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This TRS-80

wayne.lorentz.me

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Re: This TRS-80

#11

Post by morganvachon »

jkingsman wrote: post #2

How 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.

It was definitely a pleasure to read, and brought back memories of when I had a Model 100, though I was a child in the 80s and never used it for anything serious. I did learn a bit of BASIC programming on it, which I expanded upon with the TRS-80 CoCo 2 that replaced my 100 later in that decade, though to be honest I mostly played games on the latter machine.

Re: This TRS-80

#12

Post by foofoo55 »

We used the TRS-80 Model 100 at work to write software for Allen-Bradley Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). PLCs were fairly new at the time, and when coupled with the TRS-80 in the field, many minds were blown.

Re: This TRS-80

#13

Post by tekstar »

I bought a Model 100 literally last week. Going to build a little raspberry pi into a piece of wood for it to talk to.

Other than that, it would be nice to be able to take a note on it and transfer it to a modern computer. Not sure the easiest way to hook that up as I have no disk or cassette drive for it. Maybe a cable to go from cassette interface to audio and some software to decode the audio signal that would record to cassette?

Also not sure the easiest way to load Zork.

Re: This TRS-80

#14

Post by james_pm »

My first use of the TRS-80 was a model 100 that was at our McDonald's. It ran a custom program called McBin that was supposed to help manage the quantity of the different sandwiches that you put into the "bin" which was a heated compartment with eight or ten slides to hold food which was prepared in advance during busy periods.

The McBin was basically useless, but I always set it up heading into a lunch or dinner rush because it meant I got to play with the TRS-80.

Re: This TRS-80

#15

Post by mbreese »

protomyth wrote: post #8

A 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.

There is the FreeWrite [0], which seems to be targeted at just writers, which is in some respects the spiritual successor to the TRS-80 Model 100. I could swear I saw at least one other Kickstarter with something similar, but this was the only one I could find.

[0] https://getfreewrite.com/

Edit: Here’s another similar product called the AlphaSmart [1], but this one was ultimately discontinued.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart

Re: This TRS-80

#16

Post by sowbug »

protomyth wrote: post #8

A 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.

The DIY version would be a PCB with an ATmega32u4, an SD card slot, a similarly-sized LCD screen, and a lithium-ion battery. You'd attach a portable USB keyboard of your liking.

Re: This TRS-80

#17

Post by caf »

tekstar wrote: post #13

I bought a Model 100 literally last week. Going to build a little raspberry pi into a piece of wood for it to talk to. Other than that, it would be nice to be able to take a note on it and transfer it to a modern computer. Not sure the easiest way to hook that up as I have no disk or cassette drive for it. Maybe a cable to go from cassette interface to audio and some software to decode the audio signal that would rec…

It has an RS-232 port, you should be able to hook that up to a USB-RS232 adaptor with a null modem.

Re: This TRS-80

#18

Post by krasin »

Apparently, there are a lot of alive TRS-80 calculators around, but many of them have a defective LCD (due to moisture getting inside). Someone took the challenge and recently (February-May 2019) produced a batch of custom LCDs to fix all TRS-80 calculators in the world.

Part 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8-HfGTCcCk

Part 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Vagc0FJK8

Part 3 (final): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TbvC79ff3M

Re: This TRS-80

#19

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

caf wrote: post #17
tekstar wrote: post #13

I bought a Model 100 literally last week. Going to build a little raspberry pi into a piece of wood for it to talk to. Other than that, it would be nice to be able to take a note on it and transfer it to a modern computer. Not sure the easiest way to hook that up as I have no disk or cassette drive for it. Maybe a cable to go from cassette interface to audio and some software to decode the audio signal that would rec…

It has an RS-232 port, you should be able to hook that up to a USB-RS232 adaptor with a null modem.

It would be delightful to hide a Raspberry Pi inside the case of the TRS-80, wired to the serial interface, so you'd have an apparently unmodified model 100 until you fired up the terminal program and connected to a full-blown linux commandline.

Re: This TRS-80

#20

Post by salgernon »

tekstar wrote: post #13

I bought a Model 100 literally last week. Going to build a little raspberry pi into a piece of wood for it to talk to. Other than that, it would be nice to be able to take a note on it and transfer it to a modern computer. Not sure the easiest way to hook that up as I have no disk or cassette drive for it. Maybe a cable to go from cassette interface to audio and some software to decode the audio signal that would rec…

Funny, I sold several at the Sunnyvale swap meet last week. They’re awesome. I saved my teenage summer earnings to buy one and used it to do physics simulations in high school.
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