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The third video appears to star a young Luba Goy of the Royal Canadian Air Farce. Watching it I kept expecting a punch line as she has been a comedian on Canadian radio and television for thirty plus years.
#1 – Mike Craig
And the other actor is another Canadian… Billy Van.
I can’t believe I still have an old TRS-80 color computer. It plays ancient Sierra games.
I’ve still got some Model 100’s around, but the rest of them all went away….
However, I think I paid $800 (less monitor) for the HP I’m using right now. 3GB of memory, 3GHZ, something like 300GB of HD. My first TRS80 had 4K of memory and a cassette recorder, for about $700….
Interesting, no?
Prices of computers haven’t changed… things just get faster/better at the same price points.
No, dummy, you can’t use a TRS-80 program on an Apple II!
No, No, no! You don’t want to be choosing among the much more mature and available software in the market for Apple!
You should buy a TRS-80!
Signed,
Bill Gates
I learned LOGO on a trash 80. Cute little turtle.
The TRS-80 Color Computer is probably one of the most under-rated PCs in computing history. Other than the crummy chiclet keyboard (which was upgraded in a later rev of the machine), it was a very elegant design. The 6809 CPU was ahead of its time for its performance and instruction set elegance, compared to the competitors’ 6502s and Z80s. You could even get a Unix-like, multitasking, multithreaded OS for it, called OS-9 (not to be confused with Mac OS9).
Heya, Uncle Dave!
Did your ol’ TRS-80 come with floppy disks or a cassette tape? It’s been too long for me to remember.
I do recall when I flipped it on in your apt that it jammed your TV in the living room quite well.
Whatever happened to it?
#5 – Daniel – Prices of computers haven’t changed… things just get faster/better at the same price points.
And that production went to low cost countries has nothing to do with it…
#10: Cassette. Ah, the joys of spending a half hour to load a program only to find it didn’t load properly. I bought some sort of interface board or box that let me add an external floppy to it. Nirvana!
I sold it to someone I worked with. Unfortunately.
Commodore Vic-20, C-64, Tandy 1000, built my own.
That’s about six years of computing for me.
Never tried the TRS-80. Why bother, when the Commodore product was superior and the TRS-80 overpriced?
I had many friends with the “CoCo” – what they called their TRS-80.
Was that short for Color Computer?
Kings Quest on the Tandy 1000 was awesome.
16 colors, multi-channel MIDI playback.
I had a trash 80. The were solid machines but using a tape drive is for the birds. When they wanted an arm and a leg for floppy drives I bought an Apple ][ C and gave it away.
video #3 – I’m still looking forward to the day when programs can run on more than one kind of micro computer.
My TRS-80 (model I) came fully loaded with 16KB of RAM. It was awesome.
My current PC has 262,144 times as much memory. It sucks.
C64, C64/128, Amiga..(from 78-95), then built X86 machines for company..Built my own in 99′..
Had to change over..
the Amiga 2000 w/68030-50mhz was caught up but the P Pro 200mhz..Think about it. the speeds finally matched. So I built a P3 450..and in 2 years it was obsolete..My Amiga lasted over 10 years..
Stored away I have actually several(?count) Coco 2’s and 3’s (after they went from the chicklet keyboard to real). Also, floppies and cassette drives (since it could use ANY cassette with mic/earphone/remote) probably.
OS/9 was my favorite OS… a variation on the old UNIX, plus there were specialized OS’s (ADOS is burned onto one of the plug-ins for the floppies).
One of my favorite memories was going to BBSes and seeing downloads for C=64’s and others, but there was concern fairly early on about virii, etc. The RS-DOS for the Coco was on ROM (or EPROM?) so there was no concern about it for me.
Also, there were HD interfaces, I probably still have some sitting in the closet/storage with the Coco’s… of course, we’re talking massive 1-2 Meg drives?
Oh.. also the OS/9 was a true multitasking system, hit the ‘clear’ button and go to another screen running another program.. one friend discovered it was limited to twelve (12) screens at once.
As mentioned, it was underrated, and when RS decided to drop their systems, there was a rumor that someone would create an independent “Coco 4”.. apparently it died off before making it to market.
I even think I may have my copies of RAINBOW, the Coco programming/information magazine!
Hey, you kids, get offa my lawn!
J/P=geezer?
wow… richard stallman looks and sounds like a girl in the third commercial….
I also have an ancient Tandy TRS80 Color Computer and copies of Kings Quest and Space Quest. Also 2 TRS Model-100s that still work, one with the big memory from Purple Computing.
I’ll bet there are enough geezers here to start a museum.
Hey you kids, get offa my rocks!
The “Trash” 80 (TRS-80) may have paved the way but in the end just became a pseudo game system with a keyboard. I worked at the Shack back then. Not many of the late CoCo2 or any of the CoCo3 sold well.
The Tandy 1000 series had the real impact. Besides earning a lot of commissions from selling them, it was the first computer I saw reach into the “normal” person demographic. Non-techy people bought the 1000 series in droves. At many points, we could not keep them in stock even handing out certificates for people wanting to have something to put under the Christmas tree.
Fun times…
I remember programming those damn things as a teenager. I found out that their stupid Integer Basic couldn’t add numbers together with enough precision. When I was in high school an oil research company had hired me to figure out why their numbers where off on their research apps.
I had to bust up large numbers into smaller chunks and perform math operations in pieces. I finally gave up and wrote my own math routines in assembler for the client. At least they worked reliably, unlike their dodgy Basic interpreter.
One thing about the TRS-80, the CPU instruction set was far superior to Apple’s 6502. I taught myself 6502 machine code for the Apple back in 79, and then taught myself 8080 machine code for the TRS-80. No comparison. The ability for the 8080 to establish base addresses registered for relocatable code made it so much elegant. Apple’s 6502 was like playing with a toy.
I worked in the R&D dept of a company when these were out. Some of the products used Z80 processors, so a bunch of the techs there built their own Trash80s, copying the eprom from a real one.
We’re talking 1978-80 before HBO was on cable (did anyone have cable then?), but instead was beamed to an antenna on your house. Since it wasn’t encoded, it wasn’t hard to build your own antenna using a coffee can and watch HBO for free. At least until the HBO people who drove around searching for illegal antennas caught you.
Ah, the good old days…
Just remembered I still had this on my bookshelf
Click pic to embiggen
#23, I’m pretty sure the TRS-80 was a 6800 series, 6809 I think… superior to *both* 8080 and 6502 IMHO.
#26: Wrong. Z80. Hence the 80 part of the name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80
#28 I’m so ashamed. I had a TRS-80 clone back in the day.
I have lots of fond memories about the TRS “CoCo”. But did you know that the “CoCo 3” ran a little known OS called OS-9 Level II which has since morphed into something called OSK? It’s a very capable and handy OS which even the Linux aficionados probably owe a lot of their culture to. But does anyone remember? (Hey! Lonnie Falk are you still out there?) I have to wonder how many people even know that OS-9 is STILL used on NASA’s space shuttles?!
OS-9 was quite a competitor in it’s day. And for those of you who DO remember the 80’s, Apple even sued both Microsoft and Tandy over what Apple saw was an infringement over “their” Graphical Operating System (GUI)!
Funny how Xerox (the true GUI developers) still sit back and watches all this happen…
I cut my programming teeth on a TRS-80 Color Computer. An Apple II at the time was $2500 and $359 seemed a lot more rational a purchase since my family wasn’t very well off at the time.
That darn chiclet keyboard, how could I forget. Worked great the first month or so, then began sticking. The later keyboards were better.
Good times! Good times.
Hey, lets not forget the REAL VOLKS-COMPUTER, the Sinclair/Timex ZX81 for $99 ! It ran BASIC and used a B&W TV, and the despised cassette storage …
It taught BASIC to lot’s of kids who are now Internet Mavens !
Nostalgia …