80's computer question

Radio Shack TRS-80 was my first

Packard bell
Gateway
AST

Radio Shack TRS-80's

Apple II

Texas Instruments TI-99's

and

The Commodore Pet

Last Edited by C.K. Dexter Haven on 09/04/2018 07:04 PM

Atari 800, cassette tape storage, 300 baud modem. Good times.

Just seen on eBay, lol

I had a Tandy. Had a blast writing code to make it play weird songs and graphics. In college it was all about punchcards...wow...I’m a fossil.

Commodore 64 with a Frogger game cartridge. Fun for the whole family!

TI 99/4A, FTW!!

Radio Shack TRS-80 model III.

My dad had a Commodore 64 in the early 80’s. Loved the games. Especially Blue Max.

Last Edited by BrokedownPalace on 09/04/2018 07:24 PM

TRS-80
IBM PCJr.
IBM XT
IBM AT
PS2 Model 50Z
PS2 Model 95
ValuePoint 486DX4
Then made all my PCs afterwards.

Apple 1 was a home brew computer first built by Woz in 1976.

Apple 2 was a mass produced computer built and offered by Apple in 1977.

The first computer I used was a beta version of the Macintosh Plus (I was working for an ad agency that handled their account). I also got to see a beta of Illustrator 88.

My first computer was a 286 386 clone in 1986. Two floppy drives, no hard drive. No mouse. Amber CRT.

Amazing how things have advanced since then.

Last Edited by An Average American Patriot on 09/04/2018 07:32 PM

Back then we were working on them. Very soon we will be working for them.

Ditto

IBM-AT with a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive. I want to say it had 64K of RAM.

I taped some electrodes to my penis and whacked it against a typewriter.

Ha ha ha, my family had a Tandy as well.

And yellow type on a blue screen.

I want to say my first hard drive was something ridiculous, like 20MB.

And you could cut that notch into a floppy disk and flip it over and write on the other side! Technology!

Actually, my dad worked with those punch cards and the floppy disks that were like the size of LP records (another dinosaur). As kids, we used to make a bunch of things out of those punch cards.

The TRS-80 was the first one I was able to use in high school. The first one I actually owned for myself was a Tandy T-1000, which I still have in my basement, along with the monitor, 9-pin dot matrix printer, and all the original software it came with. All still fully functional.

I check it's value on E-Bay occasionally. It keeps slowly increasing in value, so I'm holding on to it.

Old school stuff like this with floppy discs.

We were too poor to own a computer, but a friend of mine had one of the early Radio Shack home computers. I didn't think much of it at the time.

Computers were boring before the internet.

I had a TI-99/4A when I was a teenager. I even went to a few user group meetings where people showed off their modified or expanded systems. This was after IBM/Microsoft was well established and the TI was outdated.

I still remember the sound of loading a program off a cassette tape.

I even made my own adapter to use an Atari joystick to play games.

The sad thing about the TI/99-4A is that the circuit board or one of the chips was purposely designed to only use half available the "bus width" (8 bits vs 16 bits or something) and so the system as released only had about HALF the speed it was actually capable of.

At one of the user groups a guy presented a known user modification where he added a little circuit board and some jumper wires and bypassed the built-in bus limitation.

It was amazing watching it boot up and operate at almost twice the speed.

Texas Instruments could have dominated the personal computer industry if they were actually serious and spent money.

Last Edited by TexasPaleo on 09/04/2018 08:09 PM

Anyone remember the Intellivision gaming console that had a computer keyboard attachment? A friend of mine had one that I borrowed for a while. I wrote my first piece of BASIC code on that thing. Saved it to a cassette tape.

Still have C64 and C128 plus 5 Disk drives and a non working HD for them. Computers still work great and still have many games for them.

Heck of a workhorse

The Trash-80.

Actually not trash for its time.

I actually had a zx-81...saved up for months for the 16k ram upgrade. Remember that monstrosity? About the size of a stick of butter that plugged into the rear of the pc.


Kids today don't know about the tight coding restrictions of yesteryear, lots of really poor coding practices around as resources seem infinite.

We used to code whole games with less memory that a phone icon uses!

Coleco Gemini

"She was a ZX-81. She was cheap, she was stupid, and she wouldn't load. Well, not for me, anyway."
-- Holley

:holley:

:red dwarf:

The voice synthesis program on the tandy got me a 2 week suspension for inputting dirty limericks, good times.