TRS-80 Computers

This is my first TRS-80, with the Quick Printer.

I was able to get a good price for the computer, but I had an awful time finding someone to take the printer. It used aluminized paper which was difficult to read, and it could only fit 16 characters per line.

As crude as these systems were, they had none of the crashing problems we put up with today, even though the operating system was written by Microsoft.

Here's the setup with my Epson printer. At the time, $750. was a good price for a dot-matrix printer. Teletype machines were just going out of style then.

I took the printer home in a car which only cost $450.

The box on the top is a monitor for the cassette machine. It was common for most TRS-80 cassette users to listen to the CLOAD and CSAVE signals to check for problems. The box also allows listening to programs which had audio output.

I couldn't afford the Radio Shack expansion interface, so I built my own. This one has my custom musical instrument interface, along with the parallel printer interface.

If you didn't have the disk drives, you needed this cable and a cassette recorder.

I bought this TRS-80 disk system very used. It had so many bad connections that I took everything out of the cases, mounted the boards to a frame, and hardwired it. Tim Allen would be proud of it. The expansion originally sold for $299, the drives for $499 each, on top of $988 for the computer.

This was my first introduction to DOS, TRSDOS to be specific. The drives were good for 80K, but with TRSDOS in place, there was only 53K left for files. A 3.5 floppy can hold 26 times as much. A CDROM can hold 12,000 times as much.

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