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Admin
Does anybody in the Columbus OH or Pittsburgh PA area want a free Osborne? Email me at cashduck at gmail dot com. Not sure it still works but it might.
Admin
sigh I had the TRS80 Pocket computer as a kid and I loved to muck around writing simple pass/code entry system for it
Please don't hate me.......
Admin
5" ~ 12.5cm
Admin
What's the guy on the right going to have for lunch?
Admin
Admin
I need this Pocket Terminal urgently. Together with Unix' "vi" predecessor "ed" or "ex" for editing files line per line, this could be the ultimate killer app.
Admin
Nice article, cheers. Still not whitelisting the site though.
Admin
Just whitelist https://thedailywtf.com/images/ads/* That's only the "what the ad" images.
Admin
Right, got another possible solution - I don't have an ad blocker installed at all and I still don't see the pics in IE or Firefox.
Go via a web proxy (put 'web proxy' into google and take your pick), just paste the daily WTF link in.
Worked for me. Presumably, our ISP or something else in between is filtering the pics out. I wonder whether sponsored links in google not working most of the time for me is due to the same reason...hmmm?
Admin
Guess what? At least some scumbag can't knock you on the noggin and "run" off with the beast! They might knock you over, but by the time you recover they will be only about 200 yards down the road!
Admin
No, not really. TRS-80 was a product line, not a model number. The "TRS" stood for Tandy/Radio Shack, and the 80 referred to the Zilog Z-80 processor that they ran on.
Admin
The Osborne 1 was revolutionary, not only was it a personal computer before anyone had really heard of personal computers, but it was portable! My dad bought one for doing engineering work using supercalc. For a while he was the only person in the office using a spreadsheet while everyone else was using calculators and squared paper.
Admin
The Guy on the Right Doesn't Stand a Chance
The guy on the right has the Osborne 1, a fully functional computer system in a portable package the size of a briefcase. The guy on the left has an Uzi submachine gun concealed in his attache case. Also in the case are four fully loaded, 32-round clips of 125-grain 9mm ammunition. The owner of the Uzi is going to get more tactical firepower delivered -- and delivered on target -- in less time, and with less effort. All for $795. It's inevitable.
If you're going up against some guy with an Osborne 1 -- or any personal computer -- he's the one who's in trouble. One round from an Uzi can zip through ten inches of solid pine wood, so you can imagine what it will do to structural foam acrylic and sheet aluminum. In fact, detachable magazines for the Uzi are available in 25-, 32-, and 40-round capacities, so you can take out an entire office full of Apple II or IBM Personal Computers tied into Ethernet or other local-area networks. What about the new 16-bit computers, like the Lisa and Fortune? Even with the Winchester backup, they're no match for the Uzi. One quick burst and they'll find out what Unix means. Make your commanding officer proud. Get an Uzi -- and come home a winner in the fight for office automatic weapons. -- "InfoWorld", June, 1984
Admin
Those Sharp pocket computers were cool. There must a PC-1450 lying about somewhere in a box on the roof. If you POKEd in the right location, you could get Katakana characters on the little screen.
I bought it whilst in secondary education and they actually let me use it during tests... oh, those were the days when teachers were still ignorant.
Admin
iPhones make money on the add-on programs you have to pay for. They cost nothing but a bit of bandwidth to reproduce (and only a pittance to produce in the first place).
As for XBoxes and PS3s, I'm not sure, but I've noticed since the last generation that controllers seem a bit overpriced...
Admin
[quote user="JonC"]I used to own one of those TRS-80s. One of the standard type in this BASIC code programs that was the manual was a hore racing game where you could bet on a horse (represented by different icons) and then 4 of the icons would 'race' from one end of the screen to the other. [quote]
So which was it - whores or horses?
Admin
Well, i've still got one of these. It will do up till 16 hours (!!!) of continuous work on a 4 penlites. Beat that.
[image]Admin
I want one of those Model 200s! Unfortunately they seem quite rare, all I've been able to find are the common but impractical model 100s :(
The games are badly overpriced! always at least 50% more than the PC versions here...
Admin
I learned BASIC on the Osborne. Then I got my own IBM PCjr with 128K. Whoo-who! I used to sit and type in code for games in found in Compute magazine.
An example: http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue17/188_1_MATCH_A_GAME_OF_MEMORY_AND_TIMING.php
110 GOTO 100
Admin
Shouldn't that read "Dwarf duplex unit..."? Shame on them, that is so not politically correct.
Admin
My father had one of these. Actually, we still have it and it still works. He did, indeed, program assembler on it. We also had the printer extension. It is a neat little computer. As a child, I was always fascinated by the tiny keyboard.
Admin
I remember lugging an Osborne 1 (on loan from Sports Canada) across a very icy parking lot and dreading what would happen if I dropped it. As I remember, it was a truly bizarre screen - logically 80 characters but physically 50.
Admin
I figure, if he can carry around a 23.5 pound machine all day, the other guy doesn't stand a chance in a fist fight.
Admin
Meh, it's from three years later (1984), but the Epson PX-8 I had at some point was actually portable and quite usable.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=198
Mine even had the optional 300 baud modem and extra ROM slot.
I didn't buy it in 1984, but got it second hand a couple of years later. It was reasonable for producing text and messing around with BASIC. At some point it even served as a VT100 terminal to my first Linux box. :-)
It was definately a Portable, not a luggable.
Admin
"I think this was the machine that blew air OUT of the case..."
Nope.
I still have my O/1...it's convection cooled; no fan at all. There's vent grilles in the face panel under the diskette drives. The little CRT display was probably the major heat source.
Of course, any machine that sucks air into the case must also blow it out...
It did come with Wordstar and Microsoft Basic (and CBasic too) but no dBase with mine. Mine came with Supercalc...very nice.
The GPIB port wasn't "useless", because it was also a parallel printer port, given the right cable.
Admin
The idea is that you control the airflow by sucking through a filter and letting the overpressure push it back out. Much cleaner setup.
Admin
Oh, oh, oh...
8 inch floppies.
Be still my beating heart.
Admin
The guy on the right didn't bring any lunch and will eventually die because online pizza ordering will be invented 10 years later, as well as being "online" in general...
Admin
The real WTF is ketchup on hotdogs
Admin
The guy on the right has the Osborne 1, a fully functional computer system in a portable package the size of a briefcase. The guy on the left has an Uzi submachine gun concealed in his attache case. Also in the case are four fully loaded, 32-round clips of 125-grain 9mm ammunition. The owner of the Uzi is going to get more tactical firepower delivered -- and delivered on target -- in less time, and with less effort. All for $795. It's inevitable. If you're going up against some guy with an Osborne 1 -- or any personal computer -- he's the one who's in trouble. One round from an Uzi can zip through ten inches of solid pine wood, so you can imagine what it will do to structural foam acrylic and sheet aluminum. In fact, detachable magazines for the Uzi are available in 25-, 32-, and 40-rou take out an entire office full of Apple II or IBM Personal Computers tied into Ethernet or other local-area networks. What about the new 16-bit computers, like the Lisa and Fortune? Even with the Winchester backup, they're no match for the Uzi. One quick burst and they'll find out what Unix means. Make your commanding officer proud. Get an Uzi -- and come home a winner in the fight for office automatic weapons.
Admin
Is your grand father named "Jay Gatsby"?
Admin
I lived through and sold these machines. Obviously, you weren't born when they were made. TRS-80 was a brand name. Much like Dodge or Cadillac of cars or Latitude and Vostro of Dell. These were some of the more affordable computers of their day.
The original TRS-80 (later labeled the "Model One" could start out as an "affordable" < 800$ computer (pictured) expandable to include up to 48K ram and four 360K floppy drives. Quite powerful in its day.
Try to look at the perspective in which these machines were designed. We went to the moon on a machine with less than 4K RAM. We still haven't been able to return even with the improvements we've made in the last 40 years.
Admin
I have an old pocket trs80 and really want to use it as a case for an mp3 player.
that thing was so cool when it was new...
Admin
It actually makes perfect sense for SOME of them, at least.
The TRS part stood for Tandy Radio Shack (Tandy was the name of the company that owned a number of chains of hobby stores, which Radio Shack was at the time), and the 80 referred to the Z-80 processor that the Model I, II, and III used.
They had adequate success with the name, so they probably tried to hang on to it for the others, although using the EXACT SAME NAME for two DIFFERENT computers that were NOT compatible (I'm talking about the two different TRS-80 CoCo [Color Computer] versions here) was monumentally stupid.
Of course, this is ALSO the company that built a PC clone that talked to its' hard drive over a PARALLEL PORT.
Admin
The Radio Shack Pocket Computer did not have the ability to program in assembly language.
This was the first computer I had, about 30 years ago now. I learned a lot from it, as the included BASIC manual was very good.
Admin
What a coincidence! I have my old PC-2 (with color plotter) in a box stored away, and right next to it is another box full of original Rubics Cubes, around 18 I think, still in the original boxes unopened.
My first publication was in that magazine, which was "Microcomputer News" I believe.
The expansion you must be remembering wrong. Mine has a 8K expansion, and they may have made one or two larger. The CPU could address two banks of 64K, one of which was normal RAM address space. I don't recall if the other bank was for ROM or just for ports and I/O.
Admin
Actually, I was the guy on the right in the picture. My agency did all the work for Osborne. The screen was fine -- it was monochrome and so had high resolution, so the small size was ok for most work and an external monitor (like so many laptops today) could be added. And it was 23 pounds, a real arm-stretcher. But when I went around the shop at night, over half of them were lugged home so people could do, then, what we take for granted now, but you could not do then. The company sole $100,000,000 in their first real year, the real problem was the $1,795 price; it could have sold as many at $2,295 (average desktop price then >$3,000 with software) and the company would have been pretty profitable. It was a harbinger of the future, and yes, it was inevitable.