TRS-80 - The Most Popular Personal Computer of 1977 |  

In what year was she born?

@@inlovewithi 1898 she died in 1980

My grandparents gave my brother a TRS-80, sometimes around mid 80s. Later on they gave us a TI 99/4A too. I have fond memories of both, but the TRS-80 stood out for certain games, like downland, and some I can't remember the name of... thing is though, we would get one of the magazines for it and my brother learned quickly how to program. So eventually we started trying to make our own games. Which we never finished but still. Kids these days will never understand it, they're so spoiled now, the experiences back then with all the limitations and having to order a game through the mail. It meant something different to us. They don't appreciate what they have like we did.

reach people

@@derealized797 im now 17, and i enjoy older computers :D

@@HK-fz5rn no. I bought it when I got out of the army. I had saved some money

I bought the exact same thing, and I still have it, including all the manuals and accessories. It is in perfect condition except for the "E" key, which is broken.

I miss those times. Good luck getting a job nowadays.

I went to a 2 year vocational electronics school in 82. We had a computer lab with a dozen or so TRS-80 Model III's. Learned to program in BASIC. Played Saipan! my first computer game, not counting arcade games. Also became familiar with the Qwerty keyboard layout for the first time in that lab. I remember siting there, struggling to find the "B" or some other character, cursing at technology. Now Im a pretty fast typist. Little did I know all the ay back then, that typing on a computer keyboard is how I would earn a living.

​​​@@sydneyhart Are you trying to tell me that it's hard to get a good job in IT with a solid background and decades of experience? Sorry, but I call major BS. I started on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k back in the 1980's and taught myself programming in BASIC when I was 11 years old. Today I am 52 years old and still have a great job in IT (Cyber & Information Security, namely Identity & Access Management) and I never even got a degree in computer sciences.

Yes, our school had one in the office probably played pong on it at lunch.

Yeah...Voyager lasted a lot longer than my 77' Ford Pinto. Hah!

Very good point.

V-Ger is searching for the Creator, carbon unit.

I had a late 70s black and white tv that lasted well into the 90s and still worked except for the knobs. My grandparents had a color RCA tv i believe from late 60s perhaps very early 70s that lasted 17 years.

Mostly working. Much of it is turned off now. It has a few more years before the RTG won't be able to power the radio. It had a glitch recently where it reactivated a broken processor. (when you're made with transistors big enough to see with the naked eye, it can take a pounding.) I'm impressed the _tape_ it uses for persistent storage still works.

Awesome!

That's a long career as a software developer. People usually burn out after 10 years.

At times I worked as an IT Manager and Software Development Manager but I ended my career as a self-employed Software Engineer; worked for HP and Micron in the last 13 years or so. I guess I had a talent for it or something...

Oh yes, that ribbon cable to the expansion interface was a major problem. I would buy them 3 at a time because they'd only last a few months. I finally got one from Micro-80 with the RAM and it lasted years. What a wonderful machine and so much fun. I learned basic on it and wrote so many programs (mostly games). I only had the tape drive for a very short time as I got the wafer drive (if anyone can remember those) which were so much faster at loading and saving. Then got the disk drive which was even faster, as well as the modem so I could play games "on-line" (which did not at all mean what it means today - think two computers talking to each other as the entire internet), but such a great little machine. I still have 2 of them but they haven't been plugged in for 20 or maybe 30 years... probably still work though. Anyway, thanks for posting about Micro-80 and the amazing fix to the headache of that short little ribbon cable. Amazing I found the guy that made that life saver...

@@JohnS-ii3mp Yes that "wafer drive" was called a "stringy floppy" if I remember right. It was a device originally designed to log information from electronic probes and sensors.. I must admit I miss those days when our reason for being was to prove to the world that micro computers could do anything. So called mini computer and mainframe guys used to think of micro computers as toys and we had to prove them wrong. Today PCs are so complex few people fully understand them and it is not as much fun to work with them.

Wow. Great memories.

@dharvell Industrial music, a carrier, why can check you ? I was expecting a story you becoming a great coders as i am, but you became creative, lol Kraftwerk. is German, so i did hear that on the radio, in Europe, not that conman in the US ?

But Kraftwerk is not Industrial music. Laibach and Einstürzende Neubauten play Industrial music. I like all three of them! My first computer was a ZX Spectrum clone. I had to make it by myself, because the ready made one was at least 2 times more expensive, which was too much even in 1991 for a student like me :-)

@@lucasrem Kraftwerk was a very influential band in Electronic music, so no wonder they were known in the US.

@@saszab They may not be Industrial music, but if not for my fifth grade teacher introducing me to Kraftwerk, I would have never discovered industrial music. It was that introduction that opened my eyes to the world of electronic music, as a whole. Was that ZX Spectrum clone a kit or did you have to source everything from scratch?

​@@dharvell Now I see. I also started with another genre of music: Depeche Mode and A-ha in 1989. Yes, kind of, but not a real kit. First you had to buy a PCB with schematics and a list of all the parts, then buy all the chips and other parts from different sellers (at a place like a flea market, but for electronic parts - there was nо store were you could buy everything in one place), then assemble and solder everything, make your own keyboard from scratch (i.e. design, draw by hand and etch another PCB), make your own power supply from scratch, then test and debug the board (so I had to buy an oscilloscope for this) - at least one microchip was faulty, so I had to buy another one, and so on. My first ZX Spectrum clone was a simple "Leningrad-1", like on this video (but mine was with 2 ROMs): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MqEwXq3njJs.html A year later I assembled a much more complicated clone, ZX Spectrum on steroids - "ATM Turbo-2", with 512K of memory ("Leningrad" had only 48K), 7 MHz Z80, extra video modes (almost like EGA), sound chip AY-8910, CP/M and FDD, like here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-5XjpB6EedJI.html Unfortunately none of them survived - I moved overseas and left all this stuff in my parents' apartment; when they moved a couple years ago to another city they left everything they don't need. So now I'm itching to make another simple clone of ZX Spectrum 48K :-)

I used to drool over that all-in-one unit when I was a kid (Model 3 or 4?), but $999 was a budget beyond what my mother could afford. It seemed like a super computer to me. In the end I was able to get Captain Kirk's computer, the VIC-20 for only $300.

@@knerduno5942 VIC-20 was a cool computer I remember that.

I'm gratefully thankful for my local RS Computer Center, which was nice enough to let me use their printer to print off my first school report I typed on my CoCo in 1981. When someone came in asking about the Coco the employee turned the customer to me because I guess I needed to work off the time and resources of using their printer. I would go on to work at a local Radio Shack store in 1987 my first job out of college when the Tandy 1000 HX came out. Our manager was nice enough to let us take one or one like it home to try it out, and somehow I erased the DOS disk.

​@@heaven-is-real I was looking at that along with TRS-80 CoCo just before the C64 came out because Apple II was too expensive. It was a nifty little machine but unfortunately only had a 20-column screen so you couldn't see much text on it.

I snagged a copy of the store operating software from one of the stores and we learned a lot about how RS did their store bookwork and how the system worked. You guys threw away some amazing stuff in the trash and we were there to gather and sift it all. We were able to use parts of some of that software to build other stuff and learn. What a great time to be alive. Also a guy who lives in AZ now made a program with the radio shack pocket amplifier that could do instant messenger between machines on a dry telephone pair in a local area. It was crude but it worked. This was operational around 82 or so. I do not know if the software even exists any more... but the cassette port would send out a signal with a preamble and all the machines would listen and put up the typed message in the received box with the sending machines name or ID. You type in your box and the press send and you could reply. We were able to test 4 machines on the same wires in a half mile area and i worked good. We were all teens at the time. Was written directly in assembly language because basic was too slow but it did call on subroutines in the ROM. I believe 1200 baud, the higher cassette speed. All machines were level 2.

Cool!

Thank you very much!

@@RetroHackShack Hi I am here to burst your small in the US forget the rest of the world bubble! Un no the in the US I think the Apple II was still more popular plus we were using them in school. We were not using the TRS80 at schools were we?! The answer was going to be for the most part a big NO. It went Apple II all the way up to the IIe and then meanwhile the IBM PC was also becoming common, plus if you went to the UK etc their was no RadioShack! The UK was using the BBC Micro etc. To you, in the USA it might of seemed like the Tandy was the most popular but you did not say 'In The US' you just stated that it was the most popular when it was not! Where they good computers, sure they were. The amount of schools I went to because we moved, I have seen way more IBM TX's that were not Tandy in schools then I have seen Tandy's! As must as it was the 80's and by then we were using way more other brands of PC's. One school I went to decided to go with Compaq for example. The Apple IIe was the most common one I ever saw. Their was also an other machine that came out while the Macintosh was also out but still I saw way more Apple IIe's. There was no RadioShack in Canada to my knowledge, so they were gong to be using something else if it was an Apple II. I loved going to RadioShack it is a shame it is gone now. I am by the way not saying that the Tandy computers sucked, I've used them before at one point even.

@@wheelieblind Hate to burst YOUR bubble, but by most measures the TRS-80 was THE microcomputer leader in TOTAL UNITS SOLD until Apple finally overtook them by '82-'83. That includes sales WORLDWIDE.

@@wheelieblind - And everyone knows UK is a wholly owned subsidiary of the USA as carried by the Americans in WW2. We should have made the UK apply for StateHood LOL Then all you blokes could be Blessed Yanks like the rest of us HA HA. Love from USA. Its always fun getting a few jabs in on the Brits. (I'm Brit by blood) don't tell anyone.

Thank you!

Thank you so much!

I used to go to the mall and while the rest of the family was shopping, I went to Radio Shack to program their Model One and later the Model 3. In 1976 all the stores had one on front counter siting there looking very high tech, but with nothing running, as there was no software. I would write a small program to put some eye can’t on the screen. I usually left a random pixel generator with reflections make it a 4 part symmetry. Then I would sneak away. They loved these little programs as they were worth watching at the time.

Yeah. It was the start of the present day hacker culture. (Not to demean the hackers of the 60s who started it all.)

I worked at radio shack in the 80s and it was a popular PC. I sold a few but it was not that big a hit.

If I remember...store programs on a cassette recorder

@@MrGchiasson correct. Although a disk drive and a disk operating system were available. We used to store data on audio cassettes (instead of the official data cassettes). They could hold a large number of programs, one after the other. But they were easily corrupted, and you could lose every program. That was painful! These days I could write software that used redundancy to make them much more robust. Man, that'd be a fun and useless project!! I might just do it

As I recall..they later sold it without a monitor...to reduce the selling price.@@jonfreeman9682

A friend had one of these, and we used to hit up BBSes on it.

We put 48k in the keyboard on one so no expansion interface. My buddy and I had an old engineer as an elmer and people thought we were top notch. It just took some reading and curiosity and some logic to figure out how to add the extra address wires for the chips. I did the disk thing on my model 3 and later model 4. The 4 was superior in every way running in model 3 mode. Much smoother and less buggy than either of the previous two. The model 4 would support larger MFM drives also.

So cool. So many of us got our start here.

If you have it still in mint condition it's an antique and you can fetch maybe $20G on it.

@@jonfreeman9682 I did some modifications on it. I installed an additional memory chip for 8 bit characters, some graphics extension and a number keypad, like the one on the later models. It gathers dust somewhere in the attic. So, sadly no mint condition 🤨.

@@RetroHackShack I ordered it with 4kB of memory , but when it arrived, it already was the 16kB model. My parents payed for it, it cost 2000 Deutsche Mark. More than my first used car.

@@alexanderpoplawski577 Try booting it up see if it still works. Dust it up a bit. Careful not to blow anything up as it's hard to get vintage parts. Recently a working Apple original sold for $440,000 but they are rare since Steve Wozniak only built a few. Several have sold over $200,000 depending on condition. TRS 80 doesn't have Apple's pedigree but it has a place in computing history. Even if it's not working I'll bet enthusiasts will still buy it to try to fix it up and resell it for much more.

Nice

I believe that's about 7500 operations by the classic algorithm, so you're saying it was doing < 3 ops/second... Wow!

@@clintonstaley8441 I wrote the algorithm but don't know (or remember) how many operations it took.

This was my first system too. I was never really happy with the monitor as it had a wobbly picture because of the 60/50 hertz difference in mains frequency.

Same as mine.

Haha ha I worked at radio shack and sold a few. That's alot of money back in those days. It's like $10,000 today.

£1,500 in 1978 is about £10,000 in today's money ...

Logical systems was a good operating system. Most software worked really good running under LDOS.

Thanks

That's definitely me 😁

Thank you

Your welcome! So much fun!

That cool!

And then Joshua (the WOPR) called you back and the rest is history... Would you like to play a game Professor Falken?

Nice!

Yes! The local radio shack was on my summer bike route :) and when the shooed me out, the local arcade was probably open or if quarters were in short supply the local video store was bound to be playing some rated R movie (beta max of course) that you could watch 😂

You bet! Thanks 👍

CHR$ 32 made the screen charactors double size :)

Same

Nice

yes... I remember that program. I bet if I had a working Mod 1, I would remember the code... Something about the x and y axis and then a go to line to repeat... Its just been too long, but it was a very short program. Maybe 3 or 4 lines. 10 cls 20 set (something, something, x, y, or something) 30 goto 20. I don't know, maybe it was something like that, but yes, I'd run it on every Mod 1 I got close to. Great fun.

Awesome

@@RetroHackShack You must be about the same age as me. My first computer programming class was in 1980 and I was in 10th grade. Also I got a Sears Video Arcade (same as Atari 2600) the first year it came out. I eventually went on to programming MS Access databases.

Same thing happened to Gene Roddenberry with a bunch of scripts. The data was recovered maybe a year or two ago. I am sure it could be also recovered.

@@knerduno5942 Eddie had experts try and fail on recovery .

That is informative, and unfortunate @@user-rt9zq8rs9k

@@user-rt9zq8rs9k - The technics used now are much better... And this version of TRS80 never had a hard drive... But the model 3 did have a 5 meg MFM drive and the model 4 could use it or a 10 meg MFM. The MFM drive was the forerunner of the IDE. The "HardCard" was a little MFM drive basically with a built in controller which is what eventually became the IDE drive which is a self contained hard drive and controller sitting directly on the CPU bus for speed. Its an interesting read about the MFM but there are interfaces for PC's that do diagnostic and recovery work to extract the data on MFM platters. They are crude but doable.

Finally, someone who kept their computers from childhood. So many of us sold or got rid of them along the way.

My mom even saved all my toys. I still have my 7ft GI Joe Aircraft carrier in storage. lol@@RetroHackShack

Nice

BASIC programming on TI 99 4A and IBM 360

There were kits to put all the ram in the keyboard and not in the expansion interface.

Thanks!

@@RetroHackShack Some how the first sentence got lopped off . . . "I always wanted one of these but started off with building . . . etc. " LOL I have restored my Amiga 500 with a Zuluscsi HD and am starting on my Amiga 3000. Videos like yours are valuable insights no matter what system one is tinkering with. Like I said being exposed to seeing these Tandy's all over the place helped spark my interest in computing. And YES, Radio Schack was one of my prime suppliers of electronic parts . . . I surely miss them :)

RW Scott Here in Europe too, the Tandy store was the epic shop was a kid back then. My father needed that PC for, i was only need a Commodore Vic 20 or this for games etc, i got the IBM. very happy too.

@@lucasrem ha, I had a VIC, too. Many happy hours playing Omega Race. :)

Great memories!

Still loved for sure! What were the most common problems you had to fix on those boards?

#1 problem hairline shorts from bad etched boards; #2 out of speck CPU chips from Zylog; #3 bad ram and/or video memory ( a digital thermometer is good for finding the bad chips that you could light a cigarette on); #4 faulty gates in the 7400 series; #5 bad crystal in clock circuit # 6 solder shorts (usually easy to find); That was a normal day in the life of a Tandy tec. 😀@@RetroHackShack

@jerryorourke7191 This is so awesome! Thanks for these insights. I want to share these on my next video in the series when I try to fix my system that is acting up. But my current hypothesis is that I have a bad/scratchy horizontal pot and maybe some bad RAM based on the symptoms. Not sure what is causing the power crash after a minute or so though.

Nice. I will have to check Starfighter out.

@@RetroHackShack These computers captured my imagination, and I worked for interTAN UK ltd (Tandy) from 1988 for about 3 years. Good times 😁 I did put together an emulator with many games, including Starfighter. Still have it, and I published it via torrent. No seeds left now, but when I attempt to seed as there are leechers, I only have 99.5% of the files? No idea why. I created it. 🤔

Cool. I started on the Coco and couldn't imagine going back to monochrome.

@@RetroHackShack - The Coco 3 could run OS9 and used the cartridge expansion to run hard disk controller and other much bigger expansions. I got a Coco 3 that had a daughter board hooked into it where the 6809 was moved to the daughter board that contained a 68000 and 1 meg of ram and a SCSI interface. That machine looked like frankenstein with his stitches and bolts in his neck but it was a MONSTER and would out perform and out chew through software and data anything else Coco I had ever seen. Gave it to a guy (Cocoman) from Steubenville OH who still has it to this day. The most narley thing I ever saw built out of a RatShack computer.

I feel the same way! I was too young to appreciate it at the time, but I love it now.

I was old enough that I could have, but our first computer was the c64, so I didn't get to experience the trs-80's or the PET (we did eventually have an apple ii+ clone). Now I have both a model 4 and a PET and really do enjoy the Model 4. (not really the pet, I love the way it looks but thats about it).

Awesome

ME TOO! Biked after school, played on their machines, got to know all the store managers, probably sold a few for them just by being there all the time!

Even if we couldn't afford it, it was still fun to hang out in the store and see what they had.

I always remember the thing I didn't like about C64 was most everything was PEEK and POKE. That's why I opted for a TRS-80 CoCo and later an Atari 800. I even remember the BASIC manual that came with it. It was written so any age programmer could understand it.

Yep

I didn't know the debounce was baked into the level II rom. Cool!

Yeah. If I do a 10 things you didn't know video about trs-80, this will be in there.

For sure!

Just wear your copper hat connected to the cold water pipe and hold on tight plugging it all in LOL. CONTACT! BZZZzzzzzzzzzz! Smokin!

Nice!

A Model III perhaps?