For no other reason than the three letters TRS, which stood for Tandy Radio Shack.
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Old Heads: Tell me bout the good ole days
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Tandy Radio Shack (TRS) got that nickname because of their low quality copies of whatever tech was popular/current at the time. IBM and Apple are still here, Tandy is not. And when Tandy went, Radio Shack stopped selling computers at all, becoming the pariah of technology stores in the 80s/90s.
So the moniker of 'Trash-80' is apt, because a lot of what Tandy marketed and sold through Radio Shack was just so much garbage.
See above…
Also, just a green screen when other computers could do color albeit it limited fashion. TRS80s could do lots of useful stuff, but it was less interesting to a 10 year old than a colorful sprite working it’s way across the screen. The TRS80 lab I was in had a hard drive. It was the size of an ottoman and was a whopping 5MB.
It’s funny because I still remember my neighbor’s a1000 as a revolutionary device. When I look at the specs now, it doesn’t match my memory of the machine. I loved deluxe paint, and was totally into the motion graphics you could do on it. Rose colored glasses in hindsight, I suppose. If only they’d actually released the AAA chipset.
I got my Amiga 1000 in either 1992 or 1993, I forget which. I always loved its ability for games (which is why I got it) but I never got beyond that. The reason for that is that at the time I had a 486 as my primary computer. The A1000 I got had no hard drive and really low ram. The original owner had bought a 1mb side car that plugged into the side. But that's pretty much all you got - ~1mb of ram.
While nothing special for the time, my 486 had more ram than that and a hard drive. Had I got this Amiga say in '84 when I got my C64 I probably would have had the accessories over time that would have made it much better. But that wasn't an investment I was going to make in the early 1990s.
Not really rose tinted: for its age the Amiga was an amazing all-in-one machine. Macs were B&W at the time, and while you could add allsorts to PCs to make their graphics and sound capabilities superior to the Amiga, at the time they were a minefield of incompatible devices, even Windows wasn't an established standard until after the Amiga had died.
The Amiga was a better machine than the Mac but was marketed by a company which had a business-interest too deeply entrenched in making PC-compatibles to allow the Amiga to seriously realise its potential. They did at least release the AGA chipset on the 4000, 600 and 1200 which added better graphics.
It is true, compared to other offerings, especially at the beginning, the Amiga was hot stuff. The AGA was always a compromise, it never kept the pace, and you’re right, commodore pooched the whole Amiga project. The genlock stuff was lost on me as a kid, I never had the money for a video toaster. Lightwave was pretty amazing, it could actually hold its own for some projects against Silicon Graphics.
Late 80s we had an SE and ImageWriter Apple printer we shared at work in a large scale hotel which my boss at that time would be hoarding for preparing training & development materials 90% of the time. He fumed when he was summoned by his boss because the Executive Office was at the far side of the building which gave me some time to access to the wonder machine. It was a fun machine to use and loved the Oscar the Grouch trash-bin animation utility in OS7.
I also later upgraded at work to a Macintosh VX machine in 1993 which was my first separate computer and monitor. Every morning when I went into my office I loved looking at my 32Mhz processor VX machine with its CD-ROM drive built in. Naturally at corporate level, the IT department at that time was using Windows systems so they were going to 66Mhz Pentium chips if I remember correctly which was blazing fast. If I wanted my Mac to get somewhere close to that I would need to insert a Daystar accelerator board into one of the NuBus slots.
At home I first had a Performa 5200 mainly for my daughter to use. The I later went on to G3 blue and G4 grey towers.
In those days you could access the motherboard easily as it opened sideways and the motherboard was facing up. I use d to tweek with the jumpers on the CPU upgrades and wished I had not. Somehow managed to get the config right in the end but a lot of hot language flying in the air. But it was the need for speed ...the thrill to ooze a bit more out the Mac. Great times those G3/G4 machines....ahhh Motorola CPUs LOL....but that was all in the latter 90s.
I also later upgraded at work to a Macintosh VX machine in 1993 which was my first separate computer and monitor. Every morning when I went into my office I loved looking at my 32Mhz processor VX machine with its CD-ROM drive built in. Naturally at corporate level, the IT department at that time was using Windows systems so they were going to 66Mhz Pentium chips if I remember correctly which was blazing fast. If I wanted my Mac to get somewhere close to that I would need to insert a Daystar accelerator board into one of the NuBus slots.
At home I first had a Performa 5200 mainly for my daughter to use. The I later went on to G3 blue and G4 grey towers.
In those days you could access the motherboard easily as it opened sideways and the motherboard was facing up. I use d to tweek with the jumpers on the CPU upgrades and wished I had not. Somehow managed to get the config right in the end but a lot of hot language flying in the air. But it was the need for speed ...the thrill to ooze a bit more out the Mac. Great times those G3/G4 machines....ahhh Motorola CPUs LOL....but that was all in the latter 90s.
IDK man. It certainly isn't a Macintosh as far as looks and construction. Very few devices of that era seemed truly thought out and complete. Maybe a NES for example is refined, by comparison. Any Amiga system, even the hand-warming keyboards, would not stand out in the crowd of beige to most people.
I say janky because my memory of everything back then is a bunch of whirring and clunking and few things ever working as they stated in the manual. To me, a beige box has always meant sitting down and patiently figuring it out, only for it to not go as smoothly as advertised. Not due to age, due to compartmentalized and fragmented development.
Ah, those are the days I don't miss. You could have two similar sound cards with only one or two letters that differ in the name and only one of them works properly on your system. Video cards, parallel ports or other extensions were a crapshoot because not everybody was aware that the i386DX is an i386...sometimes...or isn't it? See what I mean?
I think we all had some fun or neat trick that we just had to have because witnessing a computer do anything was amazing. For me, once I got the pay-off I usually found it quite annoying and disabled whatever I had just spent time installing.
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Can we stick to talking about old retro computers in this thread, or do you guys still need to vent?
I’m hoping to hear more of a perspective of erstwhile tech from the contemporaneous era. I’d like to know more about what an 800x600 resolution meant to somebody at the time and how things changed. What happened the first time you got a whole whopping 1mb of RAM?
Just trying to view old “junk” with a more fair eye.
Kids today probably laugh at N64, but the first time I saw 3D Mario running around a corridor and lighting his butt on fire, it was like dreams coming true. The most advanced 3D effect I had experienced then were the Flying stages in Lawnmower Man on SNES, so try to imagine how much of a leap that was for a console kid.
Just trying to view old “junk” with a more fair eye.
Kids today probably laugh at N64, but the first time I saw 3D Mario running around a corridor and lighting his butt on fire, it was like dreams coming true. The most advanced 3D effect I had experienced then were the Flying stages in Lawnmower Man on SNES, so try to imagine how much of a leap that was for a console kid.
I remember Usenet their was this one site used cracked programs for download! it was the last place to get expensive software for free! However near the end for me was the RIAA anmd Move industry sued Usnet and my ISP cut of newsgroups all together! I still miss that group, the last place Mac guys actually had good computer skills and because others newsgroups traded music, movies!
I can confirm there are insurance companies still entering all their policy data into a AS/400 server. In the year 2022. Migration to cloud is coming but it’s going to take a long time.
Most of our games on the c64 were “broken by the Bandit Boy.” People would just pass around floppy copies. The a1000 was a revelation, 320x240, and 4096 colors in HAM mode? Holy moly! There were even single frame digitizers, you connected a black and white security camera and a color wheel, and slowly digitized one color at a time. It really was something amazing.
My first exposure to computers was when pursuing my undergrad degree in mathematics. I think in my senior year (1981) the math department got a couple of TRS 80s that were wheeled around on carts with thermal printers. Most computer work, though, was done on the university's mainframe....using keypunch for data entry and FORTRAN for programming. Later that year, when I entered the workforce in the actuarial department of an insurance company, we would transmit data to the mainframe using one of those suction cup telephone modems. I still remember the sound. And remember the dropped connections. My first personal computer was a TI 99. Following that I moved to a TRS 1200 with an actual hard drive (albeit a 20MB drive). During the '90s PCs became more mainstream and powerful and I moved through a bunch of different desktops and laptops.
My ex-wife was an IBM employee and we could get good deals on laptops. I think it was in 2007 that I made the switch to Macs. I had just ordered a fully-decked out Thinkpad T61(??) and was excited to get it set up. It came with Windows Vista which was such a mess I returned the laptop and went to the Apple store in Raleigh, NC to find out about switching over. I walked out with a Macbook and have never looked back. I use a PC at work, but I've been an Apple convert for almost 15 years at home.
My ex-wife was an IBM employee and we could get good deals on laptops. I think it was in 2007 that I made the switch to Macs. I had just ordered a fully-decked out Thinkpad T61(??) and was excited to get it set up. It came with Windows Vista which was such a mess I returned the laptop and went to the Apple store in Raleigh, NC to find out about switching over. I walked out with a Macbook and have never looked back. I use a PC at work, but I've been an Apple convert for almost 15 years at home.
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<beeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep><doo dee doo deeeeeeee khhhhhhhhhhhhhh>!
My goodness, reading the first page of posts on this thread, gives me some lovely memories.
All I have to say is, Compuserve ruled! I was on that thing constantly. My friend and I built a Windows 95 PC. It was a tall tower, with 4 hard drives, and two fans. Talk about loud...!
All I have to say is, Compuserve ruled! I was on that thing constantly. My friend and I built a Windows 95 PC. It was a tall tower, with 4 hard drives, and two fans. Talk about loud...!
It wasn't just Radio Shack.. Sears did the same, with their copycats of the Atari and Intellivision when they were new. It was one of the problems that caused a near end to the first Console Wars. Radio Shack was in on that as well, and caused a lot of the early companies to die.
BL.
Bought my first computer when I started my Master's degree in '90? An Atari "Mega" with a 30 MB hard drive. I could type out assignments and do engineering graphs, PLUS I bought the $500 "Creator" program and had a MIDI recorder for my synths and drum machine! Used it for 8 years, then the printer head on my $400 dot-matrix printer died, couldn't find a replacement and nobody made Atari printer drivers for them newfangled "ink-jet" printers...
Replaced with a G3 Mac (I worked at TRW at that time and the Macs impressed me more than the MS-DOS machines), and I could play Tetris while a single still pr0n photo downloaded, cool!
Those were interesting days, but things are so much better and cheaper now. Great thread!
Replaced with a G3 Mac (I worked at TRW at that time and the Macs impressed me more than the MS-DOS machines), and I could play Tetris while a single still pr0n photo downloaded, cool!
Those were interesting days, but things are so much better and cheaper now. Great thread!
My dad retired from TRW in 1995. Electrical engineer, most of his career was with TRW except for a small stint with Rockwell. I still have a couple of 1960/70s era TRW-branded binders in my garage. ?
I first encountered hi res displays on the macs, they were IIci’s with 1024x768 color displays. The text was tiny, but it worked with photoshop, though you could only choose “thousands” of colors when at full res. Those big images scrolled so slowly! click, redraw, click, redraw, click, redraw. Still pretty cool. That’s why when macs went retina, I knew there was no going back, it’s amazing to see such detail on images and video.
Ah yes, I remember when a friend of mine had an MS-DOS based PC that would play Defender of the Crown and Ultima III. Spent many happy hours going around to his house to play or watch him play. This would have been maybe 1988-1989. Good times.
I think it is interesting that many people’s early experiences with computers are around games, connectivity, and to a lesser extent coding. The tinkering aspect of those early computers, I am not sure if Apple pays enough attention to that. The Swift Playgrounds are a nice attempt to bring it into this century, but I think the curve has gotten a lot steeper from learning BASIC to getting to grips with Xcode.
It doesn't come across that way...it comes across (to me) that you're silently laughing at how us oldies got excited when our computers were just "junk" or "janky boxes" with less power than an Apple Watch...how did we even survive, etc, and for that reason I think I'm out.
I think too, expectations are different. Back then, people were patient with solving a game and exploring it. When you and your friend got together and me and my friend got together we enjoyed sharing and exploring.
Now it seems, there is some expectation of instant gratification. Speed-running a game is an actual thing.
To some extent, some of it was junk - even then.
My mom (as a computer science teacher) had 12 MC-10 and a Timex Sinclair in the house at one point. Compared to a Commodore 64, or even a VIC-20 at that time, these things WERE junk.