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

[beowabbit]

I think I only ever got to play with the Model III in the store, but I cut my geekly teeth on the Model I. The two we had in high school only had tape drives, and over time they got flaky so that it took many tries to load things. But by then I was spending most of my time at the microcomputer lab at the local university (and also at their timesharing terminal farm, and on their PLATO terminal — anybody else remember PLATO? Really nice system, excellent at what it was designed for.).

The first computer we had at home (well, not counting the Timex/Sinclair) was a Commodore 64, and I occasionally think of grabbing one (or a C128D, which I bought when I went away to school) off of ebay.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. :-)

Ya know, the interesting thing is that your laptop needs a system clock 300 times faster (and a vastly more powerful instruction set). Yeah, you're doing a lot more on it than you did on the Model III, but for the routine things you do that overlap (word processing, f'rinstance), I'm sure your laptop doesn't get things done 300 times faster than the Model III did. It probably uses more computons just to draw window borders while you're writing a document than your Model III did to write a whole document. Kids today... :-)

[beowabbit]

PS — What I'd really like to get my hands on is a functioning DECwriter. I loved the sound they made as you were printing out a banner.

Actually, only about seven years ago, BU was still using DECwriters as consoles for most of their central Unix boxen. There's some significant advantage to hardcopy terminals for consoles. That's when I got used to using vi in "open mode".

[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.)

Ancient history

[sarahshevett.livejournal.com]

Do you remember the teletype in Dads office in Dix Hills?
Kachunk Kachunk kachunk

I once got it to print out the road runner.

Now THAT was slow!
But it did play games!!