[HN Gopher] Personal Stories about the TRS-80
___________________________________________________________________
Personal Stories about the TRS-80
Author : ynac
Score : 100 points
Date : 2022-02-10 05:46 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.trs-80.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.trs-80.com)
| ck2 wrote:
| I was given a trs-80 as a gift on a pre-teen birthday after
| visiting Radio Shack every week on my bicycle as a kid to play
| with the display models which were so amazing to me.
|
| Except my family didn't understand there was no way to save/load
| programs without the tape cassette accessory.
|
| So I spent the first few months memorizing and typing in code
| every day after turning it on, lol
|
| Totally aced typing class after that though.
| karmajunkie wrote:
| This is exactly how I learned to program as a kid--adapting
| Commodore BASIC code listings from magazines to the CoCo 3
| flavor I had, and trying to figure out how to fix the errors.
|
| All I really wanted was an Atari...
| jeffwass wrote:
| The second sentence in the article : "I downloaded it and tried
| to figure out how to run the Scott Adams text adventures."
|
| Weird coincidence. Literally just last night I was looking to
| download and play some of the old Scott Adams text adventures on
| my iPhone.
|
| The TRS-80 had a defining impact on my childhood. Like many
| others I learned to program in BASIC on this thing, typing
| programs from books and magazines, and reverse engineering them
| to figure out how they worked.
|
| Back in those days graphics were so primitive yet still high
| tech, it was just so cool see things visualised on the screen. I
| think a lot of that magic is lost now with ubiquitous high-res
| 24-bit colour everywhere.
|
| The blocky 128x48 monochrome resolution of the TRS-80 was of
| course quite limiting but also part of its charm.
|
| I used this machine well past its prime, all the way to 1988 when
| I upgraded to a Tandy 1000.
| anthk wrote:
| All of the Scott Adams advents are ported to the ZMachine and
| they would run better under an iOS ZMachine interpreter.
|
| https://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/scott-adams/gam...
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/frotz/id287653015
|
| On PC's, you have (win)Frotz and Lectrote.
| jeffwass wrote:
| Thanks for this!
| antod wrote:
| _> The blocky 128x48 monochrome resolution of the TRS-80 was of
| course quite limiting but also part of its charm._
|
| Yeah from memory, the pixel graphics were _really_ lores, but
| the text characters relatively hires. Something like only 6 big
| blocky (non square) pixels in the space a character took.
|
| Some games would use animated ascii chars instead of pixels
| because of this. Other computers would often have text chars
| made up of the base pixels - eg 8x8 pixels in the space of a
| character.
| jeffwass wrote:
| What was really cool about the TRS-80 is that the graphics
| were really represented as a custom character encoding.
|
| The screen was 64 cols and 16 rows. Exactly 1 kB.
|
| And as you said, each character could show either the lower
| 127 aasci character with decent resolution, or the character
| could be broken up into 2x3 graphics, represented as 64 bits
| of the upper non-ascii character byte.
|
| So text and graphics were easily mixed and looked good. You
| could even peek and poke directly into the screen memory
| locationand immediately display any graphics or text.
|
| I made a cool drawing program that saved pictures by
| basically scanning the screen memory and capturing the 1024
| unique bytes that determined what was being displayed
| (graphics and/or text) and saved to disk.
| dang wrote:
| Scott showed up here a few months ago:
|
| _The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330015 - Nov 2021 (181
| comments)
| antod wrote:
| My fathers small business had one in the early 80s when I was
| about 10-11 and he would bring it home supposedly to do some
| work, but mainly just to expose us to computers I suppose. This
| was in NZ with an American TRS-80 model 3, so it also meant
| hauling around this heavy humming 240-100V transformer with US
| plug too.
|
| Anyway, I learnt some BASIC despite my Usborne books from the UK
| not being TRS-80 specific. Played a lot of Cosmic Fighter and
| Meteor Mission, and started saving my newspaper delivery money
| for my own computer not knowing what I would end up getting. By
| the time I could afford something the ZX Spectrum arrived and I
| got that (a C64 would've taken a lot longer to save for hehe).
|
| While the Speccy was the first computer I owned, the TRS-80 was
| the first computer I used.
| kcartlidge wrote:
| > _Anyway, I learnt some BASIC despite my Usborne books from
| the UK not being TRS-80 specific_
|
| You may find this link of nostalgic interest:
| https://usborne.com/gb/books/computer-and-coding-books
|
| Usborne have made those old books available as free PDFs.
| They've even done the classic ones for writing your own text
| adventures.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| I'm far too young to have had one when they came out, but I
| recently bought a TRS-80 Model 100 to use as a distraction-free
| writing machine. And you know what? For that, it actually still
| works well!
|
| Although I'm glad I got a microSD adapter for it; the volatile
| storage would feel pretty risky for that otherwise. :)
| jccc wrote:
| I'm hoping one of these days to use mine as a Unix terminal
| with an rs232 Bluetooth adapter I have.
| tamaharbor wrote:
| I wrote all of my high school and college reports using the
| TRS-80 Model I (with expansion interface, 48k of RAM,
| upper/lowercase modification, single 5-1/4" disk drive, and dot
| matrix line printer). The ribbon cable between the keyboard and
| expansion interface was very finicky, and could cause the
| computer to reboot by just looking at it funny (or so it seemed).
| I developed the habit of saving my work every two to three
| minutes.
| ja27 wrote:
| I never owned a TRS-80, but my high school had a Model 16 running
| Microsoft Xenix with maybe 10 serial terminals attached to it.
| (This replaced a small Burroughs machine and card punch.) The
| business department ran COBOL classes on it. The COBOL was
| forgettable for me but it was my first *nix and got me started
| using vi (and writing stuff to other users' ttys). Pretty amazing
| that it could handle that.
| DrBoring wrote:
| One of my earliest memories is of a TRS-80. I was 4 years old
| when I saw my first computer program. My brother (10) showed me a
| program he wrote a that would print a pattern of Xs on the
| screen.
|
| It blew my mind that he was able to tell the computer what to do.
|
| I can't remember anything about the computer before that memory,
| but I must have assumed the software was just magically there,
| not that humans had put it there. Not that a regular person like
| me could write my own programs.
|
| That event made a big impression on me. When I was 7 I started
| teaching myself BASIC coding on our Atari 800 using a book I
| found on the family book shelf.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| I never touched the TRS-80, but my Grandmother had an instruction
| manual for coding on one and thought the book might still be
| useful. This was in the mid-2000s. The machine hadn't been part
| of the house since before I was born and the BASIC programming
| language was antiquated too. But I read through it anyway. I
| think I get the gist of it, but I will never get to test out what
| I've learned about that mythical machine from the ancient texts.
| squirrelmaker wrote:
| If you don't mind emulators you can tinker with the ghosts of
| horrors that were: https://www.trs-80.com/wordpress/emulators/
|
| A very nice one: https://github.com/lkesteloot/trs80-emulator
| (has a beautiful interface and can switch between versions of
| various TRS-80 Model configurations.)
| TMWNN wrote:
| It's well known that the Apple II was one of the first three
| prepackaged, preassembled personal computers on the market. It,
| the TRS-80 Model I, and the Commodore PET all appeared in late
| 1977.
|
| It's not well known that the Apple was _not_ the obvious winner
| of the three; the TRS-80 was. Every small town in America had
| Tandy 's Radio Shack stores, and even if Radio Shack had a
| reputation for selling toys and gizmos as opposed to computers,
| it had a reputation. As a startup, Apple didn't. Commodore wasn't
| as well known as Tandy but was an established calculator and
| office-equipment company, with its own semiconductor fab that
| produced the 6502 CPU that Apple and other rivals used.
|
| And, in fact, until about 1980, the TRS-80 dominated the market.
| What happened?
|
| * The disk drive. All three computers only used tape storage in
| 1977, but their makers soon provided disk drives. Tandy's drive
| is a horrible, unreliable kludge. Commodore's PET disk drives are
| gigantic monstrosities that are fast and reliable[1] but far too
| expensive. Steve Wozniak's Disk II is a combination of a
| brilliantly simple and reliable disk controller, and inexpensive-
| to-make (and thus highly profitable) drive mechanism, that still
| run well today, 40 years later.
|
| * Third-party products. Apple published everything needed to
| create software and hardware for the II. Its slots invited
| engineers to design cards. The TRS-80 came with a superb BASIC
| tutorial, but Tandy otherwise kept all technical information
| secret,[2] hoping to monopolize third-party development.[3] Radio
| Shack stores were not allowed to sell non-Tandy products, and
| couldn't carry third-party publications like _80 Micro_ that by
| default became the major way companies sold TRS-80 products
| (since other retailers didn 't want to compete with Radio Shack
| stores). Commodore's Jack Tramiel never ever understood the
| importance of software development, and the PET fell far behind
| Tandy and Apple in the US; until the VIC-20 in 1980 most of
| Commodore's computer sales were in Europe and Canada, where Apple
| and Tandy didn't compete.
|
| A very important factor in the Apple's II's early popularity was
| school districts buying it to run educational software from MECC
| like _Oregon Trail_ and _Lemonade Stand_. But this was not
| inevitable. A teacher or administrator in a rural school district
| in 1979 looking to purchase computers would naturally look to the
| Radio Shack in town, but would only have found incredibly crude
| Tandy-published software. Even with such handicaps Radio Shack
| had a substantial portion of the educational market, which after
| 1980 quickly eroded until 1985, when Tandy had an unexpected
| second computer boom driven by the PC-compatible Tandy 1000.
|
| * VisiCalc. Because of both of the above factors, VisiCalc was
| written for the Apple when market share should have caused it to
| be written for TRS-80 (Dan Fylstra of Personal Software,
| VisiCalc's publisher, was one of the first owners of the TRS-80).
| Being only available for disk-based Apple massively drove sales
| of the II; for the first time, people bought a computer to run a
| specific killer app, as opposed to the other way around. In turn,
| others chose the II to develop for.
|
| Even after 1980, when Apple had clearly gained sales momentum,
| Tandy still had the bulk of the installed base. 80 Micro's
| December 1982 issue
| (<https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-
| magazine-1982-...>) has 484 pages. I'm pretty sure no Apple
| magazine ever came close to that thickness; the only other
| computer magazines in history to be that thick are 1) _PC
| Magazine_ before it went bimonthly in 1984 after the December
| 1983 issue hit 800 pages, and 2) _BYTE_. Wayne Green, the
| publisher of _80 Micro_ , had by that time written editorials in
| almost every single issue pleading with Tandy to encourage third-
| party developers. Tandy didn't relent until the Model 16,
| introduced that year, had zero third-party software after six
| months. But by then it was too late.
|
| As fat as they are, reading Tandy magazines like _80 Micro_ and
| _Rainbow_ (
| <https://archive.org/details/rainbowmagazine-1983-12/>) from the
| early 1980s is like visiting a sad and barren alternate world;
| instead of Origin, Epyx, MicroProse, and SSI, there are much
| cruder-looking ads from tiny companies offering bad clones of
| popular arcade games.
|
| [1] Two virtues Commodore's later drives did not retain
|
| [2] Read this _BYTE_ article from two years after the TRS-80 's
| release (<https://archive.org/stream/byte-
| magazine-1979-08/1979_08_BYT...>), which a) discusses how to
| implement machine language graphics and b) complains about the
| complete lack of Tandy documentation that motivated the author to
| write the article in the first place.
|
| [3] It's clear in retrospect that TRS-80 was intentionally
| designed to not be compatible with the existing 8080/Z80
| standards. ROM's location in the memory map broke CP/M
| compatibility, and the expansion bus is not S-100 compatible.
| Wildgoose wrote:
| Thanks for this. We had a Radio Shack selling TRS-80s in
| Sheffield, England. UK Microcomputer magazines published
| program listings, (mainly games), and early on tended to be
| fairly generic. You could easily translate between different
| flavours of BASIC. The number of microcomputers available just
| exploded around 1980, (when I got my Acorn Atom), but the
| TRS-80 didn't have all that much software available despite its
| early entry into the field.
| ansible wrote:
| > _Tandy 's drive is a horrible, unreliable kludge._
|
| Even I, as a Color Computer (CoCo) owner, had heard about the
| issues with expansion memory and peripherals the Model I.
|
| It also couldn't pass FCC regulations for RF emissions.
|
| > _... but Tandy otherwise kept all technical information
| secret ..._
|
| They started to come around later. With the CoCo, they
| published the schematics for it as a book. I mostly didn't
| understand it back then... it would have helped if they'd
| bundled the data sheets for the various chips along with the
| book.
|
| The assembly language programming book for the 6809 (the CPU in
| the CoCo) didn't really cover the hardware inside the CoCo
| (like the 6821 peripheral interface adapter) either. That was a
| shame.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| In the late 80's/early 90's I worked for a tiny company called
| Alpha Products/Colorware. We built I/O hardware and sold a
| Color Computer drawing program called CoCoMax. CoCoMax was
| written by an outside programmer who approached us to see if we
| wanted to sell it for him. He would go on to make tens of
| thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties
| over time. He also designed and sold (on his own) a CoCo3-based
| Genlocking video manipulator whose name escapes me, but it was
| well known in the video industry since competitive products
| cost 10x what his did. I hear that with that product he went
| from collecting cars to collecting airplanes :-)
|
| The final version of CoCoMax for the Color Computer 3 was such
| an obvious ripoff of MacPaint that the owner of Alpha sat me
| down in front of a PC with a photocopied MacPaint manual and
| said "copy this manual but make it different enough so it's not
| obvious we copied it." BTW, our word processor was XYWrite if
| anyone remembers it :-)
|
| We sold analog and digital I/O boards but at that time there
| was no obvious "winner" out of all the computers on the market.
| As a result, the company had its own I/O bus that these boards
| were based on. For each computer -- Apple ][, TRS80, IBM, etc.,
| we sold an adapter that would convert that computer's external
| bus interface to our proprietary interface. So we had a line of
| boards with a single interface and you'd select an adapter
| depending on what computer you had.
|
| By 1990 or so it was obvious that 90% of our customers were
| using IBM/ISA bus machines, but by keeping with our proprietary
| bus we actually avoided having to compete too directly with
| other companies making the same kind of hardware but designed
| specifically for the ISA bus.
|
| Around 1992, I think, we dropped the "Colorware" part of the
| name as the TRS80 software had dropped off to a trickle.
| jecel wrote:
| Note that while the 1977 trio left their competitors in the
| dust, they were not the first prepackaged, preassembled
| personal computers on the market. But the makers of the Sphere,
| Compucolor II, Sol-20 and so on were terrible on the business
| side. While Apple was a VC backed startup and Tandy and
| Commodore were large companies as you pointed out. The rest
| became just footnotes in history which few people have ever
| heard of.
| jsrcout wrote:
| My very first attempt at programming was on a TRS-80 Model II, in
| a junior high school summer class. I made a Dungeons and Dragons
| character generator. Sadly I didn't know about loops, so there
| was a lot of manually typed duplicate code :-). As jeffwass
| commented, the small screen and blocky characters were part of
| the charm. Although to me at the time, it may as well have been
| the computer from the Starship Enterprise. Good times.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| My first program was the same, but on a Vic-20. My code to roll
| 3d6 3x, and take the best score for each attribute, was 52
| lines long. I printed it out and showed my dad, who was
| programming mainframes at his work. He said he could do it in
| 7, and proceeded to show me nested loops. It wound up being 6.
| From then on, I was hooked. I've been programming ever since.
| hughrr wrote:
| My father had a TRS-80. All I remember was lots of swearing as he
| was learning to write software on it. He succeeded in the end and
| ran a software business for over a decade; mostly off clone PCs
| by then.
| Wildgoose wrote:
| I call it Programmer's Tourettes. It's more common than you
| realise. :-)
| zabzonk wrote:
| My late father bought one of these in the late 70s (he was a bit
| of a gadget nut) and I played with it when I visted him - things
| like Adventure, Dancing Demon, Hello World programs etc. Shortly
| after, I got a job at a university where they had several RML
| 380Zs, which were basically the same thing as the TRS-80 (Z80,
| CP/M, wonky graphics), and started writing code in BASIC and
| assembler. So really the TRS-80 (and similar) got me into
| computing, as I'm sure it did for many, many people. Thank you,
| Tandy!
| thanatos519 wrote:
| My highest certified level of computer science education is the
| Radio Shack TRS-80 programming class I took when I was 9!
| ynac wrote:
| I still have a few five and a quarters packed with text-based
| games. One was a maze game called Crocket & Tubbs. Lots of skiing
| games and other horizontal landscapers.
|
| Thank you, Trash 80!
| chriselles wrote:
| My first computer was a TRS-80 32k.
|
| It also had the CTR-41 tape deck with data transfer at roughly
| the speed of a good typist.
|
| I learned BASIC by copying short word game programs from
| magazines and just playing around with it.
|
| Things have certainly changed in the last 40 years.
| gadders wrote:
| I never had a TRS 80, but I had the UK equivalent, a Dragon 32.
| My Dad bought me one for PS80 when the company went bust in the
| 80's.
|
| That set me off on a lifetime of tech or tech-adjacent work. If
| not for that I'd probably be an accountant. Thanks Dad.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > I never had a TRS 80, but I had the UK equivalent, a Dragon
| 32.
|
| Not at all an equivalent - 6809 chip versus Z80 - completely
| different architecture, very different BASIC (Dragon had pixel
| graphics). The Dragon was a (better) clone of the Tandy Color
| Computer, not the TRS-80,
| tssva wrote:
| From 1979 on, when the TRS-80 Model II was introduced, TRS-80
| referred to a line of computers which included models with
| differing CPUs, operating systems and form factors. Although
| it is mostly associated with the Z80 line the TRS-80 line
| included systems which used the Z80, Motorola 6800 series,
| Motorola 68000, Intel 80C85 and the Intel 80186. Some of the
| machines ran proprietary OSs while others ran UNIX or MS-DOS.
|
| The Tandy Color Computer was actually originally the TRS-80
| Color Computer.
| glhaynes wrote:
| Huh, all those chips had an "80" in their name somewhere.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Nitpick: the Tandy Color Computer was the TRS-80 Color
| Computer _3_. Prior to the CoCo3, it was just called the
| TRS-80 Color Computer
| lproven wrote:
| > The Dragon was a (better) clone of the Tandy Color
| Computer, not the TRS-80,
|
| The CoCo _was a model of TRS-80._
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer
|
| So, yes, saying that the Dragon 32 was a version of the
| TRS-80 is fair and valid IMHO.
|
| Over here in Europe, we had _dozens_ of makes and models of
| home computer that were either very obscure or completely
| unknown in North America -- mostly because computers from the
| USA were very expensive by European standards.
|
| (Ever heard of... Sinclair, Acorn, Oric, Enterprise,
| Memotech, Camputers, Tatung, Jupiter Cantab, HH Tiger,
| Grundy, Amstrad/Schneider, Philips, Thomson, MGT, Apricot,
| Compukit, CST, or Research Machines?)
|
| I used microcomputers from 1981 and got the first one of my
| own the next year. I have been working with them for 40 years
| now. When they were current, I did not know _a single person_
| with an Apple ][ or a TRS-80. They were simply too expensive
| here.
|
| So I think it's 100% understandable that, when the article
| here didn't specify any particular model of TRS-80, a Brit
| might not know that there were multiple incompatible model
| lines of the things. I only learned of the complexity of the
| TRS-80 range in the last year or two -- that is, in my 50s.
|
| They were not a huge international success.
| eesmith wrote:
| > when the article here didn't specify any particular model
| of TRS-80
|
| Even better, the linked-to article includes recollections
| from people who started with a CoCo, like "I got a CoCo2 on
| Christmas 1982".
| lproven wrote:
| :-D
|
| I have to admit, I didn't get that far. It's a bit hard
| for me to connect since I've never used a TRS-80 AFAICR.
| I think I played around with an early Tandy PC (maybe a
| Tandry 1000?) in the sole Tandy shop on the Isle of Man,
| and I did support work on one or two in the very late
| 1980s. (Anyone else remember Deskmate?)
| gadders wrote:
| That's not what wikipedia thinks:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_32/64
| anthk wrote:
| Dragon had a 6809, the same CPU as the Vectrex or the CoCo.
|
| https://www.6809.org.uk/dragon/
|
| http://www.nitros9.org/battle.html
|
| Emulator and the modern OS.
|
| The emu is from the guy from EvilWM, the WM which inspired
| CWM under OpenBSD.
| jjp wrote:
| We had one at home from early 1980's. It was bought by my dad's
| business, it came home weekends and he taught himself to program.
| He used to create job schedules and pricing estimates and I got
| to do the data entry!
|
| Dad seriously considered changing career (from electrical
| engineering), but mom couldn't be convinced that it would pay!
| Dad stayed in electrical engineering and did alright. But it got
| me into computers - copying programs onto TRS-80 and then Apple
| II with CP/M and dbase.
| Starwatcher2001 wrote:
| I bought a TRS-80 in 1979 and still have it (and a couple more).
| I cut my programming teeth on it, learning BASIC, then assembler
| and even a little hardware hacking. I dislike the "trash" term as
| for me it revolutionised my life, helping me leave the plastic
| factory where I worked, and getting me into software development,
| something I still do over 40 years later.
| CalRobert wrote:
| My very, very first computer was a TRS-80 Pocket Computer from my
| grandfather (who's still doing electrical engineering in his late
| 80's!)
| (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fe/TR...)
|
| It was how I learned BASIC. I didn't write a lot, but one of the
| things was a rudimentary altitude calculator I could use to
| figure out how high my model rockets flew. Enter the distance
| from launchpad, and angle from you to the rocket, and there it
| was. I was hooked.
|
| I think it changed my life.
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| Our family's first computer was a TRS-80 MC-10 in the early 80's.
| My parents knew nothing about computers (and still don't), but my
| mom had apparently heard once that computers need to be
| expandable, so that's what she told the sales person at Radio
| Shack. The MC-10 has a slot that lets you expand it from 4k to
| 20k of RAM, so it met the requirement.
|
| That was the family computer, but only me and my older brother
| actually used it, after that me and my older brother got
| computers of our own. My older brother got an Atari 800XL. I
| started off with an Aquarius from Matel, then a VIC-20, then
| Commodore 64. My younger brother went with Nintendo, and never
| really had a personal computer until I gave him my old Packard
| Bell in the mid 90's after he left college.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Wow, I totally forgot about the MC-10. That was also my first
| computer. I outgrew it pretty quickly and saved up for a Color
| Computer (CoCo-2). After college, my first job was at Alpha
| Products/Colorware: a company making CoCo software, in addition
| to other hardware.
|
| By the time I joined, the CoCo was in decline, but the software
| was still a cash cow.
| Agamus wrote:
| The Trash-80 was the first computer I could use alone - my older
| brother wouldn't let me touch his Apple ][. It was 1982 and 1983,
| and the principal of my elementary school had one in his office.
| He let me skip some of my 1st and 2nd grade days to hang out in
| the closet in his office where he had the thing. I wrote games,
| and played the games I had written. The slipperiest slope I have
| ever skied.
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