I had to have a computer in 1978. The choices were PET (chinzy), Apple II (pricey), and TRS-80 Model 1, Level II. I spent about $2,000 - to get the Expensive Interface and a Disk Drive. The drive was a disappointment, so I sold it off and got by with the cassette. In 1982, while working on a typewriter program to drive an Galaxy printer (upper case and lower case were switch), the power company destroyed a week's worth of work in about 1 second. And, I had made my last save on the leader tape on the cassette. I learned what the Bible means by "parish!" Recreated what I lost in two nights and finished the program by the end of the week. "Tressy" was my gateway to programming. Later, I moved to the Commodore 64, and was the last editor of Loadstar Disk Magazine.
I still have the TRS80 pocket computer with printer. We had a TRS80 model I in electronics class and would write various programs for it. Whenever I seen a computer sitting out front of Radio Shack, I would write a quick program that would slowly fill the screen with white pixels, then turn them back to black
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.
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 😂
I'm one of those people! My parents could comprehend spending what a good used car cost in 1977 on a computer for a 9 yearold ! It would be another 20 years before I could get my Mother to use a computer but once she realized she couldn't break it, she took to it like a duck to water!
The early TRS-80s had a key bounce problem. You'd press one key but get two or three characters. You'd have to pop off the key and scrub the contacts with a burnisher strip. Later they fixed that problem with a software patch. I repurposed the expansion interface cassette relay to repeatedly dial my pulse-dial phone. When it detected a carrier it honked a horn that I could hear from the other room, telling me my connection was ready. Fastest demon dialer in the west! LOL!
My great grandmother bought me a TRS 80 model I level one back in 1979, in 81 or so, when I graduated, I upgraded it to level two and later got a couple of floppy drives and an expansion interface. The system is currently sitting on my kitchen table, it stopped working a while back, and I had to replace one of the vram chips. Now it is working and I have added one of those GOTEK floppy emulators so I can run different software that I have downloaded. I will probably never get rid of it as my great grandmother bought it for me, and she was my favorite human in the universe
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.
I honed my prgramming chops on the TRS80. Seemed like magic to me in 1980. Also it had some of the earliest computer games I can recall playing. I remember playing Star Trek on it and some amazing "Galaxian" inspired shoot em up back in those days.
Big Five Software from Van Nuys California. They had Galaxians and Robot Attack and a couple others. They were sued out of existence soon after they started but there was no money or assets in the corporation LOL. But the software was out there by then and machine code games were easy to copy.
My first computer and the gateway into my career in IT. I was in Junior high and didn’t have the best grades in math. My grandma said she’d get me a car if I got an A in math, but since I lived in a city I didn’t need one. I buckled down and got the A and I’m sure she was happy that I decided on a computer instead - it was a lot cheaper! I remember the silver paint wore off from resting my wrists on the edge of the keyboard, and the keys often bouuunnnnccced. Then I was in college and got a TRS-80 color computer where I started to learn assembly language, and I also had a model 100 for taking notes. But as soon as the first Mac came out I got one and that was the end of the road for my relationship with Tandy.
My first computer was a Tandy Color Computer 2 with a tape drive. I saved up money and bought a disk drive for it a couple of years later and eventually bought a modem that I really had no use for.
my earliest memory of using a computer was summer camp. i believe it was on a trs-80 with the game NIM. it was cassette loaded. can you provide more info on this?? thanks for the video.
I would spend hours(between snacks) at the Radio Shack, at the now, defunct Eastfield Mall, Springfield, MA. Palmer, MA also had one, the owner let me check his out, I bought the 1000 RLX with a 20 megabyte hard disk drive, a 3 1/2" floppy drive, a really nice keyboard and mouse. A great monitor, a dot matrix printer. And a three year warranty: which was helpful, since the hard drive was defective; it was replaced, I fawned over Desk Mate(an early User Interface built on DOS(Disk Operating System) and a version of BASIC programming. Hangman, Wheel of Fortune and Print Shop were regular software (well-used) and "Expert" (copyrighted name) software(too many to list here!)
I bought a TRS-80, Mod 1, Lvl 1, 4 k, tiny basic for $599 in 1980 and got an associate degree in Computer programming. I was the only guy who owned a computer and interviewed with 4 companies. I got four offers. I miss that simple machine.
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 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.
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.
Ahhh my first computer, the things I did with that would astound you, Learnt Z80 machine code programming, Connected a model 15 teletype to it as the printer with software, Built the LNW-80 interface for it, had DSDD drives for it a 40 track and 80 track drive (Both 5.25"). used it to decode Radio Teletype signals (RTTY) read the news from around the world (Using a communications receiver to get the signals etc> RF shielded the whole computer to reduce radio interference. Doubled the speed of the CPU, built a high res graphics interface for it from a book, fixed the mistakes in the bookand got it working, wrote the software for it an Yeah LOTS of fun when I was 17 years old... (Now 62) :)
me and a pal used to club our pocket money together and buy a computer magazine , we would laboriously input a few games and save them to cheap cassettes for sale at school for other spectrum users i miss those simple days
I was a Radio Shack Computer Center Manager back in the day. The Model 1 had lots of upgrades and retro mods due to issues/user upgrades. (like the buffered interface cable mod). It was hard to keep track of it at times. The numeric keypad was an upgrade at 1st, then later part of the regular machine, I believe with Level II. Man, after 40+ years its hard to remember all this stuff ...... It was hard to keep hacker users fingers out of the machines, but some of those guys were a total Genius! We even maintained an VERY UNOFFICIAL list of the local Hacker/Club members in the area......... My favorite "SHOW AND TELL" was showing off Daisy Wheel Printers!
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.
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.
Bought my Trash-80 Color with 16K Mem in 1983. Including the interface cable for the Cassette player when I needed to save my BASIC software projects. It eventually died in 1994. But, It was still interesting to have.
Nice part one here. I had one of these when I was 17 and learned BASIC, APL, and Z-80 programming on it. Yes, APL! You got very lucky getting hardware in nearly operating condition. Looking forward to part 2. A little lexical assistance: You meant "Foray" and not "Foyer" meaning excursion into this field of study. All good wishes.
Brings back memories, I got one of these in 1978 as an electronics student at the time and it started my career as a software engineer now recently retired. I lived in Australia at the time and ended up working for Micro-80 which published a magazine and supported the TRS-80. Subsequently I wrote the "TRS-80 Rom Reference Manual" and designed devices to plug into the TRS-80 including a full fledged replacement for the expansion interface box. The original had several problems; the ribbon cable connecting the expansion interface was an edge connector with solder pins instead of gold plating so they would corrode and the expansion bus did not use buffers so it was unreliable. My expansion box therefore had buffers and used static RAM to alleviate the problems and was sold by Micro-80 around 1982 if I remember correctly. I used to write software using Z80 assembler for speed and efficiency. I then moved to the TRS-80 Model II with 8 inch floppies and finally to the IBM-PC and worked as a software developer/engineer from 1983 until 2022. But the TRS-80 Model 1 gave me a foundation and got me started so I remember it fondly.
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.
My fifth grade teacher had a pair of TRS-80s in his classroom in 1985. No internal hard drive, external tape player to load/save software, dual floppies... loved those things. We could only use them if we were finished with our classwork. It was on the TRS-80 I learned how to write programs in BASIC. It was the same teacher who introduced me to a music group called Kraftwerk. So I can blame my teacher for eventually getting me into Industrial music!
@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 :-)
@@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): th-cam.com/video/MqEwXq3njJs/w-d-xo.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: th-cam.com/video/5XjpB6EedJI/w-d-xo.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 worked two full time jobs in high school the summer of 1978 to save up enough to buy a TRS-80. It quickly became evident that 4 KB RAM wasn't enough. I remember sweating bullets as I de-soldered the 4KB RAM chips and soldered in 16KB RAM chips. Shout outs to Creative Computing Magazine and the Scott Adams of Scott Adams Adventures fame (not the Dilbert guy).
I had an Atari 400 for my first computer and I loved those Scott Adams adventure games. They took over 1/2 hour to load with cassette but they were worth the wait. They even redefined the character set to make the text come out as script.
The first album Eddie Van Halen made at his new home recording studio was 1984 . He played all the instruments on the demos . Donn Landee was controlling the mixes . There was also 2 albums worth of songs they recorded BUT never mixed all the instruments . So there is 2 albums worth of unmixed tapes that were only numbered . Each number coded tape information was stored on a TRS-80 computer . The computer's hard drive crashed so all those tapes sit probably never to be heard
@@BruceStephan - 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.
This was my first home computer, and I spent a total of £1500(in 1978) on the 16k level 2, with expansion box, and disc drives. We had a great operating system called LDOS, which was well ahead of it's time.
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.
Badass 70s-80s engiscience here. Spent a good part of my boyhood messing with Tandy TRS-80 computers in the local Radio Shack in bumfuck nowhere Montana. Changed my life.
I never had one at home, but a few years later I got to use the TRS-80 in the math department in my high school. I’ll always remember using CHR$ to make a program that moved characters across the screen. Wow that was a long time ago! LOL
My entry into the personal computer world was with a TRS-80 Color Computer hooked to my TV set and I used it to make slides for presentations in the university (I was a medical student at the time). I still remember the awe of my teachers and class mates with my material… 😅😅
Paid $895 for a Model I in 1979, and it started a great 35-year career in IT !! Wish I'd held onto it. Unfortunately, I donated it to a charity in 1984, to get a tax break.
@@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.
I couldn't afford an atari or apple 2, so I talked my father into going into debt to buy a TRS-80. Level 1 4k that I quickly upgraded to Level II 16k. spent stupid amount of time programming - basic and assembly. took tons of computer algorythms through it. learned how to do stuff to win local computer contests. z80 chips were very fast for the time.
I used a TRS-80 when I was in college in the early 80s. I was studying the Basic Language and I had to wait in line at the college I attended. That was until I got my fist Commodore 64, my dad let me get the matching Screen and Diskette drive too. I then could head home and create my programs for the next day. Me and a friend created a program that helped kindergarten kids, I had my first daughter use it and she mastered it really quickly. When we brought her to start kindergarten, they had a meeting with us and told us, she was too smart for kindergarten, and they gave her a test and moved her to first grade. That changed her life. She was always younger than the kids in her class.
This is really weird, it's a 45 minutes video and yet it ends so quickly, Can't wait for part2 and I hope you consider making a video demonstrating what is on those cassettes. Thanks Aaron!
@@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. 🤔
Miss my Model 1. I gave it to a highschool friend in trade for him picking me up in the morning to not have to walk 2 miles in the winter cold to school in Winter 1993/1994. I had the 16k RAM expansion module with 2 floppy drives and printer. I got it for $120 in 1990 off a coworker at K-Mart who moved to VT from CT. One whole paycheck to buy it after working at $3.75 an hour for a full week. While limited it was a great computer also set up the CLOAD to read/write from cassettes in BASIC. Replaced it with a 286 10Mhz in 1995 with CGA monitor for $120 and then 8088's and 286's and 386s started to show up around 1996 for free and grabbed up all I could get for free. Got online on AOL 2.5 with a 386 SX 40Mhz and 14.4k modem and VGA monitor with 1MB Trident Video card and 120MB HDD with 4MB RAM with Windows 3.11
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.
My first computer was a TRS-80 I with 4kB Ram and Level II Basic. Great machine once you got hold of KBFIX. The new generation keyboard (left on the screen, with the numeric keypad) does not have the problem with key bounce. A great improvement, easy to upgrade.
@19:46 - Yes this is one of the first monitors that Radio shack produced for the Model 1. You will notice the antenna keeper at the top, as well as the wood grain top that did not come with later models.
Wow, this is the BEST TRS-80 video I have ever seen! WELL DONE! Superb job! I'll try some TRS-80 stuff on an emulator soon to get aqcuainted with the old pioneering world.
My first official encounter of the school computer was with the "Meritum I", which, by all means, was just the 1983 rip-off of TRS-80 model I (in Poland). I still remember chunky graphics and green screen vibe. Everyone had various computers for home use (ZX-Spectrums, Ataris XL/XE, C-64s) and in comparison with them, the Meritum was failing short, despite the Atari was compatible with the 1979 800 model. Nevertheless all those personal 8-bits influenced my whole career.
Good memories. I learned programming on a TRS-80 Model 1 Level II. This started my career as a self employed developer in 1980. Still in the business and loving it.Looking forward to more videos in this series.
@@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.
I started playing with an IMSAI, but the first computer, I owned, was the TSR-80 (4k basic, 4k ram). It was a hacker dream of a machine :) 1. Upgrades to 12k Basic (plus the tape that had the extended basic extensions) 2. 16k ram 3. Added the extra 2102 video ram (for some reason, RS did not want to spend the 1.50) to add lower case. Required a OS patch to enable. 4. Added the Clock mod (2.1g vs 1.7g) 5. LMW Expansion board (32kram, floppy, serial, parallel) 6. Voice and speech add-on 7. RS Light pen 8. 2 floppy disks, not the RS disks. RS disk drives were only 35 tracks, while everyone else had 40 tracks.
Awe the memories, programming on the Pet, Commodore, and my Trs-80 Model 1 and tape drive, 4k of memory, then loved my TRS model 3/4, 32k, i upgraded from 180k disk drives to four 800k dual sided, bent a few pins and solded jumpers on the cpu chip to double the cup speed, clock was no longer accurate but who cared. Upgraded the 300 baud modem to 9600 then 2400 baud lthe 4800. Purchased a hard drive that the case was just as big as the computer and only had "5 megabytes" for $650. I ran a Syslink bulletin board system, BBS, on it with 2 modem lines, for the public, with email, news groups, online games, dating service, and free public domain downloadable software, and this was done in the years way BEFORE the internet went public. Local newspapers did two news stories about it. I built a weather station to display the weather on it. Oh man how the computer technologies; speed, memory, storage, has changed so quickly over the years. Look at what a cellphones can do now..
@@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
That ad claiming that you could fit multiple filling cabinets worth of data on a cassette tape was a blatant outright lie! The reality is a tape could not even carry a drawer full of ascii text.
And if you ran it all day to load it and at any point the cassette output overloaded the A/D converter, you’d get an error indication on the corner of the screen (depending could be a C an E or just an asterisk would stop blinking). Then you get to turn the cassette volume down slightly and start over from the beginning. It took dedication to be a geek.
@@DougZbikowski Looks like a typical office cabinet so each drawer is like 1 ft X 1ft X 2 ft. That holds a lot of 8.5X11 sheets of paper with a lot of text. That's a lot of ASCII potential on paper. Literally.
I had one around 1984 with a casette player and a load of copied tapes (I was 7 by that time). Spent sooo many hours on that machine. It is very nice to see the history since I live in Europe and these were not common at all over here. Thanks, and I subscribed for the next one, really like it
In retrospect, it becomes clear how much the VIC-20/C=64 ripped off the Model 1 for styling, and the Macintosh 128K ripped off from it an all in one computing solution with a black and white monitor and "so called innovative Frog Design" styling. I mean, look at the vent grill on that monitor and the line across the front of the keyboard.... identical to the bars on the Macintosh SE and Mac II. We never realized it back then, but bam is it self evident when someone like me realizes it and points it out, and then you forever can't unsee it, like the Commodore Logo chicken lips (when you add a dot inside it for an "eye")
Took my very first computer programming class on the TRS-80 back in 1981 after the 9th grade. It was offered at the community college during the summer. Loved it. I'm sure having an Atari 2600 game system influenced me to try it out. Bought an Atari 800 when it came out. Became a computer science major in engineering college and am still a software engineer today. Thanks Tandy!
@@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.
I loved my TRS-80 Model 1, expanding it all the way from the 4K standalone keyboard to 48K with expansion unit and dual 5 1/4" drives. Back then the things I was learning wasn't even being taught in colleges. This PC helped me launch my IT career and I'm still at it 40+ years later.
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.
Looking at the pile of TRS-80 hardware, the most valuable part has to be the Level 1 BASIC manual. THAT is why I am still interested in computing to this day!
The "older style" keyboards with smooth keycaps were notorious for bounce problems. The newer style was from Alps and much better. You could buy it as an upgrade, I did mine with the Level II basic conversion.
I bought a model 1 with level 2 Basic and 4k of memory (which I upgraded to 16k myself) in 1978. It cost me roughly $1000 Canadian. It was the best $1000 I ever spent. I learned programming (including assembler), hardware, etc with it and the knowledge benefitted my entire career.
Loading and saving to audio cassette was extremely slow and frustrating. Floppy drives came out about a year later, and added as much cost as the entire computer system.
I had one. Lower case kit 4 disks drives newdos80 v2. Was a great operating system. At first I used a model 33 teletype as my printer. Paper and ink was cheap. Then bought line printer iv. The boss at work found out I had a system and promoted me to a computer room. 250 a week on salary for 4,years I kept adding to the machine. Bought 80 track drives. When the company went under I took it home and started the cobra bbs running the French connection with fidonet mail. Those were good years. 1985-1907. It ran the internet killed it and I had three kids to raise.
I remember the early computers in the late 70s, through the 80s and 90s, they were slow, noisy 💩 I didn’t actually bother with any of this crap didn’t interface directly with a computer at home until the mid 2000s 😂
Bought my model 1 in 1981 just as the model III was replacing it. Retired it in 1984 as the IBM compatible standard had become the dominant platform. I still play some of the Big Five software games using an emulator.
Robot Attack, Asteroids, and Galaxians. Did you ever see the game "Time Bandit" from another company? I never did figure out how to play that. And lets not forget 13 ghosts. I would love to have the startup tune from that game as a ringtone for my phone LOL
The Visicalc spreadsheet software and some of the word processing software were the biggest components of the microcomputer's success. Maybe that's stating the obvious, but software was akin to the wheel, while the computer was akin to the lowly axle. The real action and power comes from the wheel.
I owned one of these for three weeks. Actually I had three of them in that period. I also bought a bunch of software on cassette tape, which the machine could not read. I finally said just give me my money back. But they said they would not refund my money on the software because I could have copied it. I said if I could have read it to make a copy I would not be returning it so I’ll see you in court. So they gave me a complete refund.
I used to grow weed and had a lot of extra $ back then, so I bought a Model 1 and all the goodies with my ill gotten gains. Still have the keyboard but the rest of it is gone. I wrote a Chess clock, a large font + word processor that worked like a teleprompter, and a few games and that wowed my friends.
I believe the number engraved on the bottom of the computer is the driver's license number of a previous owner. My dad used to engrave his driver's license number on items of value. He told me it would make it easier to recover things if they were ever stolen.
I agree. It is a California Drivers License number. A lot of people I know (myself included) engrave their DL# onto electronics in case of theft. It fits the California DL format from around that time
Low brightness can be a high voltage problem alse. Un fortunately when TV sets sit around dust collects and provides a path to ground for the high voltage. Humidity only make the problems worse. As they run and dry out a bit as long as they don't arc they will ofter get better
Ah, the Trash-80. The first computer I used was some behemoth which used Focal in 1977, then a Honeywell mini computer running Basic, and an Apple II also in 1978 and also using Basic (Apple Basic). But the Trash-80 was so well known.
Warranty stickers: White text on black background is placed on at manufacturing Black text on white background placed on by Computer Service Centers also hand written on sticker 4 digit number which is the service center id number and the date the service was performed..sometimes instead of the date it would be service ticket number...all this was used to look up the previous repair...since there was no central system for the service centers at the time ..using the service center number we could call that service center and asked them about it.. In the 1980's i was Computer Service Center Manager in Santa Rosa CA.
There's a fascinating windy noise which plays just after you hit enter on the BASIC Hello World, as well as when you're adjusting the voltage regulator and it keeps crashing. I guess CPU activity (like booting up or interpreting a BASIC program) is creating some kind of EMF noise that your mic is picking up. It's interesting that it actually sounds kind of pleasant, very much _unlike_ the noise from an LED lamp driver! I wonder if it would have still sounded nice on a radio, or if that would've sounded horrible.
I bought a TRS-80 model 1 that looked exactly like the one you have with the numeric keypad. I bought it in 1981. It was around $1,100 in Canada. I learned to code BASIC with it. I had years of fun with it. In year 2001 I decided to move to a different province and I did a major throw out of things I no longer used. I threw a perfectly good working TRS-80 into the garbage. I should have given it to someone as it seems a shame to have thrown it out. I loved the keyboard on it. I loved the feel and the noise it made. Watching this video brought back a flood of memories. Very cool that you have some still working after so many decades.
My mom's boyfriend gave me his TRS-80 model one in the early 80's when he upgraded. I LOVED IT!!!! Even though I also had a CoCo, I prefered the TRS-80 because of the massive amount of software for it. I used to play Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio on it... 😊
@@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 had to have a computer in 1978. The choices were PET (chinzy), Apple II (pricey), and TRS-80 Model 1, Level II. I spent about $2,000 - to get the Expensive Interface and a Disk Drive. The drive was a disappointment, so I sold it off and got by with the cassette. In 1982, while working on a typewriter program to drive an Galaxy printer (upper case and lower case were switch), the power company destroyed a week's worth of work in about 1 second. And, I had made my last save on the leader tape on the cassette. I learned what the Bible means by "parish!" Recreated what I lost in two nights and finished the program by the end of the week. "Tressy" was my gateway to programming. Later, I moved to the Commodore 64, and was the last editor of Loadstar Disk Magazine.
Nice
I still have the TRS80 pocket computer with printer.
We had a TRS80 model I in electronics class and would write various programs for it.
Whenever I seen a computer sitting out front of Radio Shack, I would write a quick program that would slowly fill the screen with white pixels, then turn them back to black
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.
Many got their first hands on computing from visiting Tandy stores and using their demonstration computers.
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 😂
I'm one of those people! My parents could comprehend spending what a good used car cost in 1977 on a computer for a 9 yearold ! It would be another 20 years before I could get my Mother to use a computer but once she realized she couldn't break it, she took to it like a duck to water!
@@jaminova_1969 Great to hear stories of the past!
The early TRS-80s had a key bounce problem. You'd press one key but get two or three characters. You'd have to pop off the key and scrub the contacts with a burnisher strip. Later they fixed that problem with a software patch.
I repurposed the expansion interface cassette relay to repeatedly dial my pulse-dial phone. When it detected a carrier it honked a horn that I could hear from the other room, telling me my connection was ready. Fastest demon dialer in the west! LOL!
That cool!
And then Joshua (the WOPR) called you back and the rest is history... Would you like to play a game Professor Falken?
My great grandmother bought me a TRS 80 model I level one back in 1979, in 81 or so, when I graduated, I upgraded it to level two and later got a couple of floppy drives and an expansion interface. The system is currently sitting on my kitchen table, it stopped working a while back, and I had to replace one of the vram chips. Now it is working and I have added one of those GOTEK floppy emulators so I can run different software that I have downloaded. I will probably never get rid of it as my great grandmother bought it for me, and she was my favorite human in the universe
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
We had 10 of those and a 3 in the school computer lab. A development of one math teacher. Most high schools never had computers back in those days.
I didn't know these existed in 1977. We got the TRS80 little tabletop model that you hooked to a TV and a phone modem in 1985.
I honed my prgramming chops on the TRS80. Seemed like magic to me in 1980.
Also it had some of the earliest computer games I can recall playing. I remember playing Star Trek on it and some amazing "Galaxian" inspired shoot em up back in those days.
Big Five Software from Van Nuys California. They had Galaxians and Robot Attack and a couple others. They were sued out of existence soon after they started but there was no money or assets in the corporation LOL. But the software was out there by then and machine code games were easy to copy.
My first computer and the gateway into my career in IT. I was in Junior high and didn’t have the best grades in math. My grandma said she’d get me a car if I got an A in math, but since I lived in a city I didn’t need one. I buckled down and got the A and I’m sure she was happy that I decided on a computer instead - it was a lot cheaper! I remember the silver paint wore off from resting my wrists on the edge of the keyboard, and the keys often bouuunnnnccced. Then I was in college and got a TRS-80 color computer where I started to learn assembly language, and I also had a model 100 for taking notes. But as soon as the first Mac came out I got one and that was the end of the road for my relationship with Tandy.
Great memories!
This is the machine I cut my teeth on in BASIC. Had the Apple II as well and learned machine language on that. Been working in IT since then.
I'm with you that retired ping pong tables make the BEST project space!
My first computer was a Tandy Color Computer 2 with a tape drive. I saved up money and bought a disk drive for it a couple of years later and eventually bought a modem that I really had no use for.
I remember using the disk drive for the first time on my Coco. It was a game changer!
That's a shame about the modem. We had a dozen local dial up BBS systems in my area in the 80s. It was great fun in the days before the internet.
I had the Model 100 which in my work, Telecom, made dialing into PBX's remotely and making changes easy. I should have kept it.
Thank you for the Dr. Pepper jingle I have never heard. I hope it leaves my brain soon.
Sold a few of those in another lifetime, during college. Radio Shack, lived by junk died by junk. Sad story. No vision.
my earliest memory of using a computer was summer camp. i believe it was on a trs-80 with the game NIM. it was cassette loaded. can you provide more info on this?? thanks for the video.
My money is on the weird etching being a password.
I had a trash 80 and I fucking hated it. When I got my Commodore 64 years later, I smashed it.
You probably should be in anger management classes.
I now use Macs!
Steve was right!
I would spend hours(between snacks) at the Radio Shack, at the now, defunct Eastfield Mall, Springfield, MA. Palmer, MA also had one, the owner let me check his out, I bought the 1000 RLX with a 20 megabyte hard disk drive, a 3 1/2" floppy drive, a really nice keyboard and mouse. A great monitor, a dot matrix printer. And a three year warranty: which was helpful, since the hard drive was defective; it was replaced, I fawned over Desk Mate(an early User Interface built on DOS(Disk Operating System) and a version of BASIC programming. Hangman, Wheel of Fortune and Print Shop were regular software (well-used) and "Expert" (copyrighted name) software(too many to list here!)
I bought a TRS-80, Mod 1, Lvl 1, 4 k, tiny basic for $599 in 1980 and got an associate degree in Computer programming. I was the only guy who owned a computer and interviewed with 4 companies. I got four offers. I miss that simple machine.
@@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.
My high school got 2 TRS-80s in 1979. influenced me to get a CS degree. still working as a software engineer.
Yes, our school had one in the office probably played pong on it at lunch.
1977 was special for long lasting technology - Voyager probes are still working
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.
My first work as a professional programmer was with TRS-80 model I and later a model III while I was at High School.
All my carrer as software engineer (58 years old) begins on a TRS80 Model 3 ♥
Ahhh my first computer, the things I did with that would astound you, Learnt Z80 machine code programming, Connected a model 15 teletype to it as the printer with software, Built the LNW-80 interface for it, had DSDD drives for it a 40 track and 80 track drive (Both 5.25"). used it to decode Radio Teletype signals (RTTY) read the news from around the world (Using a communications receiver to get the signals etc> RF shielded the whole computer to reduce radio interference. Doubled the speed of the CPU, built a high res graphics interface for it from a book, fixed the mistakes in the bookand got it working, wrote the software for it an Yeah LOTS of fun when I was 17 years old... (Now 62) :)
Wow. Great memories.
me and a pal used to club our pocket money together and buy a computer magazine , we would laboriously input a few games and save them to cheap cassettes for sale at school for other spectrum users
i miss those simple days
I was a Radio Shack Computer Center Manager back in the day. The Model 1 had lots of upgrades and retro mods due to issues/user upgrades. (like the buffered interface cable mod). It was hard to keep track of it at times. The numeric keypad was an upgrade at 1st, then later part of the regular machine, I believe with Level II. Man, after 40+ years its hard to remember all this stuff ...... It was hard to keep hacker users fingers out of the machines, but some of those guys were a total Genius! We even maintained an VERY UNOFFICIAL list of the local Hacker/Club members in the area......... My favorite "SHOW AND TELL" was showing off Daisy Wheel Printers!
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.
Bought my Trash-80 Color with 16K Mem in 1983. Including the interface cable for the Cassette player when I needed to save my BASIC software projects. It eventually died in 1994. But, It was still interesting to have.
Nice
Nice part one here. I had one of these when I was 17 and learned BASIC, APL, and Z-80 programming on it. Yes, APL! You got very lucky getting hardware in nearly operating condition. Looking forward to part 2. A little lexical assistance: You meant "Foray" and not "Foyer" meaning excursion into this field of study. All good wishes.
Brings back memories, I got one of these in 1978 as an electronics student at the time and it started my career as a software engineer now recently retired. I lived in Australia at the time and ended up working for Micro-80 which published a magazine and supported the TRS-80. Subsequently I wrote the "TRS-80 Rom Reference Manual" and designed devices to plug into the TRS-80 including a full fledged replacement for the expansion interface box. The original had several problems; the ribbon cable connecting the expansion interface was an edge connector with solder pins instead of gold plating so they would corrode and the expansion bus did not use buffers so it was unreliable. My expansion box therefore had buffers and used static RAM to alleviate the problems and was sold by Micro-80 around 1982 if I remember correctly. I used to write software using Z80 assembler for speed and efficiency. I then moved to the TRS-80 Model II with 8 inch floppies and finally to the IBM-PC and worked as a software developer/engineer from 1983 until 2022. But the TRS-80 Model 1 gave me a foundation and got me started so I remember it fondly.
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.
I was born in 85 but I do reamber using this very computer and I miss those days a much easier time for alot of people that arnt around anymore
My fifth grade teacher had a pair of TRS-80s in his classroom in 1985. No internal hard drive, external tape player to load/save software, dual floppies... loved those things. We could only use them if we were finished with our classwork. It was on the TRS-80 I learned how to write programs in BASIC. It was the same teacher who introduced me to a music group called Kraftwerk. So I can blame my teacher for eventually getting me into Industrial music!
@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):
th-cam.com/video/MqEwXq3njJs/w-d-xo.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:
th-cam.com/video/5XjpB6EedJI/w-d-xo.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 :-)
This was my first computer. I bought it used for $450 in 1981
I worked two full time jobs in high school the summer of 1978 to save up enough to buy a TRS-80. It quickly became evident that 4 KB RAM wasn't enough. I remember sweating bullets as I de-soldered the 4KB RAM chips and soldered in 16KB RAM chips. Shout outs to Creative Computing Magazine and the Scott Adams of Scott Adams Adventures fame (not the Dilbert guy).
I had an Atari 400 for my first computer and I loved those Scott Adams adventure games. They took over 1/2 hour to load with cassette but they were worth the wait. They even redefined the character set to make the text come out as script.
The first album Eddie Van Halen made at his new home recording studio was 1984 . He played all the instruments on the demos . Donn Landee was controlling the mixes . There was also 2 albums worth of songs they recorded BUT never mixed all the instruments . So there is 2 albums worth of unmixed tapes that were only numbered . Each number coded tape information was stored on a TRS-80 computer . The computer's hard drive crashed so all those tapes sit probably never to be heard
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 @@BruceStephan
@@BruceStephan - 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.
This was my first home computer, and I spent a total of £1500(in 1978) on the 16k level 2, with expansion box, and disc drives. We had a great operating system called LDOS, which was well ahead of it's time.
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 $10,000 today.
£1,500 in 1978 is about £10,000 in today's money ...
Logical systems was a good operating system. Most software worked really good running under LDOS.
Badass 70s-80s engiscience here. Spent a good part of my boyhood messing with Tandy TRS-80 computers in the local Radio Shack in bumfuck nowhere Montana. Changed my life.
Loved that computer! Temple of Apshai, coding in basic, copying games on cassette tape using brother's stereo tape deck...
I never had one at home, but a few years later I got to use the TRS-80 in the math department in my high school. I’ll always remember using CHR$ to make a program that moved characters across the screen. Wow that was a long time ago! LOL
CHR$ 32 made the screen charactors double size :)
My entry into the personal computer world was with a TRS-80 Color Computer hooked to my TV set and I used it to make slides for presentations in the university (I was a medical student at the time). I still remember the awe of my teachers and class mates with my material… 😅😅
Cool!
Paid $895 for a Model I in 1979, and it started a great 35-year career in IT !! Wish I'd held onto it. Unfortunately, I donated it to a charity in 1984, to get a tax break.
Always great to see another TRS-80 in working order and getting some love! Great job and great video!
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.
I couldn't afford an atari or apple 2, so I talked my father into going into debt to buy a TRS-80. Level 1 4k that I quickly upgraded to Level II 16k. spent stupid amount of time programming - basic and assembly. took tons of computer algorythms through it. learned how to do stuff to win local computer contests. z80 chips were very fast for the time.
I used a TRS-80 when I was in college in the early 80s. I was studying the Basic Language and I had to wait in line at the college I attended. That was until I got my fist Commodore 64, my dad let me get the matching Screen and Diskette drive too. I then could head home and create my programs for the next day. Me and a friend created a program that helped kindergarten kids, I had my first daughter use it and she mastered it really quickly. When we brought her to start kindergarten, they had a meeting with us and told us, she was too smart for kindergarten, and they gave her a test and moved her to first grade. That changed her life. She was always younger than the kids in her class.
John Roach said that 'if they don't sell, we can always use them to help with doing inventories."
Yeah. If I do a 10 things you didn't know video about trs-80, this will be in there.
This is really weird, it's a 45 minutes video and yet it ends so quickly,
Can't wait for part2 and I hope you consider making a video demonstrating what is on those cassettes.
Thanks Aaron!
Still have my TRS-80 model 1 level II, TRS-80 4P and pocket TRS-80 with printer dock. Starfighter was my favourite game (death caster one). 🥰
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. 🤔
The TRS-80 was my first PC back in 1978. I wrote a BASIC program to invert a 50 x 50 matrix. It took an hour of run time but, by George, it did it.
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.
Miss my Model 1. I gave it to a highschool friend in trade for him picking me up in the morning to not have to walk 2 miles in the winter cold to school in Winter 1993/1994. I had the 16k RAM expansion module with 2 floppy drives and printer. I got it for $120 in 1990 off a coworker at K-Mart who moved to VT from CT. One whole paycheck to buy it after working at $3.75 an hour for a full week. While limited it was a great computer also set up the CLOAD to read/write from cassettes in BASIC. Replaced it with a 286 10Mhz in 1995 with CGA monitor for $120 and then 8088's and 286's and 386s started to show up around 1996 for free and grabbed up all I could get for free. Got online on AOL 2.5 with a 386 SX 40Mhz and 14.4k modem and VGA monitor with 1MB Trident Video card and 120MB HDD with 4MB RAM with Windows 3.11
Nice!
Great video! Very insightful. Thanks for the work you put into this!
Thank you so much!
7:52 Wow the dust covers are still hanging in there, I am amazed they have not turned to dust yet.
Same
My first computer! So much fun learning on it! Thx!
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.)
My first computer was a TRS-80 I with 4kB Ram and Level II Basic. Great machine once you got hold of KBFIX. The new generation keyboard (left on the screen, with the numeric keypad) does not have the problem with key bounce. A great improvement, easy to upgrade.
@19:46 - Yes this is one of the first monitors that Radio shack produced for the Model 1. You will notice the antenna keeper at the top, as well as the wood grain top that did not come with later models.
Wow, this is the BEST TRS-80 video I have ever seen! WELL DONE! Superb job! I'll try some TRS-80 stuff on an emulator soon to get aqcuainted with the old pioneering world.
Thank you!
My first official encounter of the school computer was with the "Meritum I", which, by all means, was just the 1983 rip-off of TRS-80 model I (in Poland).
I still remember chunky graphics and green screen vibe. Everyone had various computers for home use (ZX-Spectrums, Ataris XL/XE, C-64s) and in comparison with them, the Meritum was failing short, despite the Atari was compatible with the 1979 800 model. Nevertheless all those personal 8-bits influenced my whole career.
Nice! I hadn't heard of that one before
u mnie w liceum też meritumy zawalały pracownię :) | same at my high school
th-cam.com/video/UvjGvZ2nNjY/w-d-xo.htmlsi=jM3w6vvYXVHbJRY- (no talk, didn’t find anything in english)
I had no idea PCs of any kind existed in the 70s, I thought that only started in the 80s lol.
How absolutely awesome.
Good memories. I learned programming on a TRS-80 Model 1 Level II. This started my career as a self employed developer in 1980. Still in the business and loving it.Looking forward to more videos in this series.
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.
Thank you for doing this video, brings back so many memories!
I started playing with an IMSAI, but the first computer, I owned, was the TSR-80 (4k basic, 4k ram).
It was a hacker dream of a machine :)
1. Upgrades to 12k Basic (plus the tape that had the extended basic extensions)
2. 16k ram
3. Added the extra 2102 video ram (for some reason, RS did not want to spend the 1.50) to add lower case. Required a OS patch to enable.
4. Added the Clock mod (2.1g vs 1.7g)
5. LMW Expansion board (32kram, floppy, serial, parallel)
6. Voice and speech add-on
7. RS Light pen
8. 2 floppy disks, not the RS disks. RS disk drives were only 35 tracks, while everyone else had 40 tracks.
There were kits to put all the ram in the keyboard and not in the expansion interface.
Awe the memories, programming on the Pet, Commodore, and my Trs-80 Model 1 and tape drive, 4k of memory, then loved my TRS model 3/4, 32k, i upgraded from 180k disk drives to four 800k dual sided, bent a few pins and solded jumpers on the cpu chip to double the cup speed, clock was no longer accurate but who cared. Upgraded the 300 baud modem to 9600 then 2400 baud lthe 4800. Purchased a hard drive that the case was just as big as the computer and only had "5 megabytes" for $650. I ran a Syslink bulletin board system, BBS, on it with 2 modem lines, for the public, with email, news groups, online games, dating service, and free public domain downloadable software, and this was done in the years way BEFORE the internet went public. Local newspapers did two news stories about it. I built a weather station to display the weather on it. Oh man how the computer technologies; speed, memory, storage, has changed so quickly over the years. Look at what a cellphones can do now..
Great memories!
Fond memories. I grew up with a TRS80 Model III. I learned that machine inside out and backwards. It's great seeing people bring them back to life!
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.
That ad claiming that you could fit multiple filling cabinets worth of data on a cassette tape was a blatant outright lie! The reality is a tape could not even carry a drawer full of ascii text.
The man on the TV said "tapes" while holding one tape. 😉
And if you actually could store an entire filing cabinet on a tape you would need to run it all day to load it.
How big is the drawer?
And if you ran it all day to load it and at any point the cassette output overloaded the A/D converter, you’d get an error indication on the corner of the screen (depending could be a C an E or just an asterisk would stop blinking). Then you get to turn the cassette volume down slightly and start over from the beginning.
It took dedication to be a geek.
@@DougZbikowski Looks like a typical office cabinet so each drawer is like 1 ft X 1ft X 2 ft. That holds a lot of 8.5X11 sheets of paper with a lot of text. That's a lot of ASCII potential on paper. Literally.
3:00 $599.95
$599.95 in 1977 is worth $3,039.61 today
Add some sales tax and you're looking at $3200
Yeah. Pretty crazy. Kind of in line with buying a top end gaming PC today.
I had one around 1984 with a casette player and a load of copied tapes (I was 7 by that time). Spent sooo many hours on that machine. It is very nice to see the history since I live in Europe and these were not common at all over here. Thanks, and I subscribed for the next one, really like it
Thanks
In retrospect, it becomes clear how much the VIC-20/C=64 ripped off the Model 1 for styling, and the Macintosh 128K ripped off from it an all in one computing solution with a black and white monitor and "so called innovative Frog Design" styling. I mean, look at the vent grill on that monitor and the line across the front of the keyboard.... identical to the bars on the Macintosh SE and Mac II. We never realized it back then, but bam is it self evident when someone like me realizes it and points it out, and then you forever can't unsee it, like the Commodore Logo chicken lips (when you add a dot inside it for an "eye")
Got this second hand back in 1990 from my father's job. Boy I loved that thing considered to be my first true computer.
Nice
Took my very first computer programming class on the TRS-80 back in 1981 after the 9th grade. It was offered at the community college during the summer. Loved it. I'm sure having an Atari 2600 game system influenced me to try it out. Bought an Atari 800 when it came out. Became a computer science major in engineering college and am still a software engineer today. Thanks Tandy!
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.
I loved my TRS-80 Model 1, expanding it all the way from the 4K standalone keyboard to 48K with expansion unit and dual 5 1/4" drives. Back then the things I was learning wasn't even being taught in colleges. This PC helped me launch my IT career and I'm still at it 40+ years later.
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.
Tandy had great products with the Realistic Brand that I still own and use today.
Looking at the pile of TRS-80 hardware, the most valuable part has to be the Level 1 BASIC manual. THAT is why I am still interested in computing to this day!
The "older style" keyboards with smooth keycaps were notorious for bounce problems. The newer style was from Alps and much better. You could buy it as an upgrade, I did mine with the Level II basic conversion.
I bought a model 1 with level 2 Basic and 4k of memory (which I upgraded to 16k myself) in 1978. It cost me roughly $1000 Canadian. It was the best $1000 I ever spent. I learned programming (including assembler), hardware, etc with it and the knowledge benefitted my entire career.
Loading and saving to audio cassette was extremely slow and frustrating. Floppy drives came out about a year later, and added as much cost as the entire computer system.
Ahhh yes, my first computer. TRS-80 Model 1 Level 2 16K OMG what'cha gonna do with all that memory..........
I had one. Lower case kit 4 disks drives newdos80 v2. Was a great operating system. At first I used a model 33 teletype as my printer. Paper and ink was cheap. Then bought line printer iv. The boss at work found out I had a system and promoted me to a computer room. 250 a week on salary for 4,years I kept adding to the machine. Bought 80 track drives. When the company went under I took it home and started the cobra bbs running the French connection with fidonet mail. Those were good years. 1985-1907. It ran the internet killed it and I had three kids to raise.
I remember the early computers in the late 70s, through the 80s and 90s, they were slow, noisy 💩 I didn’t actually bother with any of this crap didn’t interface directly with a computer at home until the mid 2000s 😂
Bought my model 1 in 1981 just as the model III was replacing it. Retired it in 1984 as the IBM compatible standard had become the dominant platform. I still play some of the Big Five software games using an emulator.
Awesome
Robot Attack, Asteroids, and Galaxians. Did you ever see the game "Time Bandit" from another company? I never did figure out how to play that. And lets not forget 13 ghosts. I would love to have the startup tune from that game as a ringtone for my phone LOL
The Visicalc spreadsheet software and some of the word processing software were the biggest components of the microcomputer's success. Maybe that's stating the obvious, but software was akin to the wheel, while the computer was akin to the lowly axle. The real action and power comes from the wheel.
I mowed lawns to buy one….and I think I also gave my dad 5 bucks for driving me…….but the trs80 was the first computer I bought with my own money…
I owned one of these for three weeks. Actually I had three of them in that period. I also bought a bunch of software on cassette tape, which the machine could not read. I finally said just give me my money back. But they said they would not refund my money on the software because I could have copied it. I said if I could have read it to make a copy I would not be returning it so I’ll see you in court. So they gave me a complete refund.
$600 was a sh!tload of money in 1977. That's equal to $3,000 today.
I used to grow weed and had a lot of extra $ back then, so I bought a Model 1 and all the goodies with my ill gotten gains.
Still have the keyboard but the rest of it is gone. I wrote a Chess clock, a large font + word processor that worked like a teleprompter, and a few games and that wowed my friends.
I believe the number engraved on the bottom of the computer is the driver's license number of a previous owner.
My dad used to engrave his driver's license number on items of value. He told me it would make it easier to recover things if they were ever stolen.
Interesting
I agree. It is a California Drivers License number. A lot of people I know (myself included) engrave their DL# onto electronics in case of theft. It fits the California DL format from around that time
Low brightness can be a high voltage problem alse. Un fortunately when TV sets sit around dust collects and provides a path to ground for the high voltage. Humidity only make the problems worse. As they run and dry out a bit as long as they don't arc they will ofter get better
TRS….a friend of mine who had a TRS-80 said his wife told him that TRS stood for Totally Replaces Sex.
I'm sure plugging an Apple II into a TRS80 monitor constitutes blasphemy in some states.
$599 in 1977 was in fact like buying a computer today at $3035 today.
I paid $3200 in 1989 for a 386-20 with a whopping 4MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. Bleeding edge.
I learned BASIC on these. Took 15 minutes to load your program from cassette tape. LOL
Fun times
Ah, the Trash-80. The first computer I used was some behemoth which used Focal in 1977, then a Honeywell mini computer running Basic, and an Apple II also in 1978 and also using Basic (Apple Basic). But the Trash-80 was so well known.
Warranty stickers:
White text on black background is placed on at manufacturing
Black text on white background placed on by Computer Service Centers also hand written on sticker 4 digit number which is the service center id number and the date the service was performed..sometimes instead of the date it would be service ticket number...all this was used to look up the previous repair...since there was no central system for the service centers at the time ..using the service center number we could call that service center and asked them about it..
In the 1980's i was Computer Service Center Manager in Santa Rosa CA.
Cool. Thanks for that info!
I still have mine. Don't know if it works. I'm don't thank the the disk for the Double Density disk don't work any more.
Dancing Demon was the cool demo on the Trash80 back in the day
I need to check that out.
29:08 the 25-year old Carl Young, who was born on October 16, 1953 wanted to make sure that he'd be mentioned on TH-cam someday in the future.😅
I am sure that was it. 😂
There's a fascinating windy noise which plays just after you hit enter on the BASIC Hello World, as well as when you're adjusting the voltage regulator and it keeps crashing. I guess CPU activity (like booting up or interpreting a BASIC program) is creating some kind of EMF noise that your mic is picking up.
It's interesting that it actually sounds kind of pleasant, very much _unlike_ the noise from an LED lamp driver! I wonder if it would have still sounded nice on a radio, or if that would've sounded horrible.
I'm going to need to go back and listen now. I think it might be the mic compensating for some background noise like the water heater or furnace.
$600 in 1977 is equal to about $3000 in 2023 money.
Wow. Inflated by five times.
Crazy
My first computer was a TRS80 Mod 1, Level 2. With 16k of ram, a cassette tape, black and white monitor and it cost over $1000 in 1980.
I bought a TRS-80 model 1 that looked exactly like the one you have with the numeric keypad. I bought it in 1981. It was around $1,100 in Canada. I learned to code BASIC with it. I had years of fun with it. In year 2001 I decided to move to a different province and I did a major throw out of things I no longer used. I threw a perfectly good working TRS-80 into the garbage. I should have given it to someone as it seems a shame to have thrown it out. I loved the keyboard on it. I loved the feel and the noise it made. Watching this video brought back a flood of memories. Very cool that you have some still working after so many decades.
My mom's boyfriend gave me his TRS-80 model one in the early 80's when he upgraded. I LOVED IT!!!!
Even though I also had a CoCo, I prefered the TRS-80 because of the massive amount of software for it.
I used to play Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio on 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.