How far have we come?

[penk]

In 1982, I was king o the geeks at our school. The platform of choice was the TRS-80 Model III computer by Tandy / Radioshack. We ran NewDOS/80 on them, they were 'fast', useable, capable machines, and we pushed them hard. I learned Z-80 assembly language on them, did word processing using Scripsit printed out on a daisywheel printer (RATTATTAAATTATTATATAT... SHOOMPH!). The age before hard drives, where every geek carried around their little 5 1/4" floppy box (or notebook), that had their favorite boot disks, games, and apps on 'em. We were fortunate that all our machines had 5 1/4" floppies on them, since we also had a fleet of Model 1's, which were cassette only. Booooring!!!

My officemate Walter said he had a TRS-80 Model III sitting in his garage, and would I be interested in it? Sure! sez I, and lo and behold, I now have one sitting next to me on the desk. It has a slight monitor skew problem, but otherwise boots up with the happy prompt I know oh so well:

Cass?
Memory Size?
Radio Shack Level III Basic
Ready
> _

The thing that struck me as I waxed nostalgic about this platform is realizing that this little machine, while only 20 years old, has a 4mghz system clock in it. 4. Glancing to my laptop to my right, I realize the machine I'm typing on is 300 times -faster- than this venerable platform I spent so much time working with. I dont remember it being that slow... but what would take that old TRS-80 5 minutes to do, my spiffy 1.2gig laptop can do it in just a single second.

Aint technology grand?

Comments

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Not sure, but I think the Model III had a 2MHz clock. The Model 4 had a 4MHz clock, which was why you could get a fifth voice out of the Orchestra90 when it was hooked up to a Model 4.

I really need to clear off some desk space and haul one of the Model IIIs out of the basement. And/or install one of the TRS-80 emulators someone posted the URL to on Elbows a while back. (Got 'em bookmarked.)