Anyone remember the TRS-80?

[Elidor]

A good friend of mine had one that he conned his mother into purchasing for over a thousand bucks, and we oohed and aahed over that overpriced little piece of garbage like we had been let onto the set of 2001 to do battle with Hal himself.

To load a program, you played a cassette tape into the computer's memory. We would spend half an hour trying to load this stupid game. It was a text-based game that described a room; one had to explore with text commands and find objects to unlock the room. This led to more rooms. There was also a very primitive modem. This consisted of a "boot" for old-fashioned telephone headsets. You stuck the phone in these rubber boots and then could dial out to whatever the internet consisted of in those bleak days, something like Compuserve, I guess. Bare text and no images on stark bulletin boards.

Nearing manhood, my friend tried to pawn his Trash-80. The people at the pawn shop laughed him out of the store. Radio Shack showed him the door as well. He dumped it in the trash one day, and we learned an important lesson in capitalism. And yet I wish I had that old thing today. What a clunker it was, but we regarded it with awe, whereas today, we cuss at our new, blindingly-fast machines when they act up.

[RevolutionStartsNow]

1. I remember that game!

I haven't thought of that in years...thanks for the memory! :hi:

We had a TRS-80, thought it was the coolest thing. Floppy disks were actually "floppy" back then.

My stepdad used to make my brother and I stay in for an hour or so on Saturdays and learn some basic programmming. As a teenager who just wanted to go out with my friends and raise hell, I was mad, but there was a time early in my working years when I actually used some of that basic computer knowledge to learn some real programming.

[ltfranklin]

2. Jeeze, that's a pretty late model...

It's got them new-fangled 5 and a quarter drives. REAL nerds had 8" drives!

[Elidor]

3. My friend had several bells and whistles

But his didn't look as good as the one pictured here.

I think he had an 8" drive, now that you mention it.

[ltfranklin]

6. Shhhhh!!!

You trying to get this thread locked?

Besides, size doesn't matter when it's floppy.

[RoyGBiv]

8. Nononono ....

REAL nerds used tape drives and tried to find ways to acquire an 8" drive.

[lenidog]

4. To bad he couldn't see into the future some people collect those old

clunkers. When I was in middle school they were the computers that the computer lab had. That is where I first used a computer. A couple months ago they were running "Wargames" on TBS. I had to laugh at the state of the art computer technology they had in the movie.

[Deja Q]

5. Great, now I'm horny. Thank you very much.

:wow:

Seriously, a pity re: capitalism.

But also seriously, "trash 80" is apropos. :D

[petronius]

7. Zork?

The Troll Room
You are in a small room with passages off in all directions.
Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the walls.
A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the room.
Your sword has begun to glow very brightly.
> KILL TROLL WITH SWORD
A mighty blow, but it misses the troll by a mile.
The axe gets you right in the side. Ouch!
> SWING BOTTLE AT TROLL
Trying to attack a troll with a glass bottle is suicidal.
The axe crashes against the rock, throwing sparks!
> JUMP OVER TROLL
The troll is too big to jump over.
You stagger back under a hail of axe strokes.
> TIE UP TROLL
with what?
> ROPE
The troll struggles and you cannot tie him up.
The troll hits you with a glancing blow, and you are momentarily stunned.
> DIAGNOSE
You have a light wound, which will be cured after 29 moves.
You can be killed by one more light wound.
The troll swings his axe, but it misses.
> SCREAM
Aaaarrrrrrrrgggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
The axe crashes against the rock, throwing sparks!
> WAKE UP THE TROLL
The troll isn't sleeping.
The axe sweeps past as you jump aside.
> JUMP
Wheeeeeeeeee!!!!!
The troll's axe stroke cleaves you from the nave to the chops.
It appears that that last blow was too much for you. I'm afraid you are dead.

[Elidor]

17. That sounds like it

It's been so long I don't remember, but that sure sounds like it.

[jmowreader]

45. That looks like a GD post...

[Radical Activist]

9. I had one.

I loved it, but also called it the Trash-80. I think mine was a slightly later version than yours. I had some cool games with very basic graphics on it.

[RoyGBiv]

10. Remember?

I had one. I "upgraded" to a TRS-80 COCO (Color Computer) I and then II. I gave all of them away to a friend who was trying to learn how to use computers. Like you, I wish I still had them.

I got that thing to do stuff that it was never intended to do. I also wrote several text-adventure games, one of which was published in Rainbow magazine (note the nick). Back then the origins of the OpenSource philosophy took the form of hacking out code and actually publishing the lines of that code on paper. You had to type it in and save it to use it. The code I developed built on an idea published by someone else for creating an efficient parser, and others built on my ideas as well. It was pretty cool.

Funny thing about the TRS-80. It had a power supply with a solid state fuse in it. I experienced a power surge that caused the fuse to blow once, and I managed a temporary fix until I could get a new one using a paper clip.

Just try that sort of thing today and tell me how much these old computers sucked. :-)

[Elidor]

12. omg, I remember Rainbow mag

Had totally forgotten that!

[RoyGBiv]

14. Wow, a fellow traveler!

At one time, I owned every issue that was ever published. I intended to keep them, but I had them stored in in a building that was damaged in a flood. They all disintigrated. I almost cried. :-)

[EstimatedProphet]

11. Yeah, I remember that thing

We had a Timex Sinclair 1000. It was such a bad design, I actually felt sorry for it. Never could get it to do anything at all.

[Lexingtonian]

13. I think ours is still around

somewhere in a box in the attic. Tape recorder and all, no disk drive or 'modem', and had a mediocre version of Space Invaders that took 20 minutes to load off tape. Utterly impossible to use for anything useful, really, other than keep kids like myself a mix of entertained and frustrated, which it did perfectly.... I think of it now with horror...the kids who got the Ataris, which were the only worse PCs of the time, got all those snazzy games as cartridges to make up for their machines' pitifulness. (Great marketing by Atari- selling people yet another game machine under the pretext of providing a computer the kids could supposedly use for homework.)

Still got a Commodore 64 too, which I took out a year or two ago and it still worked, crummy keyboard and nerd's dream of a programmable (but very slow) disk drive and all. Still have a pile of games I spent a lot of bored evenings removing all the copy protections from- never did manage to crack even a single Electronic Arts game, though.

[RoyGBiv]

15. Copy Protection ...

The bane of my existence in those days was the original Ultima and the copy protection scheme used on its disks. I don't know of Lord British himself designed it, but I wouldn't doubt it considering his reputation. It takes a cracker to defeat a cracker. :-)

[TahitiNut]

16. Z-80 "Bigboard" based, CP/M, acoustic coupler, etc.

Yep. I had the Xerox 820-II which was similar technology. I also had all the schematics, data books, and source code for most of the software, along with all the development software including a macro assembler. I loved that machine and dreamed of getting a 10MB disk for it ... but they cost a couple grand, for 10MB.

After the 8086-based machines came out, I used my 820-II for cobbling together hardware emulators for devices that connected via standard parrallel or serial (RS-232) interfaces. I'd then be able to develop software on the 8086 machine for such hardware... without having the hardware.

[JohnnyRingo]

18. Reminds me of this old ad:

What a bargain...(No Monitor or mouse)

[ChoralScholar]

47. MicroChannel (MCA) Architecture

the first true 32-bit bus, fell victim to IBM's notoriously bad marketing. Never heard from again after the PS/2 goes off the market.

Capitalism, indeed.

[Enraged_Ape]

19. I learned how to program on my neighbor's TRS-80

I loved that machine. I was absolutely fascinated by it. It didn't matter to me that 50% of the time, after waiting 20 minutes to load a program, you got an error message and had to rewind the tape and start over.

[Maestro]

20. I played those text based adventure games in the mid 80's.

We thought they were the "Da bomb!" :hi:

[REP]

21. I Learned BASIC and Assembler on a Trash-80 in High School

I must be fucking ancient.

[AngryAmish]

28. Me too

[vi5]

22. My school had those......

I remember loading games and programs onto it with cassette tapes.

I also remember:
10: Print "You are a jerkhead"
20: Goto 10

Woohooo! High technology at it's finest.

[Redstone]

23. Good Lord, that remined me that I still have a TI-99/44A up

in the attic, along with a Commodove VIC-20. And an original (May, 1985) Mac 128K.

Time for some spring cleaning, you think?

Redstone

[lpbk2713]

30. I still have my TI-99 put away somewhere

with all the carts, books, manuals etc. I put it away when I got my first 386 about 25 years ago. One of these days it should be really interesting to pull it out and play around with it.

[ChoralScholar]

48. The TI-99 flavor of BASIC was a bit different

Everything started with the word CALL

CALL CLEAR
CALL COLOR
CALL SOUND
CALL YOUR MOTHER

Does this take you back a bit?

[lpbk2713]

52. I remember that.,

I have a couple of TI-BASIC books put away with my stuff. I would spend all night just making a simple little tune.

[undeterred]

24. My earliest computer memory is the Apple Two Plus

I was scared to death of it and read the whole manual. :scared: The modem was 320 baud, RAM must have been 64K.

[Jara sang]

25. I had an Atari 400

Mostly for the games, Star Raiders friggin' rocks!

[qnr]

49. Star Raiders is /still/ one of my favorite games n/t

[gollygee]

26. My brother had one of these

he was the computer person in our family, not me :)

[northzax]

27. three rules for complaining about your first computer

1: if it had a modem, you can't complain.
2: if it had an internal disk drive or hard drive OF ANY KIND, you can't complain.
3: you can't complain unless it was a Commodore PET:



yeah, baby, no hard memory, 16, yes count 'em 16K of RAM, and that was the upgrade from the 8K version. Playing dungeon on the cassette tape drive? ooh, that's some good stuff.

[Mizmoon]

41. The cheapest TRS-80 had 4k memory!

I remember begging my parents to get me the 16k version instead. It cost THREEHUNDREDANDFIFTYDOLLARS! A vast sum back in the day ... they said the 32k one was out of the question. Too expensive.

[yellowcanine]

42. Oh but the Commodore 64 was a big improvement right?

:sarcasm:

[ChoralScholar]

50. 'Professional Computer'

that makes me giggle.. even then it looked like a toy...

[Dukkha]

29. I still have this

and it still works
model# 000001
128k RAM
400k Floppy drive

[Elidor]

44. We have two of those at the office, on a shelf in back

I keep trying to get the boss to let me have them.

[DS1]

31. Look Table.

You see a yellow screwdriver.

Use screwdriver.

You can't use the yellow screwdriver.

Look screwdriver.

You see a typical yellow screwdriver.

Get screwdriver.

You can't get the yellow screwdriver.

Why the fuck not?

Unrecognized query.

Fuck off.

Unrecognized command.

Move screwdriver.

You can't move the yellow screwdriver, there's a cat sitting on it.

Stab cat.

You can't stab the cat. The cat bites you.

Whistle cat.

The cat is deaf.

Stomp feet on ground.

OH NO! The floor collapsed. You died. Start again? (Y/N)

[Elidor]

43. Lol. I went through pretty much the same thing

[flvegan]

32. I had an Atari 600 XL, I think

Man, that was eons ago.

[Spacemom]

33. I had a TI-99 4A

I remember staying up nights to program.

I made this little program for my mom. It played the song "The Rainbow Connection" and popped up little phrases like "Your wonderful/Your great/Your the best mom ever." After ooing and ahing over the program, she made me go back and change all the "Your" to "You're." :D

[MrSandman]

34. That and then the 8" floppies....nt

[Mizmoon]

35. My TRS-80 "Coco" had a 16k memory

no really :)

COCO stands for color computer (for you young-uns). I used to play Bedlam, Sands of Eqypt, etc (loaded from a Casette drive)until the effin thing got so hot I had to shut it down or it would melt.

I also learned Basic Basic.

[RoyGBiv]

38. Bedlam!!!!!!!

Ahhhh, now that brings back some memories.

The PS in those things had some issues. As mentioned earlier in the thread, I had mine "fixed" with a paper clip at one point. That didn't really seem to help the heat problem though. :-)

[Mizmoon]

39. Put the blue pill into the hamburger and feed it to the guard dog

outside the hospital. THEN you can finally escape!

It took me forever to figure out that sequence.

I have never found any computer game as gripping as those plain text games were. Call me crazy :)

[short bus president]

36. Raaka Tu!

That was a kick-ass game, and I never managed to win it.

"You are standing in a dense, dark jungle."

<kick>

"Kick what?"

<kick a tree>

"Ouch! The tree is unharmed."

[regularguy]

37. Oh yeah, I used to use SCRIPSIT (sp?) to write my papaers

on one of these puppies...

[warrens]

40. I bought one for $25

We played with it for a week or two and got bored.

[nuxvomica]

46. Mine was not so fancy but I remember that game

Wasn't it called "Haunted House"? I also played "Hammurabi" and "Checkers". I had the computer hooked up to an old black-and-white TV and bought the cheapest tape recorder Radio Shack had. Because I couldn't synchronize the computer with the tape "drive", I had to remember to start "record" before writing and start "play" before reading.
It was my first exposure to programming as I studied the BASIC source code of the games to figure out some way to cheat. I made Hammurabi produce a megabounty of grain but it was mostly eaten by rats so I went back to the code and stopped the rats.
It wasn't long before I wrote a crude version of the game "Breakout," followed by a randomized horse-race game.

[Spiffarino]

51. The "SpectraVideo" was my first PC

This is it, minus the really expensive floppy drives. I had a tape drive. The docking station broke in no time and had to be duct-taped together.

[AntiCoup2K4]

53. Since there's so much discussion of text games in this thread....

Anybody remember the old INFOCOM games? I know they made them for the Commodore 64, Apple, and IBM, so I'm guessing there were Trash-80 versions as well.

I had one based on "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" which I managed to figure out, even though I hadn't yet read the books at that point.

I also had a really weird game called "Leather Goddesses of Phobos". About as close to pornographic as you can get in text only.

[qnr]

54. yeah, Infocom was great. Did mine on Atari. n/t

[kurtyboy]

55. I remember it from college--But I never touched one in those days.

I finally got started on micros with a DEC PDP-11/23 that we had at work in 1987. It was already old then, having been built in 1980 or so, and running RSX-11 OS that had an initial copyright date (on bootup) of 1975. We used the machine to control and analyze a set of high-frequency radio networks (up to 15 r-t pairs) all from a single console.

It was clunky as hell, and troubleshooting killed us, but I loved that old machine. It stayed in service until 1999, with the same software, if you can believe it.

The two we had were nearly as sophisticated as the the one in this link--but we did have dual-5-1/4 inch floppy drives (they only used DEC specified disks, though):

http://www.montagar.com/~patj/p1123.htm

At that same job, I set up my first IP network, with five(!) IBM 80286 PCs talking to an HP-3000 miniframe (using console-emulation software). The bosses (only the bosses had the consoles) loved that they could exchange documents and information electronically--and were just getting their feet wet typing their own documents using that world-class word-processing software, HP-SLATE. But they still had to get up and go to the miniframe for the printout, because the emulation software still didn't spool print-jobs to a local port.

A couple of years later, we got Novell, and we never looked back.

Okay, geek moment concluded. Thanks for the stroll.

Kurt

[leftofthedial]

56. what do you think I'm using right now?

Not really, but I remember