This image is of the bedroom my dad and I shared as a home "office" for our shared Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer (AKA TRASH-80 Coco) circa 1980.
This state of the art unit connected to a small color television and had add-on peripherals; in this case a cassette tape deck and dot matrix printer.
Shortly after we got the printer, the teens next door were lucky enough to get a peripheral 8 inch floppy drive (1).
Man - we were living in the future!
I even created a program to roll up Tunnels & Trolls characters (2). (The math was simple enough for me).
For all you young 'uns - using the tape drive meant you had to enter a DOS (3) command telling the tape to fast forward to marker at the beginning of that particular program. And then you waited until it finally found it. The time depended on how many programs we'd stored, where the tape started, and how long much of the cassette was used for each program (which varied). And - of course - if you did not know where the tape had last been stopped, you had to first rewind it completely. I think the model dad and I shared came with 16K (4) memory, the minimum required to create programs.
Footnotes:
(1) An 8 inch floppy was a disk in a sleeve that was about the size of a damned salad plate. See: [en.wikipedia.org]
(2) Tunnels & Trolls was the second modern roleplaying game. It was a somewhat simplified version of Dungeons & Dragons.
(3) Disk Operating System: This was way before Windows. Now mouse, no nothing. You typed in commands and hoped for the best.
(4) 16 kilobytes of RAM is = 0.000016 Gigabyte. You'd need over 2,000 times that much memory just to play Candy Crush.
5
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I just found this scan of a 1980 Radio Shack catalogue. Only $448 to add 16k to your TRS-80! [radioshackcatalogs.com]
Jnei
Level 8
Dec 16, 2018
1
That is so cool to remember. Although I know little about this stuff, it has always fascinated me. I owned a huge, heavy Radio Shack also in the 70's. In the 60's I worked at a bank that just installed the first computer - in a 20' x 20' glass enclosed, sealed room. It took up most of the space. Now I'm writing this on my cell phone & can compute a million times more & faster!!!!! Love it.
Louiseann
Level 6
Dec 16, 2018
1
I had a Science of Cambridge (which later became Sinclair) ZX80 - which came in kit form for £80, so my dad had to solder the parts together. It had 1k of RAM and a 3.25mHz CPU for blistering performance, and wasn't capable of displaying (black and white, very blocky) graphics at the same time keys were being pressed to input data; nevertheless, it taught six-year-old me the very basic rudiments of programming (or indeed, the rudiments of programming in BASIC) and, after a few months of playing around with it, I wrote a graphics program - I copied it out by hand on paper and sent it to a magazine, which published it.
That's how you got software in those days - you couldn't download it (the Internet hadn't been invented) nor install from CD or even floppy disc; you had to go to a shop, buy a magazine and type a program in, character by character... though it wasn't long before you could buy programs on magnetic tape, just like you could with music, and sometimes the magazines gave away free software (which was frequently so full of bugs you usually had to rewrite it anyway) on flexi discs which were like flexible phonograph records and were inputted by "playing" them on a record player connected to the computer by a cable between the headphone socket and the computer's microphone socket (they generally lasted for one or two uses at best). Doing this made you feel like you lived in the time of the Jetsons.
I loved listening to the sounds software on magnetic tape made when played through a speaker, which is probably why I later loved techno music so much, too.
Jnei
Level 8
Dec 16, 2018
4
So that's why my code from the back page of the computer magazine never worked! And I certainly didn't know enough to debug it.
I remember these. The parish priest in my parents church owned one and used it to create all kinds of documents for the church and high school.
That dude was the Bill Gates of my home town. Knew everything there was to know about computers at the time. We all thought he was a genius. He taught computer classes at the high school. I didn't learn much from him because I wasn't smart enough. I did just well enough to scrape by with C's.
webbew1
Level 7
Dec 16, 2018
1
Enjoy being online again!
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