Trs-80 In My Hands! Yay!

[Theory5]

I will try that craig thanks

IT WORKED CRAIG!!!!!! THANKS!!!!!

now i just gotta stop it from moving again, that should be easy enough!

 

thanks for all the help guys.

without this site I wouldnt know what to do somtimes.

I get all my science articles from here, whereas before I would have gone to a newspaper site (this site has much better articles) I get advice from here and I love some of the forums people write! and I get help with stuff I have very little knowledge with! :evil::):hihi::):P:):D:):)

-Theory

[alexander]

microsoftophobe/clast

 

hehe, not microsoftphobic, antimicrosofticsilicoperformotheosimpathetic.... (i'll post the definition in linguistics)

[Buffy]

Stumbled across some sites you might find useful that have

 

info on the trash-80 including an *emulator*

 

and a site where apparently you can get TRSDOS on the proper floppies!

 

Have fun!

Buffy

[Buffy]

And gosh, if y'all are getting *really* nostalgic, you can now get brand new Altair Kits that you can build yourself!

 

Flipping front panel switches,

Buffy

[Theory5]

lol that might be interesting but i think not. The Altair was just like a calculator, with not as many fuctions and harder to work. :-P

[Buffy]

The Altair was just like a calculator, with not as many fuctions and harder to work. :-P

Hardly. In fact although the Z80 in your Trash-80 was slightly faster than the 8080 in the Altair, the Altair with its "industry standard" S-100 bus was far more useful for "real" applications: you could plug so many things into it so easily and there was lots of software available for it...

 

xor'd,

Buffy

[Janus]

Speaking of the TRS_80, did any one else have one of these?

[TheBigDog]

Speaking of the TRS_80, did any one else have one of these?

I remember a similar model with four rows of characters on the screen.

 

Bill

[Buffy]

I remember a similar model with four rows of characters on the screen.

You mean the Model 100?

 

AKA the "world's first laptop." I know some tech journalists who swore by these long after "better" ones came out.

 

Gets the job done,

Buffy

[Janus]

You mean the Model 100?

 

AKA the "world's first laptop." I know some tech journalists who swore by these long after "better" ones came out.

 

Gets the job done,

Buffy

 

One difference is that the model 100 was this size:

 

 

And the one I had was this size:

 

[Buffy]

And the one I had was this size:

 

 

Speaking of size though, the Pocket Computer allowed we HP calculator fans to say: "See, it might still have an "=" key, but the Enter key is still bigger!"

 

RPN rulez, :cheer:

Buffy

[CraigD]

Speaking of the TRS_80, did any one else have one of these?

In the early 1980s, a girlfriend of mine had something like this – though my recollection is that is was by either Sharp or Cassio. It slid into a hard plastic storage case a bit like a slide rule slips into its case. She was a clinical nutritionist, and got it with the idea of storing lots of formulas and protocols in it - it could be programmed to ask some pretty fancy text-based dialogs, and she managed to sweet talk me into putting an indecent amount of effort into such programming :cheer:

I remember a similar model with four rows of characters on the screen.

You mean the Model 100?

 

AKA the "world's first laptop." I know some tech journalists who swore by these long after "better" ones came out.

I’ve seen Model 100s only in stores and pictures, and felt little attraction. However, in 1986, my shop provided after-hours on-call support via rotating possession of a “take-home terminal”. That year, we replaced a portable dot-matrix printer with a keyboard and an acoustic link modem (one of those with rubber sockets to stick a phone handset into) with a Data General One

The DG-1 was for all practical purposes a true laptop, able to do whatever a PC could do, do it on batteries, and read and write it from and to 3.5” floppy’s (which hardly any machine except Apple Macintoshs used in those days)

 

The display on the DG-1 was amazingly bad (the weird green stippling in the photo isn’t a photo or printer relic – it really looked like that!) with a viewing angle seemingly almost to small to allow you to see all 80 cols by 25 lines without moving your head, but it was an amazing machine to all of us, and would draw a crowd if used in public. It came out within 12 months of the model 100.

 

I recall TI made some laptop-ish box around 1981 – I never laid hands on one, but recall adds showing that it would fit in the drive bay slots of an empty PC chassis. As I recall, it pretended to have floppy drives, using some sort of battery-backed up memories, and boasted being functionally equivalent to a PC.

 

As late as 2001, Montgomery county Maryland USA public schools were using special purpose, battery operated “word processing” machines that looked a lot like model 100s (but, as I recall, were made by typewriter company Brother). They’d store a reasonable amount of texts in a small number of documents (I recall that there were a row of buttons that allowed you to switch documents), and could be plugged directly into a parallel printer port to print them. My son loved the machines, managed to get one from the county when they got rid of them, and kept it about a year until some physical tragedy befell it.

[Janus]

In the early 1980s, a girlfriend of mine had something like this – though my recollection is that is was by either Sharp or Cassio.

The RAdio shack model was exactly the same as the Sharp pocket computer, just sold under a different brand name.

 

If you want to go way back, the first computer I worked with (In high school)was the HP 9830

 

 

It came complete with this thermal printer, which sat on top of it.

 

[alexander]

I may be getting an Atari 800xl or 1200xl-s, that's supposed to still be operational, that will be interesting... I saw the system briefly, its sick, has programming cartridges and some extras, like the joystick controllers, and stuff.... I don't know the model number, rather don't remember, but it will be an interesting reconditioning job, if i can persuade my friend to give it to me...

[TheBigDog]

I may be getting an Atari 800xl or 1200xl-s, that's supposed to still be operational, that will be interesting... I saw the system briefly, its sick, has programming cartridges and some extras, like the joystick controllers, and stuff.... I don't know the model number, rather don't remember, but it will be an interesting reconditioning job, if i can persuade my friend to give it to me...

At my parents house in NJ there are two working Atari 800's, along with many of the cartridges, including BASIC, Pascal, Assembler Editor, Star Raiders, Miner 2049er, and more. I cut my teeth on BASIC on the Atari back in 1980.

 

Bill

[alexander]

first pc my family had was a custom built i486 overclocked to 100MHz with 16 and later 32 megs of ram, first system i had was in HS, and it was a Dell OptiPlex gx100 a 733 with 128MB of RAM, it wasnt till my junior year in HS that i was even interested in computers, and now, i give Apple techs advise when i'm on the phone with them, like just a few hours ago...