Tandy TRS 80 Model 3 -  

One other bit: TRS-80's were used to generate several of the console displays used in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture." The source listings were published in a great old TRS-80 specific magazine called "SoftSide." It was and is so cool to watch that movie and recognize where my little old TRS-80 helped make the Enterprise fly!😁

We got one of those in 1981. I taught myself to program when I was 9. That box changed the course of our lives. I was just discussing the game Taipan this morning.

I'm so old... the C64 came out when I was a kid.... We had Tandy TRS 80s in our classrooms with 5.25 floppies

My High School had a lab full of these, and I had my first computer lessons on them. I had to code a design on the screen, and have it move, so I made a tardis appear and fade off. As I recall I passed. If you were late for class you didn't get a TRS, instead you got a console that just ran the plotter. Loved that experience. It was in the early 80's and was a great and exciting time for computers.

I had every generation TRS-80 from I, III, and IV. Then a Tandy 1000. Started my career. Learned to do programming and how to do college program assignments through a dialup modem to the university PDP-11/70. Learned how to setup a terminal emulator designed for an 80x24 screen for the Model III's 64x16, IIRC. Spent many a fun hour playing and learning these beasts; even found a local company installing dual disk drives cheaper than RS. Great memories. The tape recorder was notoriously fussy; needed to use decent quality tapes to save important programs. Also bought a third-party music program that allowed you to actually play fairly accurate notes through a separate speaker.

My first non-gaming console computer was a TRS-80 Model III. :) It had 64kB RAM (could have been 48 probably) and 2 5.25" 360kB floppy drives. I had an external amplifier connected to the cassette port. I once wrote a Wheel of Fortune-like game in BASIC with a Z80 assembly routine for sound. The code was probably an eyesore. I was just 14 years old. I liked using LDOS much more than TRS-DOS. I had the Model III in 1988. Yeah, rather late in the life of the Model III. Dealing with the primitive graphics and sound (or lack thereof) was so much fun!

Having grown up with a TRS-80 Model I since 1983 and a Model III since about 1990 it is good to see more TRS-80 related videos on youtube.

Never expected to hear Helmet here! A real overlooked band. Still sounds great to me. I spent a lot of time as a teenager in the 80's at a friends home playing games on a TRS 80 and TI/99.

12:22 "EACA INTERNATIONAL LTD" in the program listing. EACA was the Hong Kong company that made TRS-80 clones called "Video Genie"

I remember drooling over these when I was a kid. I ended up with an Apple IIe though

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. The TRS80 was my first memory of a computer when I was a kid!

My first computer at four years old. Good old LDOS.

As always you keep doing great and interesting videos and this SepTandy is no exception.

This brings back bad memories. When all of the Apple 2s were already taken in the school computer room I got stuck using this one with subpar graphics and no Oregon Trail 😢

Your videos are very calming.

Wow, I remember these from my childhood. There would be a regular little group that would meet at the local Radio Shack and the sales rep would get on some local bbs's. It was fun, it seemed every kid was a nerd in some way back then. Good video.

The Model 3 is such a classic design. You have presented a great overview of this system and how to load its software using contemporary techniques -- excellent information; I learned a lot.

what an amazing piece of technique history!

i've always wanted to get ahold of this model. Love the All-In-One Computers!

On this computer I made my first small BASIC programs, back in 1981. This was in the local Radio Shack shop, here in The Netherlands. As a 15 year old, I could only dream of owning such an awesome machine. On my 16th birthday, I got a Sinclair ZX-81 (in the States known as Timex). Also a Z80 machine, but with only 1KB of memory.

I just hate it when Puff the magic smoke dragon visits on old computer! :) Loved the video. My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1, 4K. It was great fun.

The Model 3 was the nicest looking computer from back then.... curvey and silver.... gorgeous!

I had three of them, I used them through college. While i loved them while I had them for word processing, spreadsheet, and database uses, it never occurred to me that they could actually run games.

I have the model III in the basement. First code I wrote was with the TRS80. Good box in the day.

Excellent review 🤠

This brings back memories. That exact computer was my first home computer. No floppies, 16Kb or ram, and a cassette player. My favorite game was Asylum ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_(1981_video_game) ). Thanks for the video. :)

Great vid! In my high school, we had a network of Model IIIs and Model IVs... they were networked to one "host" machine that served the rest with 4 floppy drives and a printer. Imagine that.. networked floppy drives!!

i just had flashbacks to Jr. High School when we had Model 3's in our computer lab exactly like this. No disk drives. There was a central disk unit and software was sent to each terminal. I'm not exactly sure if it was over parallel or serial, but it was slow as hell. Great machines though.

Given the way the case is constructed, I would turn the entire machine upside down and pull the bottom out instead of trying to lift the heavy, lopsided weight of the CRT risking damage. Most of the screws are also on the bottom so it would be a matter of flip, unscrew, pull.

Star Trek! I played so much Star Trek on the TRS-80 Model III. It was my intro to Super Star Trek.

As soon as you mentioned smoke at the beginning, I immediately thought of the infamous rifa caps!

great video man, keep it up

Radio Shack loves to put ports on the bottom. Even the Color Computers had those. Even the BBC Micro's as well had interesting connector locations.

gotta have a copy of that Nirvana tape there :')

Hi there, Retro - I've really enjoyed all your videos, and I'm really looking forward to watching this one in particular. I remember waiting for the new RS catalogue to come out each year, and then spending the rest of the year poring over the pages and dreaming of all those products I couldn't afford at the time. One of them was the TRS 80 Model 3, which seemed to me to be the ultimate in computing excellence (I have no idea why lol). Honestly I'd give anything to have one of these machines now. Now, on with the video haha. A note or two - The cassette unit probably has no speaker simply due to the fact that it is intended for computer operations exclusively, and they wanted to avoid users being inadvertently being accosted by the screeching of TRS 80 and his 8-bit Band. The tape deck is probably otherwise identical to their audio units though. Otherwise, I have to say that cassette is probably the very worst medium conceived of for mass storage, and I have only had bad experiences with them. As for the music you chose to listen to, I noticed you chose Heather Nova. She's actually of Bermudian origin (from the local Frith family). I just thought that was really cool, as she's not a hugely well-known artist. But to address the issue of poor quality sound issue, I was thinking that perhaps they altered certain aspects of the record and playback specs for recording computer code. Not sure though.

I typed in "Super Star Trek" from David Ahl's "101 BASIC Computer Games" book and was thankful I had a cassette to save it. I wasn't so happy when the "load bug" in the corner would get stuck indicating the save was bad. I had to modify the BASIC used in the listing - TRS-80 BASIC didn't support function definitions and the program was literally a few bytes too big for my whipping 16K RAM..But I finally got it going...

Had the PC and the tape deck in the 80's!

I just wanted to mention - The Model 3 used a standard Shugart interface with 34 pin edge connector for its floppies, so if you buy one of those cheap GOTEK floppy emulators, install the Flash Floppy firmware on it, and connect it up, you can easily load floppy images onto one of these without any original drives or disks. With mine, I've actually run the cable out through a vent on the bottom, so the GOTEK can sit external to the machine and not mess up the look.

Funny that most mornings driving into work, I load up a Nirvana playlist on youtube and play it through my car speakers. When Nirvana was popular when I was in school, I had Nevermind and Heart Shaped Box, but now almost everything I listen to is from Bleach, Incesticide, and the unplugged album.

Thank you for this video I owned a model III back in the day The CASS? question is to set the baud rate of the cassette port. L is for 300 baud and H is for 1200 baud. I always used H at the cassette prompt so programs would load so much faster. This option was only for the mode III or IV was high speed was not available for the Model 1

Had a classroom in highschool filled with these in 1983.

Nintendo was for the rich kids. I just turned 7 when my dad found one of these on the side of a road and gave it to me. No cassette player, no floppy drive, no instructions (I literally "rammed" that thing you see in 2:23, thinking I was supposed to do that to make something cool happen). Still I had the greatest, endless fun with it. Just the mere fact that pressing a key made that letter appear on a screen was already awesome, but then I learned the basics of "goto", "print", and "input". Like holy crap! I had my own computer, and I could now even make it ask for and then say my name. This is funny to remember when I babysit kids nowadays and see how with the simple click of a button, they immediately get this infinite number of Roblox games to choose from.

Wow, somebody else who has heard of Helmet. Definitely unexpected in a TRS-80 video. Hehehe...

Cool! Although I'm surprised the cassette player doesn't have a speaker inside, my Tandy "Computer Cassette Recorder" CCR-81 does. The TRS-80 was a bit before my time and I've never seen one in person, so I guess they weren't really all that popular here in Australia (don't even know if it was sold here). Went to school with a kid that had one, but he was from Europe, so evidently it was more popular there. We did have a clone, the Dick Smith System 80, hence the line in the space invaders game "Dick Smith Elect.". Presumably it was made for the Dick Smith System 80 and sold alongside the machine at Dick Smith Electronics stores. It would be interesting to see this machine upgraded to the full 48K and a floppy drive or two. Although I'd understand if you don't want to go to that kind of effort since it's not your machine. You'd need to acquire necessary parts, and obviously get the owner's permission, but you don't even get to keep the fruits of your labour! Anyway, it was fun to see such an -old- (ahem) classic machine running!

🙂awesome

As soon as you said, "it filled the room with smoke," I immediately thought "RIFA."

TRS-80 with floppy controller can accept up to 4 floppy drives.

Happy lil Trash-80!😀

My TRS-80 Model III had the exact same issue with the PSU boards. I replaced thos pesky RIFA caps with modern eauivalents, A full-bridge-rectifier and all electrolytic caps to get them up and running again (there are two PSU boards in mine) . I was lucky to have found Model III with two diskdrives installed, along with 32K of RAM. Unfortnately it is missing the "X" and the "9" keys and switches. Hope to find these some day.

Great video as always! I love these old computers! Where in Europe are you from?

Cut my programming teeth on those in high school 81-83. Our school's computer lab had three of those, a Model 1, an Apple II+ and a very loud 150 baud teletype terminal with a paper tape punch/reader. We learned BASIC, FORTRAN and COBOL.

Nirvana, great choice! Seems you have used a high quality chrome tape for storing the basic program. Those type 2 / high position cassettes are a bit too good for this purpose as they have excellent audio quality and good treble response. Most commercial software was recorded on the cheapest type 1 / “type 0” ferro cassettes of dictaphone quality.

Nirvana....that's a meditation program right....hope it's upgraded

TRS is terrific! And run space invaders in 2020.

Gotta love the really vintage Nirvana pirated tape ;-)

8:01: How hard would it be to create some kind of maybe USB adapter to plug the remote control pins on the DIN into a modern laptop also, for extra convenience with appropriate software supporting that?

I have this one. need to figure out what to do with it.

1:37 that is the Z80 bus expansion port and the other is the parallel port. Could you tell us how they got sounds out of the TRS80 5:37 and routed to output via the AUX jack of the tape recorder? The AUX is is a high level INPUT to the cassette recorder.

The L you have to type on the Cass(ette) prompt is for Low baud rate, apparently. Which makes me wonder why they're asking in the first place? Was there some high baud rate cassette tape setup as well?

I rather like the TRS80GP emulator. It supports Model 1 through Model 6000 and you can run Microsoft Xenix on it. I booted a Xenix developer version on it and was able to write and compile C programs in VI.

I worked for Radio Shack (01-2715) in 86. Had some trash 80 masters teaching me. Good days

sepspector!!👍🤘😉

mine has 2 power supplies, but thats because it has the two disk drives and the controller card which also takes power.

x86 goodies from the nineties PART 2!!!!

It looks as if You had the headphone jack plugged in, so that's why you couldn't hear audio. I had a speaker in my CTR80 deck.

You have to wait for the CRT to warm up. LOL

I bought a house with alot of junk in a outdoor shed and found some Trs-80 joysticks and a Dracula game or book on cassette fir trs-80 with package unopened searched net but cant find anything about the Dracula cassette? Even on ebay?

try sockit development kit, an fpga dev suite

Hi, What Laptop is this @12:04 ?

You have to clean the rubber roller in the tape player

how u get the roms?

Wow... cload and csave. Kids these days have no idea how easy they have it!

you have to upgrade the PSU to add a floppy drive. man, that's rough.

The orange button always scared me in elementary school

DOOD!

I bought a basic TRS-80 Model III in 1981 for $999. I later upgraded to 48K and added the two floppy drives. I think it more than doubled the cost. Adding the $800 dot matrix printer and the Hayes Smartmodem 300 completed the package. I was one of two people that I knew of on board our ship that had a computer.

Friend: Hey my uncle gave me his TRS 80 Model 3. I'm just powering it up Me: Nooooooooooo!!! ::Loud Pop:: Friend: It's smoking

That machine does not have a serial port those ports are the parallel port and the I/O Bus

Good grief.... My first PC.

10 CLS 20 GOTO 10 🤣

Tandy computers were not upgradable as per a salesman in 1990.

I just traded recently this exact model for a PowerBook 190CS!?

I'm sure you're a great channel but way too many ads so I had to set your channel as never suggest. Great video but not worth watching those ads. BTW, I wasn't the person that clicked the thumbs down, nor did I click the thumbs up either.