TRS80?

I hope a little intended good humor won't disturb the masses!



What happens in 61 years when Trainz becomes...TRS80? :hehe:







I also hope that joke/pun does not need explanation as anyone who learned to program computers in public school/in the US/in the late 1970's/early 1980s should get this in a heartbeat.

Hopefully it will include a Commodore (Hudson) locomotive.... :O)

... and updates will be available via cassette tape

Tell you what, sometimes it feels like I'm trying to play Trainz on an old Tandy...

Matt

I certainly won't be around to see it, but I'm sure it will look better than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRrrubQkthg

TRS-80 Model 1 Level 2 (16k, cassette deck and green screen) was my first computer. Loved it to bits.

Had it for three or four years before upgrading to a BBC Micro - still my alltime favourite machine of the era.

I also had a TRS-80 Level 2 and learned programming in BASIC. Since then I have never been without a home computer. After the Tandy I had a succession of Macs - the first had both the operating system and the program on one floppy disk. I still have a Mac which must be well over 25 years old - perhaps I'll try it one day to see if it still works, although the battery will probably be flat.
I understand that old Macs are now collectable, and that enthusiasts will pay a good price.
Ray

Most of the Auran\N3V rolling stock and cab interiors, still look the same now.

I looked at these systems myself but opted for a Visual V-1050 because I got a big employee discount on their expensive system. The system came with a green-screen 9-inch display, Keytronics keyboard, 2 Floppy Drives, 128K of RAM (bank-switched), 32 K video RAM, and had an expansion port to handle an external hard drive in addition to the standard serial and Centronics printer port. The software package alone was amazing and contained the OS, CP/M Plus (CP/M 3.0), DR Graph, Microsoft Multiplan, C-Basic, Z80-Assembler - linker and compiler, and Word Star. The system also could read other software released for DEC, Osborne, Kaypro and others as well as emulate various terminals directly including Visual's own products, and those by DEC and others.

After using the system, I gave it to a neighbor when I 'upgraded' to a PC Compatible in 1986. I still kick myself in the pants for giving the system away, because it's actually worth something today as a collectors item.

Tony_Hilliam said:

I certainly won't be around to see it, but I'm sure it will look better than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRrrubQkthg

Click to expand...

Hay Tony, what route is that? Looks so cool! Where can I get it?? :hehe:






(of course I'm being sarcastic. Just echoing what I read so many times in the forum when people post a screenie.)

If a version ever comes out made specifically and only for OSX I hope it's named SD90MAC..

You guys are showing your age. Myself, I had Apple II+ used a cassette deck and a tv channel 34, I think, as a monitor. Never had as much fun as with that baby.

Rob

Hey Tony, I'm with these other guys. T:ANE doesn't look all that much different than that video! Would not mind having the route and session!

I had an TRS80 Model 1, many models of Tandy Color Computer, Commodore 64, Atari 1200, Tandy 1000 PC/PCjr compatible, many makes and models of PC compatibles, a few notebooks, and two tablets.

I had a TRS80 way back in the 1970s. TRS80s were much better at generating random numbers and at sorting numbers than the PC is. A TRS80 could come up with over 100 random numbers without any repeats and you could specify the max and min numbers.

Bill69 said:

I had a TRS80 way back in the 1970s. TRS80s were much better at generating random numbers and at sorting numbers than the PC is. A TRS80 could come up with over 100 random numbers without any repeats and you could specify the max and min numbers.

Click to expand...

That I think was due to the Z80 CPU compared to the Intel 808x.

I did Cobol punch cards on a PDP-11 at my high school, and had access to a Commodore PET 8K RAM with cassette drive at my neighbors house. That was until I could get my own rig, IBM PC XT.

Great thread, great memories.

Cocos galore

We are getting old! I had several Cocos: first 2 had 16K memory and cassette recorders and then moved up big time with a 64K and an external floppy drive. Bought the drive and 64K Coco used for $100! (The external drive then, new, was over $200.)

Moved up to an IBM XT with 128K RAM, 20M HD, 5.25 floppy. Added 36 chips to the MB to get the total RAM to1 meg! Added a 3.5" floppy which was a high density. Took a special program to make the 8088 accept it. Reading from the drive, it was drive B, but writing to it required that you address it as drive D. Good times.

Moved up to a 286-20 with 1 meg RAM. Added 3 more meg and then ran a bulletin board (BBS) from that with 3 regular modems and phone lines. It had 4 modems in it so that I could call out on the 4th phone line, but to use that modem meant that I had to disconnect the mouse to have an IRQ available for the modem to use.

Good times.

Definitely good times autodctr, fun times working with the old equipment as a technician. I worked for Visual and became a hardware tech that got involved with their terminals, PCs, and later the older Ontel Corp. equipment when they acquired Ontel in the mid-1980s. Ontel equipment was quite old even by those days, but if they weren't purchased they would have come out with some more current equipment. They unfortunately were owned by Caesars World, yes the casino as a tax write-off, and were kept on death's edge for that reason. When Caesars World divested, Visual bought them up.

The old Ontel equipment was a combination of dumb terminals, smart terminals, and early PCs running their own operating system. There were multiple models all based around the same platform, but with different options including 96 MB removable drive stacks. This was a new thing in the late 1970s and 1980s for computers. The early units had a VME-like bus with individual plug-in cards including DMA-controllers and something called Word Mover Controllers. A WMC was used to facilitate copying and pasting text using a small buffer and shift register-loops. This is something we take for granted and done in memory, but then we're talking about 64K maximum for a system.

The systems were high-tech for the times utilizing 8080s, 8085s, with earlier systems from the 1970s running 8008s, but they were fun to work on with all the discrete IC components.

Who else tried to use the cursor to improve things in the video ?