
This TRS-80 - smacktoward
http://wayne.lorentz.me/This_TRS-80/
======
smacktoward
A fun side note: the core software that was included on the Model 100's ROM
was written by Microsoft, and not just by Microsoft, but by Bill Gates
himself. It was the last Microsoft project where he would write most of the
code personally.

In a wide-ranging early '90s interview at the National Museum of American
History, he reminisced about the Model 100, calling it "in a sense my favorite
machine":
[https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm#tc35](https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm#tc35)

~~~
reacweb
Yes. OS was an acquisition of Microsoft, but Basic, P-CODE, visual basic and
visual basic for applications were very central in Microsoft. It enabled to
develop office very quickly.

~~~
C1sc0cat
All of the early PC's had a variant of GW Basic and Microsoft wrote those -
they all even had the same memory leak.

You can tell an old school basic professional programmer from the Pet and
Apple ][ Days by how they break out of Loops.

------
chipotle_coyote
I had a TRS-80 Model 200 for a while, so this brings back some weird memories.
I regret getting rid of it, really; it'd have been fun to have it around to
bring to coffee shops for writing sessions now.

(Possibly) interesting trivia: the linked article mentions the AP used a
typesetting system called ATEX. This was a big dedicated terminal/server
system that basically used plain text with markup, similar to troff or LaTeX,
although the markup was entirely different. The team that created ATEX split
up and created two different pieces of software, both inspired by ATEX. One
team created a DOS word processor called XyWrite, which was used by some major
publications well into the 1990s and possibly into this century. (IIRC, it was
also used to issue US Supreme Court rulings for many, many years!) The other
team created PageMaker, one of the very first GUI desktop publishing programs.
To the best of my knowledge, every version of PageMaker -- as well as the
first couple of versions of its successor InDesign, and contemporary versions
of its major competitor, Quark XPress -- could natively import XyWrite files.
(While XyWrite is no more, it has its own successor program, an academic-
focused Windows word processor called Nota Bene.)

~~~
codezero
That brings back memories, I used PageMaker to make our high school yearbook
in the 90s :)

~~~
rhombocombus
Me too! I really loved PageMaker, and used it for most of my papers into
college as well. I moved away from it when they made InDesign...

~~~
lostlogin
I remember being in trouble as a kid for installing a load of games on a Mac,
and adding a few system extensions to help them out. It messed up the sacred
order of system extension loading and my dad wasn’t able to use pagemaker
until it was fixed.

------
jseutter
In the '90s I worked in a warehouse where some of the guys had bought old
model 100s for cheap and had programmed an inventory system. The 100 was the
perfect size to sit on the console of the forklift and you would record where
you were placing or retrieving pallets of inventory. At the end of the day you
could sync the updates from one machine to the next over serial ports. For
being so computationally limited they are surprisingly capable machines.

The extra long battery life made this application possible.

In spite of being warehouse workers they were a very smart bunch. There were
several other things they had automated as well. I was young at the time and
was only interested in video game, so never picked up programming until later.

~~~
craz8
In the 80s I worked with Industrial Apple IIs - which I’ve only ever heard
about at that job!

They were networked though, as they were not attached to forklifts

By the end of the 80s, the floppy disks with the code were running a bit thin!

That company made non-prescription drugs

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krasin
Apparently, there are a lot of alive TRS-80 calculators around, but many of
them have a defective LCD (due to moisture getting inside). Someone took the
challenge and recently (February-May 2019) produced a batch of custom LCDs to
fix all TRS-80 calculators in the world.

Part 1.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8-HfGTCcCk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8-HfGTCcCk)

Part 2.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Vagc0FJK8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Vagc0FJK8)

Part 3 (final):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TbvC79ff3M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TbvC79ff3M)

~~~
cjsawyer
I have 3x working TRS-80 PC-2’s and one TRS-80 PC-3. If anyone is interested I
will post my email.

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jdblair
This is my favorite line, at least so far:

There were microphones at each typewriter, and at the computer. When the on-
air talent tossed to the newsroom for a live report, the journalism factory
noises in the background were real.

This is a great story. It helps that it is told by a professional writer, but
it's also a special time in the history of tech. I remember lusting after this
gadget when I was a kid. I remember that there was a time when a local Radio
Shack in Akron listed the price incorrectly very low and there was a run on
the model 100 when people found out. When I showed up they were sold out.

~~~
ngcc_hk
I heard about that story as well. Must be reported on byte.

------
cyberferret
Not that particular TRS-80, but I fondly remember cutting my first lines of
BASIC code on a TRS-80 back in 1980. It is THE computer that was responsible
for me becoming a coder.

Oh, the fun of watching those two asterisk's blinking in the top corner of the
screen while it loaded your latest creation from the cassette drive...

------
jeffwass
I’ve mentioned this before here, but I worked with an electrical engineer who
until at least the late 90’s, possibly later, kept a Model 100 on his lab
bench for testing serial port API’s on electronic systems he was building.

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james_pm
My first use of the TRS-80 was a model 100 that was at our McDonald's. It ran
a custom program called McBin that was supposed to help manage the quantity of
the different sandwiches that you put into the "bin" which was a heated
compartment with eight or ten slides to hold food which was prepared in
advance during busy periods.

The McBin was basically useless, but I always set it up heading into a lunch
or dinner rush because it meant I got to play with the TRS-80.

------
tekstar
I bought a Model 100 literally last week. Going to build a little raspberry pi
into a piece of wood for it to talk to.

Other than that, it would be nice to be able to take a note on it and transfer
it to a modern computer. Not sure the easiest way to hook that up as I have no
disk or cassette drive for it. Maybe a cable to go from cassette interface to
audio and some software to decode the audio signal that would record to
cassette?

Also not sure the easiest way to load Zork.

~~~
salgernon
Funny, I sold several at the Sunnyvale swap meet last week. They’re awesome. I
saved my teenage summer earnings to buy one and used it to do physics
simulations in high school.

~~~
wildbill
Gahh damnit. I haven't ever been to that swap meet, but I've been looking for
a Model 100... I shoulda gone.

------
jkingsman
How delightful :) I don't have much substantive to say beyond, that was a
pleasure to read and made me very happy in a strange way.

~~~
morganvachon
It was definitely a pleasure to read, and brought back memories of when I had
a Model 100, though I was a child in the 80s and never used it for anything
serious. I did learn a bit of BASIC programming on it, which I expanded upon
with the TRS-80 CoCo 2 that replaced my 100 later in that decade, though to be
honest I mostly played games on the latter machine.

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smcnally
> The only place I couldn’t use the 100 was in City Hall. The keyboard was too
> clackety-clack to take notes in that kind of environment. I did it during
> one meeting and the mayor put a private word in my ear letting me know that
> the TRS-80 was not welcome.

Start by taking notes on the Selectric and folks will appreciate the relative
quiet of the 100.

~~~
C1sc0cat
The VT100 if you turned on the keyclick sound was awesome if you where a touch
typist - I got yelled at once for using that :-)

------
mrob
>Mouse counts the number of bytes available and divides by seven, assuming
that the average word a reporter might use is seven letters long.

Isn't that six letters followed by a space?

------
russellbeattie
I own one of these as well because I started my career in journalism for a
couple years before becoming a developer. Additionally, my first computer ever
was a TRS-80 CoCo, so it seemed like a perfect nostalgia item to own.

Fun fact: The Model 100 has a year 2000 bug - the dates in the main menu are
hard coded to 19XX.

------
foofoo55
We used the TRS-80 Model 100 at work to write software for Allen-Bradley
Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). PLCs were fairly new at the time, and
when coupled with the TRS-80 in the field, many minds were blown.

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glonq
Back in the early 90's, I worked for a company that made parking meters. The
big yellow kind with displays and buttons. We sent TRS80 Model 102's to
customers for editing rates and messages and uploading them into the meters.

It was my job to reverse engineer the protocols and rewrite the software for
DOS so that it could be used on portables like the HP 200LX. A few years later
we rewrote it again for Windows.

I'd love to believe that there's still customers out there using the TRS or HP
to manage their parking meters.

------
equalunique
In case anyone was curious, the keycaps on that TRS-80 are made of doubleshot-
ABS in the DSA profile.

~~~
winrid
Is that special/better than common keyboards of today?

~~~
prometheus76
In addition to the letters not flaking off or wearing out, the DSA key profile
is different than almost all keyboards made today. Most keyboards today have a
concave profile for the tops of the keys that are basically uniform from the
top of the key to the bottom. (I don't know if I'm explaining it well, but I
think you understand just by taking a look at your keyboard).

Anyway, the DSA profile has more of a spherical concave recess, which cups
your fingers more than current keyboards.

My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 3, which also had the DSA key profile and
I love it. I'm actually saving up to get a keycap set with that profile to
replace my current keyset on my daskeyboard mechanical keyboard.

------
visiblink
My roommate in 1990 was a journalist and he had one of these.

There's an emulator here:
[https://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualt/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualt/)

------
theandrewbailey
> While computers ended up using the generic double-quote symbol " for both
> opening and closing quotation marks, in printing quotation marks are
> expected to be two different characters. To get around this, reporters were
> instructed to use two grave marks to open quotes, and two apostrophes to
> close quotes:

> For example: ``When we talk to God it’s called prayer. When God talks to us
> it’s called crazy.''

> As bad as that looks on a modern digital screen, it was absolutely jarring
> to see coming out of a teletype.

Is this why some people mix up grave symbols and apostrophes today?

------
Angostura
Thishas made me want to dig out my
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88)

------
protomyth
A modern version of the TRS-80 Model 100 would be a pretty amazing thing.
Along with the Psion and eMate were amazingly production little machines.

~~~
mbreese
There is the FreeWrite [0], which seems to be targeted at just writers, which
is in some respects the spiritual successor to the TRS-80 Model 100. I could
swear I saw at least one other Kickstarter with something similar, but this
was the only one I could find.

[0] [https://getfreewrite.com/](https://getfreewrite.com/)

Edit: Here’s another similar product called the AlphaSmart [1], but this one
was ultimately discontinued.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart)

~~~
wilsonnb3
We used to use those AlphaSmarts to learn how to type in elementary school in
the early 2000's, before our school got a laptop cart that could be wheeled
between classrooms.

Good times.

------
saganus
A bit off-topic but, I have a TRS-80 Model 4P that does not turn on. On the
inside everything seems fine (but I'm no expert).

Does anyone know where could I have one of these repaired? I'd love to boot it
up again as it was the first computer I ever owned.

------
dalacv
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/dungeons-of-
daggorath/9nbl...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/dungeons-of-
daggorath/9nblggh4spb4?activetab=pivot:overviewtab)

~~~
morganvachon
DoD actually didn't run on the Model 100/200 series, which was purely a
writing machine. You're probably thinking of the TRS-80 Color Computer 2, aka
the CoCo 2 or Trash-80. Dungeons of Daggorath was (in my opinion) the best
game for the CoCo 2 and one of the earliest dungeon crawler games.

~~~
Mountain_Skies
It's a real shame Dungeons of Daggorath was replaced in the movie version of
Ready Player One. Adventure, with its Easter egg, wasn't a bad replacement but
the CoCo got so little mainstream love in its day that it would have been nice
to see it on the big screen.

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TheOtherHobbes
I'm wondering what happened at the other of the wire service uploads. Were
they vetted? Checked? Edited? Or did they just get sent out to subscribers
automatically?

~~~
reaperducer
Never sent out automatically. Always went through at least one editor. And if
it wasn't breaking news, through at least one level of fact checkers.

------
musicale
A laptop with an actual decent keyboard!

Sadly I'm stuck with Apple's "butterfly" keyboard from one of the lower levels
of hell.

