Personal Stories about the TRS-80 | Hacker News Reader

Personal Stories about the TRS-80

trs-80.com

117 pointsynac67 comments

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.

> 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.

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.

The true pixel resolution of the Model I was 512x192, comprised of 64 columns by 16 rows of 8x12 pixel character cells. But of course the processor only had access to the character cell array, not the individual pixels. The pixels were created with a dozen (or 2?) 'MSI' chips hard wired to create that one mode. It would take the values stored in that character array by the CPU, pass them through a character generator ROM, into a shift register and thence into analog to the display. At 8x12, each character had ample room for lower case descenders, but to shave a couple bucks off the price tag, the character array (at 3c00-3cff) had only 7 bits per character, and either the character ROM didn't even have lower case, or there simply was no way to index them with only 6 bits. Yes, 6, on account of all the symbols with the MSB set were dedicated to 'semigraphic' glyphs; the 2x3 chunks of giant lo-res pseudo pixels you could elicit with poke statements. 64 of those, 64 for letters numbers and symbols, and that was that.

The 512x192 was probably about all the cheesy tunerless television display could handle, which is why we had 64 columns and not 80. Still, many of the other home computers only had 40 columns, so point for TRS-80. Otoh, those other computers often had 24 or 25 rows, but we only had the 16. Had the character cell been 8x8 instead of 8x12, we'd have had 24 rows, but that would have required 1536 memory locations for the screen. The 1024 locations at 7 bits each was seven 1024x1 static RAM chips, but 1536 would probably have doubled that, not to mention complicated the address decoding.

So SET and RESET graphics were limited to 128x48, but those were good times.

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.

Thanks for this!

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)

Wow, thanks for the link! What a great guy, he really engaged with almost everybody who asked a question.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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. :)

I’m hoping one of these days to use mine as a Unix terminal with an rs232 Bluetooth adapter I have.

I recently acquired both a 100 and a 102. I've gotten them to work over RS-232 to an older P3 machine I have with modern FreeBSD on it. Something about termcap stuff. I couldn't get it to work with Linux. But I was able to get a terminal login, use Lynx, etc. Wireless would be fun.

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.

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.

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.

Back in 1982 I got the complete pocket TRS-80 with the mini-printer-plotter and the RS-232 communication interface, plus the handy carrying case.

Full documentation was amazing.

Since it was a plotter it could sign your name to the ticket if you took the time to program the coordinates, and the pen moved like someone was actually writing with it. You could also do graphics on the LCD, animation was not too hard.

I had already done some scientific & industrial programming on Atari and Commodores which came out pretty good, and this was going to be a portable version for carrying on board cargo ships to make some difficult independent calculations at the end of the bulk transfer.

It took hours to work through the forms the traditional way with a hand calculator.

If you saw me going up the gangway with it like everybody else does with their laptop today, you probably would have thought nothing of it.

But the IBM PC had just been launched and it would be well over a decade before laptops even became a thing.

Back in the office we got the next model when the good one was discontinued, the newer one would actually fit in the pocet of your coveralls, so no little suitcase.

But it only had 0.5K of memory and I was going to fit in the massive measurement tables which had been finally standardized in 1980 as an algorithm that had been reduced to a few pages of 32-bit Fortran. Floating point and heavily commented by high-stakes engineers with strict instructions during steps when numerical rounding was necessary. From that point on the official values were those generated by the code or from tables printed from the code.

It was the right thing to do but it was only an 8-bit pocket computer.

Had to scale down using a non-universal rudimentary version of Gustafson's UNUMs, and re-algorithm using integer math so it did not resemble the official code at all.

Then without a 32-bit machine, had to come up with some way to check the output, this required the TRS-80 having the 2K of memory to be connected to the little one.

This one had a completely different program. It was quite adversarial though not much of a network, it took almost a week and only caught 3 suspected errors which were confirmed incorrect by looking them up in the full 83,000-entry Fortran reference printout.

Never did know how many incorrect entries my artificial not-so-intelligent approach failed to detect.

I guess it might have changed my life too.

I wouldn't say it changed an industry, they're all boarding vessels using laptops now not TRS-80's.

I never had a TRS 80, but I had the UK equivalent, a Dragon 32. My Dad bought me one for £80 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.

> 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,

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.

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

Huh, all those chips had an "80" in their name somewhere.

That's not what wikipedia thinks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_32/64

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.

> 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.

> 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".

:-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?)

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.

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!

Started college in 1982, and had already learned BASIC and Pascal via a mainframe terminal at my high school. So of course I swaggered over to the college computer center to see if they had any student jobs. I thought I was hot shit. Well, jobs involving the campus mainframe were reserved for CS students, which I was not. But they said I could have the job of maintaining the "micro lab," a room with a half dozen TRS-80 Model III's that was pretty much ignored by everybody except the kids of a couple professors came in after school to play games.

Among other things, I discovered word processing. I decided to try word processing a term paper. Turning it in was a bit dramatic, first I went to the professor and showed him a sample of the printout (dot matrix) and asked for permission to use a word processor. He tentatively said yes, but...

This triggered a lengthy discussion at the all-faculty meeting, to decide if they would allow word processing. It was the physics professors who talked them off the ledge, explained that the computer isn't actually doing the writing, etc. The faculty issued a ruling: Word processing was OK, but you're on your honor not to use a spell checker! That was fine, I didn't have a spell checker anyway.

I started "doing the research" on getting my own computer. I set myself a budget of 1000 bucks for computer, monitor, software, and printer. This was a time when a lot of computers were "bundled" with basic software. I came in close to my budget with a Sanyo MS-DOS computer, Zenith monochrome display, and a super cheap daisywheel printer. Software was Wordstar and Sanyo BASIC. My dad read this article in the Wall Street Journal about a guy who was selling a software app for just $39, so he got me Turbo Pascal for my birthday!

I don't think my professors guessed the real advantages of word processing, but I have a hunch it bought me at least 1/2 a point on my overall GPA. I also developed a love for microcomputers that influenced my career. At my college, the CS program used the "real" computer, but the people doing cool things with microcomputers were in the math and physics department, so I majored in those subjects. The profs were pretty heavily into the TRS-80, and had even networked them in some primitive way, so they could transmit their manuscripts to the department secretary. Plus, of course I got to learn about hardware hacking!

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

For 6th grade in 1983, I moved to the California suburbs with family. The kids were a lot more mature than where I came from; fighting, light drug use, sex, etc. I got bullied pretty bad. One day a kid picked on me before lunch and I had enough. I punched him and we got into a fight in front of the whole grade. I won that fight and the principal punished me because of it, not the kid that started it.

My punishment was to tutor kids in a grade lower on the only TRS-80 in the school. I figured out the flashcard games were written in BASIC and could ctrl-C out of them. The correct answers were in an array at the end of the program. I rewrote it so that it skipped the array check and always returned correct. The kids I was tutoring got all correct answers and thought I was a god.

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.

> 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.

Thanks for that nostalgia hit. I think I had about 7 or 8 of those, plus a couple that weren't on that page.

Time to look up some 8 bit emulators....

I got a TRS-80 Model I when I was 14. For the next four years, I didn't have a disk drive, and was stuck with the 500bps cassette interface for storage. When I finally did get a disk drive, I didn't want to spend $50 purchasing the DOS edition of the Z-80 assembler when I already owned the cassette version. So, instead, I used TASMON to reverse-engineer the edition I had, relocated the assembler/editor program into a memory range that would run under DOS, and patched in new disk load/save routines (written, naturally, in Z-80 assembly). I don't think I ever built anything particularly innovative for the Model I, but I got a lot of neat learning experiences like this one out of it.

Such nostalgia! My first computer was a second-hand TRS-80 / "CoCo 2" [1].

The thing came with a couple cartridge-style games (Downland [2] and Sokoban), but to do anything more you had to learn to program. I still remember that old-book smell cracking open the aged parchment in my dog-eared copy of Getting Started With Extended Color Basic [3]. I was around 10 years old, and that summer I took it with me and read a few pages every morning on the bus to summer camp. I was such a nerd. (Somehow one of the older campers found that attractive and briefly became my "girlfriend".)

It had an external 5¼" floppy drive nearly the size of a shoe-box, but I got a bigger kick out of using the cassette recorder for storage since you could see it in action and hear the distinct squeal of your data (sounded something like a modem). My friends and I played a make-believe game that emulated adult life (we'd get jobs, use monopoly money to pay ourselves a salary, demarcate homes by taping out floorplans on the floor, etc). I was the "banker" and started writing a program to record deposits, withdrawals and balances. I recall planning UI's by meticulously coloring in squares on a paper grid.

Dad complained I should spend more time outside, and maybe he was right. But I grew up, published my first commercial software title, and turned that geeky interest into a fulfilling career.

One thing I gotta say, that TRS-80 still booted up faster than any PC I've owned since!

[1] My TRS-80: https://imgur.com/a/eC19U94

[2] Downland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCzhqa-DROM

[3] Getting Started With Extended Color Basic: http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Documents/Manuals/H...

This is a really strange site; it seems to have all sorts of information except for the actual documentation and software.

Is there a decent site for this system that has actual documentation scans and software that you can download and/or run in an emulator?

Perhaps there's a web emulator for it and a section on archive.org like there is for other vintage systems?

(Another Z-80 system post, but I don't see any 6502 posts today. There really is a lot to like about 8-bit systems because of their simplicity, the fact that hobbyists routinely built their own systems in the 1970s, and the many games created for 8-bit platforms like the Apple II and NES.)

Try searching on archive.org. They have thousands of manuals, books, magazines. and even software for vintage computers. They even have emulators to run the software in a web browser.

Thanks, archive.org seems to have a gold mine of PDFs about the system including magazines, books, user manuals, and system documentation. Pretty terrific stuff, and perhaps inspiring to anyone trying to make a homebrew Z-80 (or other 8-bit) system! (Not to mention information on CP/M and other Z-80 platforms. I still want to try the original Turbo Pascal sometime.)

I wasn't immediately able to find an emulator on archive.org with software for it, though there were some software archives with a few games and other programs.

Hmm. It seems they don't have a TRS-80 emulator. They have a number of other systems though. Maybe there are legal issues.

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.

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.

> 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.

Wait, what?

William Barden's "TRS-80 Color Computer Assembly Language Programming" most certainly did cover the peripherals.

Even Lance Leventhal's "6809 Assembly Language Programming" covered the 6820 PIA.

The big problem was that Lance Leventhal's book wasn't strictly speaking compatible with the EDTASM assembly language disks and cartridges. That caused a lot of grief for me until Barden's book came out.

I wasn't aware of either of those books. I was referring to the book by Forrest M. Mins III which was sold in Radio Shack stores.

Bummer. I would have really enjoyed either of those. The Mims book didn't even cover interrupts...

The magazines and newsletters of the time were essential.

Living in a rural area, I had nobody to talk to about this stuff. Barden was quite prolific in the newsletters and magazines and was effectively my only contact with assembly language and advanced CS concepts (FFTs-for example).

I had to pre-order the Leventhal book sight unseen from my local bookstore for something like $60, and it took 18 weeks to get the book. The only way I could ever have figured out that I wanted that book was via breadcrumbs from those articles.

Side note: "TRS-80 Color Computer Assembly Language Programming" was actually a Radio Shack book. As was the "Color Computer Technical Reference Manual".

IIRC, I briefly had a subscription to a Color Computer magazine, but I don't remember the title. It was printed on a thick newsprint-like material, and stopped publishing shortly after I started subscribing. :-( Later I did subscribe to Hot CoCo. I don't recall (30+ years later) seeing adverts for other assembly language books.

I never did subscribe to any other newsletters or programs-on-tape like I had wanted.

> I had to pre-order the Leventhal book sight unseen from my local bookstore for something like $60, and it took 18 weeks to get the book.

Yeah, even if I'd have had the money for that, I doubt I'd have done that.

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.

BYTE magazine claimed the Sphere 1 was the first personal computer.

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.

I still have the whopping 5 meg hard disk that my dad bought for his model 1 in my garage. I vividly remember him yelling "tell it to park" before shutting it off. It's huge. The hard disk was about 6x bigger than the actual computer and cost around $1k, but you still had to issue a "park" command before powering off or you could ruin the thing when powering on next time and the heads seek. You couldn't boot off of it either. Still had to load the OS via 5 1/4" 360k (IIRC) floppies before accessing. It also made some pretty cool squeaks and squawks while in use - sounds I've never heard from any other HD since.

> And, in fact, until about 1980, the TRS-80 dominated the market. What happened?

Two things, in particular, happened:

1) The founder of Tandy died at the end of 1978. This deprived the company of the vision of the founder right at the inflection point in computing.

2) I seem to remember that Tandy got hit by not one but two embezzlement scandals which deprived it of operating capital at fairly critical points.

> Tandy's drive is a horrible, unreliable kludge

Apparently the Shugart SA400 and Western Digital FD1771 controller chip used by Radio Shack for the TRS-80 were commonly used on other systems of that era, such as S-100 systems, but the Apple's Disk II originally used a stripped down/cheaper version of the drive dubbed "SA390" that attached to Woz's disk controller card.

More info at: https://apple2history.org/history/ah05/

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.

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.

My highest certified level of computer science education is the Radio Shack TRS-80 programming class I took when I was 9!

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.

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.

I call it Programmer's Tourettes. It's more common than you realise. :-)

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!

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