave it away to someone who was still using it until recently to print labels.

@ravenbarsrepairs5594 Год назад

I didn't know saltwater tafy came in that many flavors. My favorites are blueberry, banana, and/or rootbeef, depending on maker.

@lightmagick Год назад

I realize that was a typo but I found the thought of "rootbeef" taffy hilarious. 😂

@ravenbarsrepairs5594 Год назад

@@lightmagick Sad part is I edited that part of the post, thinking it was correct.

@TheAnkMan Год назад

I would not paint it at all, because it removes some "originality". Just ignore the scratches or whatever that is. The scars (right to the keyboard, oh boy!) shows it was a hard worker back in its day. Countless hours of Space Invaders. 😀 Also, shouldn't the lower shell be affected by whatever the bag did to the upper part too? Multi-User: CP/M has that too. No real user separation though as on UNIX or Linux (or even Windows these days).

@MLampner Год назад

One more thing before the 9 pin DB9 became the standard DB25 was the standard for mcirocomputer RS232 connections. Interesting it was also the plug for parellel printers. I no longer sure but I think I have the direction right, Parallel ports were male DB25s and Serial Ports where female DB25s on the back of the machines.