I received one of these from parents when I finished the 8th grade in 1980. I think they got the base model though with 4KB of ram, it was “only” $999. I recorded programs onto a cassette tape. Fun!
Upper AND lower case letters?
“How’d they do that?!”
I was 11 years old when I learned BASIC programming on one of these in 7th grade. I loved it and it led to my career.
Iconic design. Still want to make a cyberdeck from one but even a husk is $400. So, no.
That would be the world heaviest cyberdeck, haha
True! hmm. Cyber-conversation-piece?
I think we call that a “desktop computer.”
I already had a computer when I started computer science in the ninth grade. These bad boys were fun to play with. The teacher who was a very smart guy quickly gave up trying to keep me from typing away. I spent most of my time porting basic games from magazines to these. There were a lot of copies of my floppy making the rounds if you know what I mean.
porting basic games from magazines to these.
Same! Lunar Lander, a maze generator, so many. And I even started to learn about Assembly language but that turned out to be too hard for me at that age.
On the trash 80 I had to do a lot of work to find the memory region for the display. It didn’t take that long but many of the games I ported used peek and poke statement to write the screen. Doing it was fun in a way nothing today can be. Its either too simple or way too complex these days.
Didn’t steal anything. They were programs printed out in magazines. Very few were written for TRS 80 model III. I took those free programs mostly games and ported/converted them to it.
Glorious graphics! /s
Inflation calculator says $2500 then is similar to $8000 today.
Funny thing, those floppy drives, 175K x 2. Both together are still a small fraction of a single web page, for many sites in 2026. Multi-megabyte web pages are very common.
Yeah well some genius back then was telling us no one needs more than 640k. Now he’s telling us AI will wipe our asses by 2028.
I was on a call with a (young) designer who was going to get me a graphic. I said I need in such and such dimensions, jpeg, 75%.
She said “umm, sorry 75%?”
I told her I meant the compression, and then she understood. I apologized for saying it, and briefly explained it was just a slip from decades ago and no one seems to care about compression these days.
I got off the call, felt old, but then angry that people don’t fucking compress shit. 💩
I think Photoshop still sets compression to something like 85 % (or even lower) as default when you export for web!
There are lots of new image formats these days that work better for web than JPEG, though.
I remember getting pacman running, with the most interesting part was using the tapes save function as a way to make the sounds.
Ooh, TWO drives, so you could boot from one and work from the other!
very arguably radio shack assuming they had made the perfect computer (this) and no one would ever want more computer in the future is exactly why there’s still Apple and there’s not still Radio Shack
There is no Radio Shack because they were bought by hedge fund raiders who sold all the real world assets to another company they had formed. Then rented it all back to the Radio Shack at highly inflated prices. At the same time they continually increase the fee that independently run Radio Shack stores paid. A few years later they had drained the company of everything and shorted the stock in to the cellar. Bankruptcy and final liquidation happened quickly.
Radio Shack joined others like Sears and Toys R Us in getting destroyed by vultures. Vultures who know how to get the most out of a company and not owing anything at the end by making the stock worthless.
The ad specifically says “perfect starter system”?
there were add ons for the TRS-80, but Radio Shack assumed they’d never have to make an updated core system
lol
One of the very first computers I used. Set me on a path to a career in software development, and last week I retired at 57.
I call that advertising text “Yuppie Font”
