MHaensel

M1L1 Number Wizard.txt I like playing around on a emulated Model I in level I basic. It's so . . . simple.

Everyone needs something to do during the shutdown. While researching TRS-80 printers in Radio Shack computer catalogs and 80 Micro magazine, I've found some interesting things: The Line Printer I was . . . limited. It printed upper-case characters and numbers only, monospaced, no block graphics, no bitmap printing. It also used 360 watts of power! Fortunately, things improved quickly. The Line Printer II/III added lower-case characters. The IV/V/VI added added block graphics characters. The IV and VI also added proportional printing, although the V stayed monospace in the interest of speed. But it wasn't until the Line Printer VIII that TRS offered a fully-capable dot matrix printer, with dot-addressable graphics, a full TRS-80 character set, and proportional printing. For $800 in 1982, it wasn't too bad a deal. ========== The beefier printers put the *heavy* in heavy duty. Line printer I: 45 pounds Line printer V: 42 pounds DMP-500: 50 pounds DMP-2100: 42 pounds LMP-2150: 60 pounds - although this printed a full line at a time, so it's closer to mainframe hardware than a microcomputer printer ========== The Daisy Wheel printers had high-quality output. The original Daisy Wheel II was rated for 43 cps! But it also made an awful racket while printing: Later daisy wheels got oddly slow. The DWP-510 and DWP-520 kept up with the original, but others were about half as fast. And speed doesn't correlate with price or release date! You could but a $1500 slow printer or a $1000 fast printer. ========== If someone has better info than me, I welcome corrections. What other neat stuff is there to know about these printers?

I don't have a retro TRS-80 printer yet, but one is in my future, either a daisy wheel or a dot matrix (Line Printer or DMP). I'd like to connect it to my 2020-era laptop. It would be fun to output from a modern computer to one of these heavy-duty beasts. A USB->Centronics adapter gets me most of the way there. Do I need a card edge adapter or something for early printers, or were they standard Centronics ports?

For laser printers, this sounds . . . wrong to me. When things work correctly, toner is fused to the paper and shouldn't be sticky. Duplex printing doesn't change that. Have you have this experience with multiple laser printers?

Talk about a speed difference! 8-bit bus to 32-bit bus, 5-10 MHz to 40 MHz . . . it must have felt like a supercomputer.

I started computing on a Commodore 64 with one or two game cartridges, connected to an old black-and-white television. My brother and I typed programs in from the C=64 manual. That was my introduction to programming! It was a start that my parents could afford at the time. (Thank you, mom and dad. Thank you, thank you, thank you.) But a lot of the things needed for a good computer experience were missing. Among other things, we had no way to save programs. If you want to run that program you typed in yesterday, well, type it in again. A better monitor came early. Text was readable, and in color. A floppy drive followed soon afterwards. OH MY GOD it was amazing being able to save your work one day, and the next day you could load it right back up! The second floppy drive was an almost equally large improvement. Being able to easily make copies was another big step forward. But the winner is probably when I bought a printer. I was literally shaking with excitement when it arrived. (Hey, I was a teenager. My friend said, "You're vibrating!") The computer could finally have an impact on the world outside my bedroom. Suddenly I could print homework assignments, type letters to friends, organize my VHS tape collection with nicely-printed labels, make signs for my bedroom and locker . . . Computing became useful, and not just a hobby! And then the modem that let me call BBSs, and soon connect to the internet . . . being able to chat on IRC with people around the world was a lifeline for me. I've posted elsewhere about upgrading from the Amiga to an iMac. That was an amazing jump too. :- )

Great work. What an improvement! Thanks for reminding people that these were new and nice at one time, and can be again.

That was my "has to have an Amiga" moment too! Late 1989/early 1990, I saw an Amiga in the mall running the Dragon's Lair demo. That kind of fluid, full-screen, full-color animation was jaw-dropping at the time. A computer can do this?! I was sure this kind of power meant it would be incredible at other things too. That demo sold me on the Amiga for the next decade. I'd vote 486. My 386DX-25 was stodgy for games. When I sold it and bought an Amiga 600, I played more games on the A600 than the 386. I had that phase too! I was so sure the Amiga was going to take off. The years went by, but it was just about to bust out . . . any day now . . . I annoyed the heck out of my husband from 1991-1999! Some reasons it was going to win: Any program can have the screen resolution and color setting it wants Digitized sound that beat everything else until 16-bit stereo sound became commonplace An operating system and hardware design that felt knowable - the design work of a few smart people really showed through Smoothly drag the screen down to see another program with different resolution/color settings, have both on screen at the same time . . . it still feels miraculous. "Hey y'all, look at this!"

Thinking Kindly About Tandy Radio Shack TL;DR: TRS saw a growth market and dove into it with both feet! They weren't sure how they were going to win, but they made the most of the opportunity. I've played with emulated Tandy machines over the last year, and read 80 Micro and TRS-80 Microcomputer News. I used to be puzzled by many of Tandy Radio Shack's (TRs's) decisions. I think I have a better perspective now. It's easy to critcise TRS. Every hardware upgrade brought some quirky incompatibility for software. Keeping track of all the TRSDOS versions is almost impossible. And trying to support six kinds of computers** at the same time was always a crazy idea. But they did this because each line served a specific market need, identified by weaknesses in the Model I. Like most early microcomputers, the TRS-80 Model I was kind of a shot in the dark. Further development came fast and was *all* Tandy noticing and responding to market forces. Business needs more storage, lower-case letters, and 80-column screens? Model II. Home users want color, sound, and games? Color computer. The expansion box isn't reliable, the FCC is unhappy, and schools want all-in-one design? Model III. Computers on the go? Pocket computers, Model 100, both developed by other companies but sold and supported by TRS. IBM workalikes? Tandy 2000: ran MS-DOS, slightly faster than the IBM PC AT, on the market six months *before* the IBM PC AT. On paper they knocked this one completely out of the park. 100% IBM compatibility required? Tandy 1000, which quickly spawned a whole line of true IBM compatible computers. To contrast with the incredibly popular 1981 IBM PC 5150: $1565 base price 8/16 bit processor 16KB RAM CGA if you wanted color, MDA+printer port if you wanted a machine for word processing First versions of DOS didn't understand hard drives By early 1982, Tandy beat that in any dimension you cared to go. The Color Computer and Model III were cheaper, especially when you put a complete system together Model 16 had a 16/32-bit processor Computers from 4KB to 128KB RAM built-in Color Computer roughly equals CGA, slightly higher-resolution monochrome graphics available for models II-16 Hard drives available and fully supported for models II-16 In retrospect, it would be great if TRS made these options cross-compatible. I can only imagine the confusion of someone walking into a store and finding software for six competely different systems. But nobody was doing that kind of compatibility yet! It took several years and millions of dollars of engineering effort to put IBM clones in all these different markets. TRS should be applauded for the extensive work they did making computers affordable, available, and useful to people with different needs. They tackled this problem early on, and in a way nobody else did. ** The six computer lines: Model I/III/IV, Model II/12/16/6000, Color Computers, Tandy 2000/1000, pocket computers, and the Model 100. You could probably split the 1000 and 2000 into their own lines since software came in different versions for each.

I've been reading TRS-80 Microcomputer News, and entered a few of their type-in programs. You can copy-and-paste these into an emulator to run them. I made a typo on the Compu-Artist program that I think makes the output better, but I included the original version as a comment also. Enjoy! M2 tree text based.bas.txt M1,3 Christmas Tree on Line Printer.bas.txt M1L1 Tree.bas.txt M1L2 Tree.bas.txt M2 Tree graphics .bas.txt M1L1 Compu-Artist.txt

The TRS-80 model 4 and model 12 both came out in 1983. In terms of hardware: 4 MHz Z80, similar amounts of RAM, similar display, CP/M and TRSDOS compatible. But the 4 was half the price! Plus points for the 12: Slightly more RAM 1.25MB floppy drives Could be expanded into a model 16 (for $1499!) Very good CPU support chips - I don't know how the 4 compares Was a 12 that much better than the 4? Am I missing something obvious? * Retail price shortly after release for a two-disk model: 12 = $3999, 4 = $1999. Compared in the RSC-10 catalog.

I sort-of missed out on the TRS-80 Model II in the 1980s. I enjoy playing with one in emulation now. But 10-year-old me would have been bitterly disappointed by a computer with no color, no sound, and limited animation. I missed out on the Amiga 2000 back in 1991. My parents bought me a boring IBM compatible. :- | I got Amigas years later, but they were very much in decline by the time I could afford them. P.S. My A4000 needed to be opened for most cold boots, and the sharp case usually drew blood. It's funny that the new Amiga accelerator is called the "Vampire."

Very nice! What do you want to run on it first?

Nice setup! AGA was a big step up from ECS, and an accelerator helps even more.

What program displays that insanely colorful control panel?

I'll answer in a general way. Emulation lets me play with way more machines than I have space or money for: A Commodore B128 COMAL 80 on a C64, which was too expensive for me at the time A TRS-80 Model II and Tandy 6000 for TRSDOS, CP/M, and XENIX A 68K Mac for easy-to-navigate menus and the After Dark: The Simpsons screen saver 8088 and 8086 PCs - the first time I heard that IBM PC beep again, I felt like a teenager for a moment That would be a fair amount of physical hardware, money, and upkeep with real devices. That said, I'd like to own one physical retrocomputer for the full experience. Maybe two. No, wait, three . . . but definitely no more than three-ish.

I guess it depends on the household. For me, the C64 really was a games machine I also started programming on. I learned BASIC, COMAL, binary logic, a little assembly language, did word processing, played sidplayer music, accessed BBSs and the internet . . . and played games. All my adult professional jobs have been computer-related, so it worked out as an investment in my future. Thanks, mom and dad. :- )

COMAL was a great language, and a significant step up from PET BASIC 2.0. Named procedures, IF . . . THEN . . . ELSE, several types of loops, PRINT USING . . . COMAL was my first experience with a truly structured programing language! Thanks to my time with COMAL, I learned C without really breaking stride. DavidC is right that a bundled C64 + COMAL cartridge would have unlocked a lot of the C64's capabilities. I wonder if there would have been a market for education? As carlsson notes, Commodore and the home market were very price-sensitive. But the education market was less so. A C64 + COMAL cartridge would have unlocked a lot of programming capability for about $600. It could have competed with Turbo PASCAL at the low end, at least for a while. The Amazing Adventures of Captain COMAL.pdf

For Deskmate specifically, I think I found the answer! Deskmate for the Model 16/Tandy 6000 runs under XENIX, which is a multi-user operating system. Among other things, that means virtualized access to screens and keyboards, which slows things down.

Just to follow-on my original post: I didn't have much experience with 68K Macs. My PowerPC Macs were speed demons in MacOS classic, but also crashed a lot. In emulation, Basilisk II has been very stable. SheepShaver crashes a lot until I learn what programs I can or can't run. Since that mimics what I remember from real hardware, I'm not going to fight too hard. I'll keep Basilisk II around for smooth operation and fond memories. The Simpsons screen saver always makes me smile!

Back when I first my bought my iMac G3/233, it was a revelation. I loved MacOS 8 and the speed of the thing. But it crashed on me, a lot. I later bought a PowerMac G4/450. It was a rocket in classic MacOS! But it crashed even more than the iMac. At the time I used my Macs pretty hard, for everything from internet to programming to 3D games. i spent lots of time trying different combinations of extensions to make things more stable. Now I'm considering getting a classic Mac for light duty: writing, speech synthesis, Kaleidoscope, After Dark, and maybe a small game or two. I like speed but stability would be better. Would a 68040-based Mac crash less than a PowerPC one under classic MacOS? Do board members have experience here?

What if the TRS-80 Model II had won? 80 Micro (March 1982) compared the IBM PC 5150 to the TRS-80 Model II. The IBM could handle more RAM but both systems came with just 64K. The Model II had more software, bigger/faster floppy disk storage, was cheaper when you included the cost of a printer, and so on. This got me to thinking: what if the Model II had won instead of the IBM PC? Please wander with me through Model II world. 1979: Tandy Radio Shack (TRS) releases the Model II to positive reviews but modest market penetration. They have a nationwide dealer network and establish a solid software base. TRS also releases the Color Computer with 4K for the home market. Early 1982: The market is split between “business computers” and “home/games computers”. The Color Computer and a few minor competitors fight over the home computer market. Business computers run up against the limits of 64K RAM and floppy disk storage. IBM comes out with the PC 5150, but expects it to be a fancy terminal you run little projects on before you connect to Big Blue mainframes. With 64K RAM and 360K floppy drives, the IBM name only carries it so far. The Model 16 is released with a 68000 card, 256K RAM, and 1.25MB floppy drives. A brief burst of sales shows market interest. But rather than buy expensive software again for the 68000, businesses focus on the Z80-based Model II. The Model IIb is released, which is basically a Model II with 1.25MB floppies and 80K of RAM. (In our world this was the Model 12.) The $3200 price is low enough for strong sales. The 80K Model IIb is the best-selling business microcomputer this year. The 32K Color Computer is the best-selling home computer. 1983: The Color Computer 2 is released with 16K or 64K of RAM and several internal improvements. 1984: The Model IIc is released with up to 256K of bank-switched RAM and slightly faster operation. Model II sales get a significant boost. 1985: The Model IId is released using a Hitachi HD64180 CPU. It runs Z80 code but also supports up to 1MB memory without bank switching, 10 MHz speed, pipelined instruction operation, and other significant improvements. This gives businesses the computer they've been ready for: compatible with their old software, but faster and with more room to work. Sales take off like a rocket. TRS struggles to meet demand. 1986: There are lots of third-party software and accessories for the Model IId. But TRS doesn’t like to carry third-party stuff. An alternative network of distribution and dealership springs up. “Model II Complete” stores show up in malls right next to Radio Shack. “Everything but the Model II” bundles would become popular: printers, word processors, utilities, a few games, blank floppy disks . . . everything you need except the Model IId that was only available at TRS. The Color Computer 3 is released with 128KB of RAM and significant graphical improvements. "Model II Complete" stores pick up on some of the CoCo home market, mostly focusing on games. 1990: Zilog releases a backwards-compatible z380. This 32-bit processor runs Z80 software, has clock speeds up to 20 MHz, addresses 4GB of RAM, and supports floating-point coprocessors. The Model IIe uses the Z380, adds simple but high-resolution color graphics, has 1MB of RAM in the base model, and uses 2.88MB 3.5" floppy drives. TRS releases the Color Computer 4 with a hybrid 8/16 bit CPU and support for up to 1 MB of RAM. It's somewhere between EGA and Amiga OCS graphics capability, but resolution is low because of the need to display on a composite monitor or TV. Early 1993: The internet and CD-ROMs become A Thing. People want high-resolution full-color screens, CDs to play music and install software, dial-up modems, and good sound. They want to browse the internet on a personal computer. And they want these things everywhere: at home, at work, in hotels. TRS has a problem: everything listed is a natural fit for the color computer, not the Model II. But their view computing is a Model II running several terminals in the office, a color computer at home connected to the TV. They release a Model IIf (up to 40 MHz, with CD drive) and Color Computer 5 targeted at different markets. The CD drive on the Model IIf spins the whole time the computer is powered on. Third-party products push on two fronts: 1. Improve sound and graphics on the Model IIf to make it comfortable for home use. 2. Expand the Color Computer 5 with more RAM, high-quality monitors, and business software. The release of the game Doom tips things decisively for the Model II. Raw CPU speed and expandability overcome a lot of flaws. The Color Computer 5 puts up a darn good showing before the end. Its strength in 2D games carries it along for several years. 1995: TRS realizes it's time to unify their product lines. The Model IIg is released with a high-resolution, full-color screen. An optional add-on card provides compatibility with the Color Computer 5. There is much rejoicing. TRS leads the way into the new millennium of computing! That’s my tour through Model II world. Thanks for visiting. And if you think I missed something, or you’d like to add your own take, please post!

Sorry, I would close the thread if I could. Thank your for your perspectives.

Very cool!

I'd love to hear other people's perspectives on physical hardware vs. emulation. I find myself window shopping for retro computers: a TRS-80 Model II, a 68040 or PowerPC Mac, maybe an early XT or AT clone . . . computers I liked/wanted at the time, or would want looking back on it. I've also recreated the experience using emulators. Plus points for emulators: Integrates my retro environment with a computer with full internet access No need to store physical hardware (I don't have a lot of free space) Recreate basically any hardware configuration desired Use any keyboard/monitor/laptop I want (!) But there are things emulation doesn't scratch the nostalgia itch for: Classic MacOS: was engineered to be instantly responsive to mouse movement, I don't think emulators quite capture this Floppy disks: a program was a physical thing you could organize and file The feel and sound of an old computer So I toss it out to the forum: do you prefer emulation, physical hardware, or a mix? Was there something you liked so much you needed the physical machine?