Posted on 03/17/2015 7:49:21 PM PDT by AlmaKing
Once upon a time, Radio Shack was saved from bankruptcy — in the 1960s. The British Tandy corporation, at that time a leather goods retailer, bought the company in a resulting merger called Tandy Radio Shack & Leather.
In 1977, Radio Shack's 3,000 stores started selling the TRS-80 (Tandy/Radio Shack, Z-80 microprocessor). Largely forgotten by the general public, the TRS-80 was, with Apple and Commodore's products, one of the pioneering personal computers of the late 1970s, and a key machine in the personal computer revolution. Byte magazine described the "1977 Trinity" of computers: Apple, Commodore and Tandy.
In 1981, the year of this catalog, the TRS-80 earned the nicknamed "Trash-80." Computer designer and writer Adam Osbourne described Tandy and Radio Shack as "the number-one microcomputer manufacturer."
Probably get SF deviants all excited now........
I started with a TRS-80 that had 4K of memory.
Had an Apple II Plus at home and a “Trash-80” at school.
Check the 300 baud modem. I’m so old that I used computers that worked at 110 baud (one start bit, 7 data bits, 1 parity bit, two stop bits - 10 characters a second). How long would an internet page take to load at that speed?
I remember baud or symbol rate vs. bit rate. Started at 300, saw the jumps to 28k, 56k, etc.
Except for printing, I iPhone does everything in that catalogue. But I don’t print much stuff anymore.
I recall loading programs from the tape recorder.
Ah, when I had my first “home computer”, you couldn’t BUY one. I had to wire wrap it, and the parts alone almost broke me in high school.
Don't remind me how many years I had to limp along with dial up connections.
Bttt! I have to show the kids this. :)
A few years ago, I attended a sort of yard sale put on by a local computer club.
I actually found a few items I needed. My computer was old enough that the memory sticks they were selling for 50 cents each, worked in mine.
One thing I noticed as they were still setting up tables was a 300 baud modem, still new in the box. It had a price of several hundred dollars but the guy in charge told them to mark it 50 Cents too. He said if that was too high, to just give it away.
> I started with a TRS-80 that had 4K of memory.
It was so much fun loading programs with one of those bulky tape drives wasn’t it? They didn’t always take. I remember writing tons of programs in BASIC and playing Dungeons of Daggorath and being beaten to death by a stick figure...lol
Still kicking myself in the ass for being a high schooler at the birth of the PC craze and not understanding the potential.
Somewhere in my basement is a Hayes external 300/1200 baud modem. I can remember being excited about finding BBSes that supported 1200...
Yep! Our Atari 800 did that...
I had to use dial-up until two years ago when I went to Hughes net. Just last night, I checked with Century Link which is the local provider of wired phone service.
Sure enough, they still don’t offer high speed internet out here. If not for satellite, I would still be using dial-up which is now just awful. By the time I switched, a large part of the internet was simply not useable.
Just bought a 32GB memchip for my camera for around $40 ....1TB backup drive for my laptop for $79.
> Check the 300 baud modem
I remember having a 300 baud modem and hearing the familiar flurry of noise over the phone linenuntil I heard a single tone then was connected to a bulletin board. I remember the day when the 2400 baud snobs didn’t want us on their boards...lol....boy times haved changed
Remember when they offered the TI-994A for only $99. I bought one and actually was learning to program. It also had a pretty good black jack program.
I gave it to my daughter and gave up on them for a while. She on the other hand got pretty good with computers and she still is.
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