Alpiner sucked..
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."
Imagine if you could go back in show up with a thumb drive and say this holds 64G of data; they’d first look at you like you were crazy then call you bonkers because they wouldn’t know how to access the data because USb hadnt been invented yet...lol
I loved “Parsec”. Got a kick out of “Hunt the Wumpus”, too.
Alpiner sucked..
I still have my Model I, Level I 4k model. My mom bought it for me back in 1980. said “One day, everyone will have one of these in their homes”
Was that one of the old Heathkit DIY’s?
lol, I’ve got one too.
Comp-u-serve at 300. You have to admit, it was pretty damn amazing.
the TRS-80 model II was the first computer i programmed. i would go to the local radio shack and code on it after school.
the store owner loved it, as i helped sell computers (it’s so simple, even a kid can do it!)
my first major program was a lunar lander type game. i was 12.
my next major piece was on the franklin ace 1000 (the first computer i owned). a rotating cube (not bad for a kid that hadn’t been exposed to trigonometry and only knew mechanical drawing and geometry). after that, i made a dynamic dungeon crawler.
to this day, many people i interview cannot do basic file operations. hell, most cannot implement strlen (auto-fail in my book)
the average page on my site is about 1.5m on a fresh reload.
1.5m @ 110 bps it would take 114390 seconds or almost 32 hours for a single page.
Thought you might enjoy this thread.
Join the club.
Those were fun times. (Except Jimmy Carter was prexy....)
No, but I built my share of those earlier. Every Heathkit I built was soldering to a printed circuit board. That was fun too!
The wire-wrapped boards I built were my own designs.
“I started with a TRS-80 that had 4K of memory.”
Not counting the unlimited memory in tapes. But I just had mine so I could use it as a terminal.
“- told me that he remembers an Apple hard drive of 10MB “
In the early 80’s, 10mb vendor drivers were about $2000. I bought a third party drive for $800.
Guess he was a bit off on the price ... it’s interesting how prices have come down on things like that. I read somewhere that if prices paralleled a Rolls, the car would be selling for around $3.50 .....
I was happy as heck when they came out with an external floppy disc drive.
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