03 August 1977 - RADIO SHACK UNVEILS THE TRS-80 COMPUTER: Tandy
announces one of the first mass-market home computers, the TRS-80, to
be sold in its Radio Shack stores. It features 4K of RAM and sells
for $399 (or $599 with a monitor and tape recorder for storage).
Upgrades will keep various TRS-80 models on the market until 1991.
Sean Dennis wrote to Dave Drum <=-
03 August 1977 - RADIO SHACK UNVEILS THE TRS-80 COMPUTER: Tandy
announces one of the first mass-market home computers, the TRS-80, to
be sold in its Radio Shack stores. It features 4K of RAM and sells
for $399 (or $599 with a monitor and tape recorder for storage).
Upgrades will keep various TRS-80 models on the market until 1991.
A TRS-80 CoCo 2 was my first "real" computer and what I taught myself BASIC on.
Still miss that computer (it was stolen decades ago).
Ross Branham wrote to Dave Drum <=-
Believe it or not, we still use a TRS-80 model4 where I work. It run a proprietary enraving machine. Still runs strong. We do have some non working ones for spare parts.
It was the first computer I ever used.
I moved on to the Commode Door 64 after the TRaSh-80. A number of those are still in service (the motherboards anyweay) with NOAA reporting on tides and monitoring costal oceanographic data.
And one of the last remaining video rental companies in USA (Family
Video) ran their whole company on a Tandy 1000 using home brewed Linux software until their demise last year. It was head-quartered just a mile or so from my house
I would like to know what other old computers are being used for daily busin
Richard Falken wrote to Ross Branham <=-
PDP-11 reported in use in a nuclear power plant. They don't plan to decomission the machinery until 2050.
I'd assume there's a 2038 event possible with the OS. Might be easier to emulate the OS with modern hardware?
Ed Vance wrote to Dave Drum <=-
Howdy Dave,
A friend I met at Church got a TRS-80 Model 1.
Earlier he played with an 1802 ELF (believe that's the name).
When the COMMODORE C=64 came out, he bought one.
One day he told me it wasn't much fun typing BASIC Code in, running it
and when he finished with that PRG he would type NEW and all the time
and energy it took to type that PRG in was gone as he typed in some
other code he wanted to try out.
I told him about the circuit I saw in Popular Electronics that used a
7414 IC, in between a Cassette Recorder and the C=64's Cassette Port to Save his Code, and to CLoad it back into his PC when he wished to use
that program again. That Circuit worked very well for him...UNTIL I got
my own C=64, VIC Modem 300 and 1541Floppy Disk Drive.
The Modem had a program on a cassette tape and I wanted to put that program on a Disk.
I asked him to bring the Circuit he built and his cassette recorder to
my home so I could Load the program from the tape to Save it on a
floppy disk (I bought a 2-pack of SSSD 5-1/4" disks for $2.00 when I
got the Disk Drive at K-Mart). When my friend saw how quickly the File
was Saved on the disk, compared to the much longer time it took to Load
it to my COMMODORE 64, his jaw dropped and he bought a disk drive the
next day. BTW, He let me play with his 1802 ELF board some time later
to type in the Star Trek program on the HEX Keypad it had.
Good Days back then.
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