This TRS-80
wayne.lorentz.me
This TRS-80
1–10 of 56 posts
Re: This TRS-80
#2How delightful :) I don't have much substantive to say beyond, that was a pleasure to read and made me very happy in a strange way.
Re: This TRS-80
#3I had a TRS-80 Model 200 for a while, so this brings back some weird memories. I regret getting rid of it, really; it'd have been fun to have it around to bring to coffee shops for writing sessions now.
(Possibly) interesting trivia: the linked article mentions the AP used a typesetting system called ATEX. This was a big dedicated terminal/server system that basically used plain text with markup, similar to troff or LaTeX, although the markup was entirely different. The team that created ATEX split up and created two different pieces of software, both inspired by ATEX. One team created a DOS word processor called XyWrite, which was used by some major publications well into the 1990s and possibly into this century. (IIRC, it was also used to issue US Supreme Court rulings for many, many years!) The other team created PageMaker, one of the very first GUI desktop publishing programs. To the best of my knowledge, every version of PageMaker -- as well as the first couple of versions of its successor InDesign, and contemporary versions of its major competitor, Quark XPress -- could natively import XyWrite files. (While XyWrite is no more, it has its own successor program, an academic-focused Windows word processor called Nota Bene.)
Re: This TRS-80
#4Re: This TRS-80
#5In case anyone was curious, the keycaps on that TRS-80 are made of doubleshot-ABS in the DSA profile.
Re: This TRS-80
#6I had a TRS-80 Model 200 for a while, so this brings back some weird memories. I regret getting rid of it, really; it'd have been fun to have it around to bring to coffee shops for writing sessions now. (Possibly) interesting trivia: the linked article mentions the AP used a typesetting system called ATEX. This was a big dedicated terminal/server system that basically used plain text with markup, similar to troff or…
That brings back memories, I used PageMaker to make our high school yearbook in the 90s :)
Re: This TRS-80
#7I’ve mentioned this before here, but I worked with an electrical engineer who until at least the late 90’s, possibly later, kept a Model 100 on his lab bench for testing serial port API’s on electronic systems he was building.
Re: This TRS-80
#8A modern version of the TRS-80 Model 100 would be a pretty amazing thing. Along with the Psion and eMate were amazingly production little machines.
Re: This TRS-80
#9A fun side note: the core software that was included on the Model 100's ROM was written by Microsoft, and not just by Microsoft, but by Bill Gates himself. It was the last Microsoft project where he would write most of the code personally.
In a wide-ranging early '90s interview at the National Museum of American History, he reminisced about the Model 100, calling it "in a sense my favorite machine": https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm#tc35
Re: This TRS-80
#10https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/dungeons-of-daggorath/9nbl...
DoD actually didn't run on the Model 100/200 series, which was purely a writing machine. You're probably thinking of the TRS-80 Color Computer 2, aka the CoCo 2 or Trash-80. Dungeons of Daggorath was (in my opinion) the best game for the CoCo 2 and one of the earliest dungeon crawler games.