Oh my gosh, you bring back such memories. Is it just my imagination or did the disk drive grind more than it produced data?
TRSDOS anyone?
We’ve come a looong way, though I hear Vista is still a nightmare of sorts.
That kkey bbbbounccce will be a real bitch on landings. I hope they have good shock absorbers on those things! (Or an up to date keybounce filter! :)
My TRS Mod-1 went in for warranty service almost 20 times. No kidding. Went through five mainboards. At the end it still ran like a three-legged horse. Had to keep whacking it upside the EI every ten minutes or so to keep it from locking up. Ah, those were the days... NOT!
(I was jealous of the guy who bought the first one in our part of the state -- they gave HIM the "pregnant cable" (an extra DIN cable to run next to the ribbon between the KB and EI), but all I got was the "buffered" cable (a box with a PCB that rode on the ribbon cable). I got the third one sold in the region, so I guess I didn't rate for really "early adopter" treatment.)
After all the warranty extentions wore off (they kept bumping my coverage up every time they'd wall-job it for a few weeks***), I took to it with screwdriver and soldering pencil. Added lower-case mod (21L02 1K static RAM chip "piggybacked" over one of the video memory chips, buncha wire-wrap wires soldered hither and yon, a couple of surplus calculator keys to use as Ctrl keys, and a machine language driver written by a guy out east who put out a newsletter), then a double-density kit (the "real" one from Tandy -- i.e., no real support, had to use third-party OS to make real use of the thing), four half-height 720K DSDD drives (the same format that ended up being the first standard for 3.5" drives, but using 5.25" disks), and I finally pushed it into the grave when I just had to tweak it just a tad faster. It died at something like 2 or 2.5Mhz (I forget the exact speed) when I added the turbo kit. I should have known better than to try digging the spurs into that already-lame old nag.
It was dead, dead, dead, for keeps after that adventure. Had to race down and buy a Mod-4, because we were running our store on the damn thing. Ouch!
*** I remember the time the store manager called to tell me it was back, and this time he was sure they'd fixed it -- they really got it taken care of, finally, blah blah blah. So, I went in, and instead of lugging it back with me, I said let's try it out and see what happens. He says sure, no problem, so, I plug it in -- it's sitting on the counter in the ratshack store -- and I pecked in some two-line loop to dump a string to the monitor (or something like that) -- and I think it was like thirty seconds or so and it locked up tight as a drum. Had to reset it or power down to get it going again. I just shook my head and walked out, and he packed it up for one more trip to the shop. It was like a bad dream that wouldn't end.