I had one, had to build it from kit and learn to program it from kit... good fun for a young guy that never went into 'puters. Yes it does mean Tandy Radio Shack...
They were pretty commonly scorned as "TRaSh-80". I think largely because of the ugly cheap grey low grade plastic cases their computers had and they mostly targeted the bottom of the market. The other low end brand was Commdore. Their early machines, the PET/CBM series were sturdy and well built, but later they also went with the cheap grade plastic cases, although theirs were generally a lot better looking than Tandy. Early machines from both of those mainly relied on cassette tape (slooooow) and they usually had low amounts of memory (16k or less), which didn't help their image. But I think probably the biggest thing is most of the early TRS-80s (other than the CoCo) and the PET/CBMs were monochrome only, block character graphics only and mute. Apple, Atari and TI, the other major players in those days had color and sound, even if crude by today's standards, they weren't far off par with arcade machines of the era. -swj
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I had one, had to build it from kit and learn to program it from kit... good fun for a young guy that never went into 'puters. Yes it does mean Tandy Radio Shack...
ReplyDeleteThey were pretty commonly scorned as "TRaSh-80". I think largely because of the ugly cheap grey low grade plastic cases their computers had and they mostly targeted the bottom of the market. The other low end brand was Commdore. Their early machines, the PET/CBM series were sturdy and well built, but later they also went with the cheap grade plastic cases, although theirs were generally a lot better looking than Tandy. Early machines from both of those mainly relied on cassette tape (slooooow) and they usually had low amounts of memory (16k or less), which didn't help their image. But I think probably the biggest thing is most of the early TRS-80s (other than the CoCo) and the PET/CBMs were monochrome only, block character graphics only and mute. Apple, Atari and TI, the other major players in those days had color and sound, even if crude by today's standards, they weren't far off par with arcade machines of the era.
Delete-swj