I had a TRS-80 Model Three. It was all one piece, but silver and black. It was ok to code with. In the late 80's a ran a sign engraving business with it.

My friends and I wreaked havoc with our Commodore 64s and one of my friends with rich parents had an Amiga. A couple had Atari 800s.

I started off with a Timex Sinclair, it had a whole 2k RAM onboard, but then I saved up my money and got the 16k expansion pack. All my friends were jealous.

Yes it's mine and no you can't have it :)

WoW
 

This stuff is too cool, don't know what happened to my Sperry something we used for my college business classes. Had the big floppy disks and could only store minimal data. Dos prompts were a drag. I leaped light years ahead when I bought my first windows, PC :helpme

But I want it.

This was my first, back in the early 80s. I thought it would be worth more on eBay but no...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...9-IMG_7132.jpg

Remember
10: print "duke skywalker"
20 goto 10
/run
Or something like that lol.

In the mid 1980s I attended a computer class held in the back room of a Tandy Electronics store (which was the Australian version of Radio Shack). There was a room full of these machines, but the majority had no floppy or hard drives. So how did you get programs onto them? The method used was ingenious: students type CLOAD (load program from cassette) and then the instructor CSAVEs the program on his master computer (which did have storage). All of the computer's cassette ports were connected to the instructor's computer, so that they could simultaneously listen to the broadcast of the program it was "saving", via the cassette port. Pretty amazing that you could set up a rudimentary network using nothing more than a simple analog distribution amplifier.

Yes that's exactly right!

When I was about 18 or 19, one of my first jobs was teaching computers at this little office that someone had set up. They had 6 TRS-80 Model 3's. The "Network Controller" from Radio Shack worked just as you described, by Cassette port.


http://www.trs-80.com/images/hw-model1-network2.png

My friend and I convinced the owner to let us build one for him because these things were too expensive (About $1400 I think). So what we did was connect the output of the Teaching computer to a simple audio amp (5 watts maybe, I don't remember), and sent the output of the amp to the input of each TRS-80 via audio cable, and it worked! The students typed CLOAD while the teacher typed CSAVE, and voila!

I'll do you even 1 better:

In the 80's I had written a BBS program, that people could dial into and post messages. It was popular, and adult, even though it could only accept 1 user at a time.

I added a second Model 3, modem and phone line so now 2 people could login at the same time. But now of course, I wanted chat.

So I made a special little cable that connected Cassette port Output, to the Cassette port Input of the other machine. A friend of mine and I wrote a program in machine language that would then let each Model 3 communicate with the other in real time via the cassette port! When a user from machine A wanted to chat with a user on Machine B, they would get a message, accept the request, and then be able to chat!

It was cool as hell at the time and today seems even cooler.

Haha, should have known there was an overpriced product to provide this networking service, rather than a cool hack thought of by some employee. Tandy Electronics was always the dumbed down and expensive store, selling a mix of gadgets, and low level electronic components, but even the small components were always packaged in a pretty plastic and cardboard display box. The packaging for a couple of resistors probably cost more than the actual product, and took up a hell of a lot more space. At another hobbyist store you just popped open a small drawer and took as many as you needed to the counter.

The TRS-80 was pretty cool, though. But expensive.

fiddy old schools

Yes Radio Shack was really overpriced on alot of small items. If you wanted resistors, capcacitors and things like that, you paid a fortune. We went to other stores like Adisons and Etco at the time.

Then again, this network gadget sat firmly in a super-vertical market, and, this was before networking of micro computers was even an idea. The TRS-80's had no network adapter of any kind. Only PC's could do it.

For price, the TRS-80 was priced really well. You could get a base model for about $500 and a "loaded" system for about $1100. Apple II's were in a similar price range I think.

Radio Shack?
 

I needed a mini USB cable (quick) for a GPU I set up for gaming. So I went to Radio Shack and paid $30 buck for a trivial item. No wonder people just buy on eBay :helpme

Found this and thought I'd share it with you.