The lowly TRS-80 doesn’t get much love in most circles; it’s constantly overshadowed by the popularity of the Apple II or computers that had graphics that weren’t terrible. For [Mike Loewen]’s VCF exhibit, he’s turning his TRS-80 into something good with SD card disk drives and custom graphics adapters.
The -80 in question is a Model 4, the fancy all-in-one version that could run CP/M. The disk drives in this computer were replaced with half-height 5 1/4″ drives, the 200ns RAM was replaced with 100ns RAM and modified to get rid of the wait states, and a hard drive is emulated on a SD card adapter thanks to an add-on from [Ian Mavric].
[Ian] is somewhat prolific in the world of TRS-80s; he reverse engineered the original hi-res graphics board and reimplemented it with video RAM chips of a more modern vintage.
I I love this. Not just because it reminds me of the Model 1, Level 1 that was my first computer, but also because it runs CP/M. S100 CP/M systems were out of my budget back in the day so I (and many others) flocked to 300-baud public RCP/M systems. Acoustic couplers FTW! :-)
Trash 80 not getting much respect? Radio Shack catalogs were like porn mags when I was growing up! ;-) The first thing I’d turn to was the computers and dream of owning one. But they were expensive and it was cheaper to get the Atari 800XL and a disk drive. By the time I was buying my first computer the TRS-80 was on the way out and the Apple II, Commodore 64 and Atari 800 were consumer kings and the IBM PC had just been introduced. The times were-a-changing.
Ha! No kidding. I used to drool over the stereo systems as well (Good … better … Best), while knowing that a “better” or “best” system with those “awesome” massive tower speakers was WAY out of my budget.
Is it just me or does a Commodore PET or TRS-80 just look like a computer is supposed to look like (like a dumb terminal i guess)?
Not just you.
The PET was the model for “the computer” in the RPG Paranoia.
Thanks to Mike Loewen for converting my t-shirt into a retro-screensaver :)
Dan Roganti
“The lowly TRS-80 doesn’t get much love in most circles”
Nothing but love coming from me! Tandy (UK) was the place I hung out as a kid, when they disappeared from the country I was truly heart broken. The staff were great and they encouraged curiosity. I’d leave the school grounds and lunchtime and spend the hour sat learning BASIC and reading the reference books. Thanks to my grandfather, I owned a number of their machines, the CoCo, CoCo2, a few Pocket Computers and MC-10 as well as the brilliant Science Fair Microcomputer Trainer. Their computers were great, well built and lots of them are still kicking about. I miss my old TRS-80’s, I wish Tandy/Radio Shack could be resurrected to it’s former glory. Good memories, my best years.