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Journeying down the path of vintage tech and retro computers is a good time even when it’s full of twists and turns… which it always is. But what happens when you’ve got a proto-portable computer that fits in your pocket, that struggles to function, that runs into incompatibility issues at every stage, and that was made by a leather company who decided to get into the home electronics business?
That’s the Tandy TRS-80 Pocket Computer, sold exclusively through Radio Shack. And there’s a reason why the portable TRS-80 and its desktop companion were dubbed the ‘Trash-80.’
Charles Tandy built an empire so sprawling that the federal government had to break it up, and the TRS-80 line was one of his crowning achievements before his death. Everything was looking great for both Tandy and Radio Shack – but the TRS-80 Pocket Computer revealed the vulnerabilities of both businesses, the volatility of the hyper-evolving personal computer market, and the risks of market leadership in one of the most uncertain, unstable technological eras humanity has ever seen.
The TRS-80 Pocket Computer was one of the earliest forerunners to Apple’s iPhone and to smartphones in pockets around the world. But it was also a cautionary tale for the entire tech industry… and it continues to serve as a warning for anyone interested in vintage computer restoration.
#Computers #retrotech #Science
@GottaGeek
July 25, 2024 at 8:12 pm
I have a color Tandy that I got for Xmas in 1988. The tape player as well.
@RisingRevengeance
July 25, 2024 at 8:17 pm
I understand why a scifi author would be excited about it but it is odd that some basic code was all he imagined. Idk maybe it made sense at the time, I wasn’t even alive so I can’t get into that headspace.
@billschlafly4107
July 25, 2024 at 8:28 pm
I programmed games on a TI-85 when I was 12ish years old. I had no idea that I was learning a valuable skill and dismissed computers as a fad. Eventually I went to school for civil engineering because people would always need roads. I’m comfortable now, financially speaking and I’m reasonably satisfied with the things I’ve done. But I really I missed the boat on what could have been because I really enjoyed programming games and working out bugs and finding better solutions with code tricks.
Nice video by the way v man.
@UCs6ktlulE5BEeb3vBBOu6DQ
July 25, 2024 at 8:28 pm
My TRS-80 Model II took the whole kitchen table
@thiesenf
July 25, 2024 at 8:37 pm
Yoiu don’t realize how ridiculous I think you are acting…
Would you actually be like that when going to the grocery store as well?
Come on… no one (except for… uhm… people with mental oddnessness) behaves that way irl…
@gramblekongdongdumbel-re7wj
July 25, 2024 at 8:38 pm
jesus this video fucking sucks
@Geoffr524
July 25, 2024 at 8:39 pm
There is a Tandy Leather store near me in the same strip mall that had a Radio Shack
@davidconner-shover51
July 25, 2024 at 8:45 pm
I had one of these back in the ’80s
@j5962
July 25, 2024 at 8:46 pm
My stepfather had one of the Casio versions.. he was an aeronautical engineer. I always thought it was neat, but it seemed pretty useless by the 90’s when I found it in a junk drawer.
@epicethereallord2977
July 25, 2024 at 8:47 pm
your vsause2
@ibanezmike
July 25, 2024 at 8:48 pm
When I close my eyes, I see this thing, a sign, I see this name in bright blue neon lights with a purple outline.
And this name is so bright and so sharp that the sign – it just blows up because the name is so powerful…
It says, “Miles Johnson”.
@billyoung9538
July 25, 2024 at 8:51 pm
Well this both made me nostalgic and sad at the same time. Having lived through this time I have fond memories of programming a paint program I Called CoCo Paint. I remember attempting to upload it to Compuserve on my 150 baud modem, and having some one pick up the phone 45 minutes into the upload killing it and wasting almost $60 on the long distance phonecall. I ended up giving my taped save of the program to my friend when I sold the computer.
@raydall3734
July 25, 2024 at 8:54 pm
Radio Shack died because they abandoned their CORE BUSINESS.
Ham Radio. If they had continued to support radio and sell theory books and radio parts, I would still be going there today. Ham radio operators use computers too.
They decided to become an aftermarket store for cell phones and drop their electronics and radios. That killed them.
@kozad86
July 25, 2024 at 8:54 pm
If you decide to rush out and buy one of these old computers, do a little research before you even plug it in, some old power supplies can kill the computer, and the electronics in them will fail over time. If you see a listing for one which has been “recapped” that’s probably the one to grab if you’re not willing to crack the computer open to do a little soldering.
@paulvinoski8023
July 25, 2024 at 8:59 pm
You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers… If you want those answers, find yourself an old radio shack employee from that era. Like me.
I spent many hours at radio shack as a teen, and many years on both the corporate side and franchise side of rs. I learned basic on a commodore, and owned one of the pocket computers. Yes, I was cringing at his failed solutions as I knew the solutions. But I digress… I could never go back to those days. Hard to believe I spent hours programming back then but would be bored with these devices now in less than 10 minutes. It is out of place, out of time, but in it’s time it was all very exciting.
@mhmrules
July 25, 2024 at 8:59 pm
idk why this guy makes videos for Popular Science. Can we get someone SMART?
@legerdemain
July 25, 2024 at 9:00 pm
I still have my Tandy PC-6 from back in the day. One thing emulators cannot capture is that it smelled amazing. I don’t know what kind of plastic was poisoning my young brain, and I didn’t huff the thing, but it did have a distinct aroma. It was like fresh cotton if interpreted through whatever filter made people think Strawberry Shortcake dolls smelled like strawberries.
@carlam6669
July 25, 2024 at 9:02 pm
Here’s an idea for a game for someone just learning BASIC: The program randomly chooses a number between 1 and 100 then tells the user that it has chosen a number between 1 and 100 and player must try and guess what it is. If the entered number is correct it shows how many guesses it took to find the correct number. If the number entered is incorrect it either (randomly) says your guess is too high or too low or whether your number is close or far away. Once you’ve written version 1.0, enhance your program by having it randomly lie (about 1/5 times) about the hint it gives and then every five turns display how many times it has lied. Once you’ve completed version 2.0, enhance it by displaying insults after some number of wrong guesses such as “Most people would have guessed the number by now.” Or “For your next guess try your I.Q.”. More insults can be found online.
@domineech
July 25, 2024 at 9:02 pm
I saved up $100 to buy a TRS80 desktop from Radio Shack when I was in 4th or 5th grade. For storage I used the family cassette deck. The local college radio station would play the cassette games over the air in the middle of the night. I never was able to get a full program recorded.
@kaleidophon
July 25, 2024 at 9:10 pm
Your neck muscles bulge as if you are benching 500 Lbs – as if that is what we’re here for. Hyperbole and extreme facial contortion aren’t necessary to keep our interest. The thumbnail was quite enough to get our attention, thank you. – Chill.
@codycbradio
July 25, 2024 at 9:11 pm
Free Kevin!
@williambrasky3891
July 25, 2024 at 9:12 pm
Called it X, unsubscribed
@richbuilds_com
July 25, 2024 at 9:15 pm
I had the Sharp version (UK).
@TheSnowPlowShow
July 25, 2024 at 9:17 pm
You might have better luck loading the full games if you mess around with the volume knob. Putting mine all the way up in the 80’s created too much distortion. I had the best results between 50% and 75%.
@CNGboyevil
July 25, 2024 at 9:21 pm
2:59 like it were a Boeing safety check
@g4z-kb7ct
July 26, 2024 at 6:52 am
This is classic proof that every generation gets dumber and dumber. Eventually no one will be able to type or speak, it will all be done telepathically with the chips embedded in their brain and every now and then people will just stop functioning and will need to be reset by someone passing by lol
@chrisrus1965
July 26, 2024 at 7:04 am
This video was excellent.
@unnecessaryparentheses-h5q
July 26, 2024 at 8:06 am
Asimov must not have read his own book.
@BrickTsar
July 26, 2024 at 8:24 am
Glad you found the switch for channel 3. I used a color computer from 1980 to 1991. I think I was the only one in middle school with a computer at all. In high school the computers were all trs-80s. We still had typewriters in school. Radio Shack was my favorite place to go. Use to wish we had one in the small town I lived in so I could walk there.
@AndrewWyld
July 26, 2024 at 8:36 am
The point about Tandy/Radio Shack rebadging other machines is interesting: I’ve got a Realistic Concertmate MG-1 from 1981 that’s essentially a repackaged Moog Rogue with a cheap electronic organ circuit added in for polyphony. I wonder if this was their strategy in other areas too?
@YourMomLovesMeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
July 26, 2024 at 8:56 am
You whine nearly as much as Donald Trump.
@dannyhilarious
July 26, 2024 at 9:00 am
Nowadays you don’t really need a cassette recorder in order to load games into these computers. A smartphone and a matching set of cable connecting the phone headphone jack to the computer is absolute sufficient.
Only thing is, you need to find the tape images on the internet (which consist in most cases of mp3 recordings of the screeching sounds).
That’s it!
@HellHeater
July 26, 2024 at 9:19 am
1:30 thats a funny way to misspell twitter
@arcanics1971
July 26, 2024 at 9:20 am
I remember typing for 8 hours into the ZX Spectrum to create a game only to discover my unit was one of the 25% of units in which the internal clock was faulty. I feel your pain.
@tlhIngan
July 26, 2024 at 9:35 am
Between Tandy, Radio Shack and InterTAN, the company was an empire for home electronics. You do have an audience who grew up in the 80s and 90s who do remember Radio Shack (in North America) or Tandy (outside North America) stores. They were the place to go if you needed electronic parts or anything electronic. Their downfall was the rise of the big-box retailer like Circuit City and Best Buy, and the 90s thing they started getting rid of what made them popular back in the day of electronic parts and weird gizmos and DIY electronics. and became just miniature version of the big-box retailer selling a smaller selection of those same goods. You need a strange part to connect your TV up? They likely had it.
@PacificAirwave144
July 26, 2024 at 9:47 am
This was a fantastic documentary! I miss Radio Shack! I still have several CoCos and peripherals. Really great documentation…you could learn everything about the graphics and make it do anything…twiddle the disk-drive settings for more cylinders… Absolutely the neatest computer-learning platform! Rainbow Magazine, Byte Magazine, Circuit Cellar Inc…
@SevenDeMagnus
July 26, 2024 at 9:50 am
Cool. thanks thrash computer.
God bless.
@jeremyanimatespoorly9573
July 26, 2024 at 10:06 am
I bought a TI-99 4/a computer a few years back along with a TI-branded tape player and original cables. The only time I’ve ever been able to get that thing to successfully read off a tape is when I wrote a short “Hello World” loop to a tape and read it back. Literally everything else fails a good ways into the read process.
I think it’s just a super janky technology that was the best/cheapest option available for software delivery at the time, but never an actually GOOD option.
@marblemunkey
July 26, 2024 at 10:36 am
3-2-1 Contact magazine also used to have BASIC games at the back of them. Entering those into the Apple II clone at my dad’s work (a mechanic shop) was my introduction to computers at about age 8.
35 years later I’m still punching code into computers.
@DimasFajar-ns4vb
July 26, 2024 at 11:20 am
wow and peace be upon you sir
@ronslayton5270
July 26, 2024 at 11:47 am
No offense, but WHY did PS choose someone so technologically inept to do this video?
@mikebell2112
July 26, 2024 at 12:02 pm
TRaSh-80 was also just a rivalry thing, like CommodeOdor 64. Not necessarily a commentary about quality.
@cfg83
July 26, 2024 at 12:15 pm
Thanks for the Tech Tangents screen repair tip. Need to fix a screen for a Sharp PC-1260. I think the 2 error code means “Calculation error”. Sisyphus would be proud of your video, 🙂 .
@KiloOscarZulu
July 26, 2024 at 12:28 pm
I remember trying to load tape programmes onto my Commodore 64. We wrapped aluminium foil around the cable to shield it from interference because it was so sensitive to external electronic noise. I also remember going to my friend’s place after school because he had a TRS80 and we spent hours typing in a programme from a book, but they never worked, either because we typed it in wrong or the book had a typo.
@cujoedaman
July 26, 2024 at 12:52 pm
Thanks for the near existential crisis ending there 😀
@EleKrik
July 26, 2024 at 3:19 pm
Most of us that bought these little computers didn’t care if the programs were any good. It was about learning. How could I improve on it?
@Darkyryus_
July 26, 2024 at 3:53 pm
Holy boomers crying in the comments…
@gdclemo
July 26, 2024 at 4:03 pm
I thought this was going to be about Coleco – the Connecticut Leather Company and maker of the Colecovision. I mean it’s weird that it happened twice!
@klingoncowboy4
July 26, 2024 at 4:21 pm
I got one if those for cheap at a ham radio flea market a few years ago… just wanted it as a collection item. It does work but I haven’t played it it reall
@klingoncowboy4
July 26, 2024 at 4:23 pm
Though I don’t have any of the accessories
@ElderTreeStump
July 26, 2024 at 8:12 pm
We got the Pc 2 before gta6
@bradwartman3647
July 27, 2024 at 10:30 am
I once worked for a campany that was a subsidiary of Poqet Computer, the first company to manufacture a small-form PC like the TRS-80 but with an 8086 processor (). My favorite story from that time is when I attended COMDEX in Las Vegas one year with the folks from Poqet. They brought with them 2 Poqets…the only 2 the company had…and if you turned one of them upside down all the keys would fall off of the keyboard. So there we are at our booth, ready to answer questions from the crowd and googlling all the showgirls who had been hired to stand in the crowd and distribute leaflets, when up walks a guy in full Army uniform. After greeting him the guy picks up one of the Poqets…which at that time probably cost close to a million $ in R&D costs…and asks “Is this Milspec compliant?”. The salesmen on the team, sensing an opportunity to land a military contract, enthusiastically respond in the affirmative. Then the Army guy did something quite unexpected by stepping back, raising the Poqet to his chest, and letting of it. At that moment you could see the eyes of the salespeople go wide open, praying that the Poqet would both survive being dropped onto a concrete floor and not be the model with the loose keys. The Poqet hit the floor and bounced but survived with all of its keys remaining on the keyboard. It was a heart-stopping but unforgettable moment
@douglasmaass7530
July 27, 2024 at 11:12 am
My first handheld anything was a Mathematic 808 calculator (in 1970). What a joy to do math without a pencil! Then I got an Osborne 1 with a 5″ screen, two 5-1/4″ drives and 56K RAM and learned a little CPM. I loved MailMerge. Kaypro was another “transportable” computer, also about the size of a cased sewing machine. In 1992 I switched to Apple, eventually going through 11 models to the present. I was also a frequent customer, in the 60s and 70s, of Radio Shack, Lafayette Radio, Heathkit and Eico.
@lotterwinner6474
July 27, 2024 at 12:17 pm
Crazy to think the government cared about monopolies at some point.
@davebeth2576
July 27, 2024 at 12:41 pm
I do like this channel and most of the videos are pretty good, but when we say “kids today would never survive in the 70s/80s”, this is what we mean. None of this was all that problematic way back when. It does make you appreciate a bit more how revolutionary the “plug and play” concept was though.
@jonzerstyle6817
July 27, 2024 at 2:19 pm
A tip on electronics and batteries. You can clip in a external power supply instead of using the batteries (buy a cheap lab power supply online). Just be careful to set the voltage and current limit appropriately. Alot of times people have left over laptop power cables etc. You can use those also (they are essentially AC to DC inverters that are cheap power supplies fixed in their output voltage and have a max Amp rating) – as they will only supply what the unit needs up to their max rating. So you can cut the cabling and alligator clip onto the battery terminals that way as well. Of course becareful not to shock yourself or damange the equipment. Its always advisable to connect to a DMM first before connecting to the actual unit.
@7272nighthawk
July 27, 2024 at 2:23 pm
we had a TRS 80 color II and we loved it !! We had it bumped all the way up to 64k (base models ) we using 16k. There used to be a magazine that covered the TRS 80 line called coco magazine. It would feature programs from several good quality games. My parents would spend long cold winter weekends typing them in. Friday and saturday was spent getting the program typed in and then sunday was spent fixing all the errors. It wasnt long before we had a massive game collection. We had a system mapped out we used 90min tapes for a master tape und used the tape counter with a list on the back label. instead of typing in cload and then the program name you could fast forward the counter spot and just type cload and it woud blindly load the first thing that it came to on the tape player. we would turn the 5 min answering tapes into a single play with the same game saved several times so all you had to do was stick the tape in type cload and your game was ready to go before you had your soda and got back over to the computor! Mom culd 60 or more words a minute so she would have someone read the code and she would type it in. Good times !
@ChairmanHehe
July 27, 2024 at 2:25 pm
god bless retro tech community
@Pacificbell
July 27, 2024 at 2:29 pm
Sheldon lee cooper had a tandy 1000
@SolitaryWolf
July 27, 2024 at 4:05 pm
I proudly owned this model, TRS-80 PC-1 with the accessories you received. I learned BASIC on this and was able to write a program that contained Statistics formulas that would solve problems by just entering the data. My professor in college was so impress he said, if you can program that little thing to do statistics, you obviously don’t need to take the final exam at the end of the term. So this little computer is not as laughable as you might imagine. Remember, people learned by these archaic devices to get technology where it is today. You don’t drive a car without first inventing stone wheels. Radio Shack was my “toy store” when I was in college in the early 80’s. My father saw that there was potential in me from this tiny device that he bought me a TRS-80 Model III. I took BASIC to a whole new level with that. But that’s another story.
@epockismet76
July 27, 2024 at 4:13 pm
Radio Shack and Tandy were big in my childhood, but by the time I was old enough to appreciate it, the x86 dominated the market with dos games and takeup by businesses and government.
We had a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 🤪 at the time I just played the cartridge games, then I got a used atari 7800, with a box full of games 😄 my good old days 🤪
@NinerFourWhiskey
July 27, 2024 at 5:13 pm
I worked for Tandy Corporation in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. I also owned and used a number of Tandy computers, and I used the TRS80 Model 100 in my personal flying. Tandy was a pioneer of the early computing age, and even had a hand in the DCC, a digital audio tape system they developed with Philips. Radio Shack failed when the Tandy family stepped out of managing the company. The company then jumped into consumer electronics stores and failed.
@k.b.tidwell
July 27, 2024 at 7:48 pm
I could tangibly feel the slide when they began devoting half the store to cell phone sales.
@kenreighard5071
July 27, 2024 at 5:18 pm
What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
@k.b.tidwell
July 27, 2024 at 7:46 pm
I took some ginkgo-beloba and ate fish in order to recover enough to write this, and I just wanted to say that I’ve come to your same sad conclusion on a couple other videos of his that I train-wreck-watched before. He has mastered the art of very emotionally displaying his ineptitude. Points for that I guess.
@gerardevrard29
July 27, 2024 at 6:21 pm
Hello,
Wonderful video !
You are a genius !!
I really really enjoyed this.
I have all the pocket stuff : PC1211s, cables, cassette players, all many many other pocket computers, printers… dozens of boxes everywhere…
I changed the darkening screen on some machines, from brand new parts created by mysterious tinkerers.
Everything works if you know… it’s an arcane game with masters, apprentices, hoarders, treasures, probably dragons too 🙂
We gather in groups, have meetings, discuss programming issues, we even have a magazine (100 pages each) !
You exactly described the voyage of going back to the past. The story is not finished. Knowledge is not lost.
We are the young guys of the past, old now but still young !! Forever !!!
Welcome into this world.
And thanks.
@plateshutoverlock
July 27, 2024 at 6:30 pm
Calling it an “ancient iphone” is quite a stretch. Not many people had a device like this, and the small percentage that had this device had to use an acoustic coupler with a pay phone or a hotel phone to do anything iPhone-like.
@bellemorelock4924
July 27, 2024 at 6:37 pm
Some points:
Charles Tandy dies at 60, in the age of steak dinners, cigarettes, and early heart failure. Cholesterol, and later fats, were blamed for this epidemic, which lead to the reactionary adoption of low-protein high-carb diets from 1985-2010. All this within and benefiting the efforts to reduce the cost of food generally. I worked at Radio Shack seasonally in the mid 2000s, and it did feel like a ghost ship, drifting along whatever current drove profits. That is very different than a driven, directional, focused (or diverse) retail business. Pier 1 was in its day, the IKEA. It was largely ignored by customers for a decade before (I assume) it died. I would contend there wasn’t a contingency plan for Mr’ Tandy’s death, but the company was incredibly stable and so well-stocked with talent, that it coasted through the 80s and 90s getting less relevant all along the way. The fading relevance of RadioShack did NOT help the case for mall shopping! They did spend to spruce up the stores, but they always LAGGED the rest of the world (since my childhood in the late 80s until their end).
Wow this author is really not tech-savvy at all. Tune-up things need to be done to this analog equipment to do that programming. At least he knows its almost working. Also there’s ink and many ways to reink a spool. Well, he almost tried. EDIT: I have saved this VIDEO. This guy is solidly the WORST, LEAST TECH SAVVY guy I have ever seen TRY to ATTEMPT a video like this. I mean, he could lose a fix-it competition to a 12 year old GIRL. This video will FOREVER be what I point to if someone seems to lack the confidence to fix something, and I know they can do it. Guy, if you read this, you are the 1% who should just buy the extended warranty, and set everything to “simple”.
While nearly all users would have had work purposes for their calculator-computer, the author focused on gaming, showcasing the computer in the light which normal people use them today. Of course this is easier than finding former users and interviewing them, and talking about the accountant, engineer, pilot, or data specialist’s need for the device. If it sold for 8-10 years, and never got “Palm Pilot” contact-type functions it served some kind of purpose in some field. After watching, I still have no idea what that is. I think HVAC system designers could have written programs for their basic calculations.. think of macros in Excel. Pilots could have programs for flight times and fuel, using winds elevations and distances. Anyone who scheduled things with various interrelated inputs that have specific values, could have sped up their work a bit with this.
Finally, I am struck by the obvious attachment printer accessory. To think that a digital world was so NOT what anyone sought in 1980, that you add something to a device this limited, to give SOMETHING physical as output, even at a great cost in money and form factor. Contrast this against the LG G5 setting up to have “friends” accessorize it in very useful ways in 2015, only to be completely ignored by a market where the phone was already a commodity, and itself a destination not unlike a TV screen in your hands.
@michaelwessel4953
July 27, 2024 at 6:40 pm
Nice artificial drama. Quite humorous. Like with many things in life, you’ll have to known what you are doing with these old machines 😅
@RandomDeforge
July 27, 2024 at 7:19 pm
this guy is gonna be so stoked when he finally hits puberty and his voice stops cracking
@k.b.tidwell
July 27, 2024 at 7:41 pm
You’re right. You do need help for even wanting to mess around this stuff that required esoteric geekery even back in the day. I remember seeing these in the Radio Shack catalog as I lusted over the desktop TRS-80. Man, I dreamed about that thing! I eventually bought a Commodore 64, which turned out to be a much better choice. I was 10 in 1980, and my school’s computer lab had all TRS-80 computers, so that’s why I wanted one, but there were way more expensive than my C-64. Summer jobs would only take you so far.
@lesliefranklin1870
July 27, 2024 at 7:55 pm
I’ve worked with computers since 1975. It sounds like you have gotten the authentic experience. Congratulations! You’re a winner!
@fcbrants
July 27, 2024 at 8:30 pm
Don’t feel too bad… I’m almost 60 & getting that hardware to run when it was NEW was hard enough, but getting it to run 40 years later? Fuggettaboudit…
@wiretamer5710
July 27, 2024 at 8:33 pm
What has changed?
Getting an iPhone 7 to work with a 2009 vintage apple laptop, is a similar challenge. A lot of Apple users are stuck with ageing hardware because the last decade of Apples are a nightmare.
But forget hardware… your odyssey sounds more like navigating the ever changing rules of social media platforms: nothing works… and the tutorials on line are always out of date.
SImulatiors rock: I once got a Power Computer Mac clone to generate a blue screen of death via Wndows 3.1 on top of Virtual PC.
On behave of the millions of lonely tech warriors out there: well done!
@grandetaco4416
July 27, 2024 at 8:34 pm
As I was watching you struggle with channel 4 I was thinking to myself, “those devices always had a switch to change the channel, I wonder why that one doesn’t have one?” Glad you found it, I’m really old.
@cmfrancis1
July 27, 2024 at 8:45 pm
Dude has no idea what he’s doing…
@95rav
July 27, 2024 at 9:13 pm
Unfortunately, here in Australia (for me at least) Tandy was just too expensive.
Blame exchange rates, overheads, greed, whatever – the end result was the same.
RadioShack also sold electronic components (transistors, chips etc) that were significantly more expensive than say Dick Smith, and alternative hobbyist supplier.
@choppergirlfpv
July 27, 2024 at 9:16 pm
I bought one, so I could carry BASIC with me into class and program when I was bored out of my mind. I wrote a Hangman game for it, where one person entered a word at an input friend, and then handed it to their friend, who would press letters to guess the word. If a letter was correct, it would fill it in… if not, you got a strike… basically like Wheel of Fortune. I may have even had the first friend enter a HINT that you were told before you started the game. Anyway, my TRS80 Pocket computer got passed around so much, by the time Chemistry class rolled around, I had to hunt for it to find out who had it as one group of friends would pass it on to another, and so on.
It made a terrible calculator for chemistry, and I really didn’t want to find myself without a calculator in Chem class being an A student, so I ended up buying a TI-30, just for multiplying moles… the TI-30 was a real finger puncher with a satisfying keyboard.
@luisgrimaldi936
July 28, 2024 at 2:52 pm
I guess this is what happens when you put Jesse Pinkman into making a video of retro computers…
@fredseekingbibleturth
July 28, 2024 at 2:59 pm
This reminds me of the first hand held computer I had in the 90s and that was made by sharp. I had 2 different models. I no longer have them and forgot the model numbers but I used them to take notes for school and would print them off. I Also took a class in high school to learn basic. That was fun but I do not remember any of it.
@EldritchFyre
July 28, 2024 at 2:59 pm
This guy is what we used to refer to as a ‘Noob” or “christmas user” – no idea whatt they’re doing, dabbling away with zero understanding, and then complaining it’s someone else’s fault things don’t work. Like alot of things, if you didn’t actually live through it, you’ll likely never understand. “computing” today is BORING… big deal… a new version of Windows, Android, or IOS shows up once in a while, some new web service grabs the short attention span of the public, a new overpriced game console shows up… etc etc etc. YAWN. The pre-internet steps leading up to today were far more interesting and innovative.
@fredseekingbibleturth
July 28, 2024 at 3:16 pm
I found them both I had a zaurus and 2 models of it.
@stellarobado4269
July 28, 2024 at 3:25 pm
TIL that this channel really IS Popular Science and not a fan channel
@KarlWitsman
July 28, 2024 at 3:28 pm
I shopped at Radio Shack for a long time and worked at Radio Shack sometime in the late 80s. I never was impressed with the pocket computer, but some reported it was a good product for the time. I learned BASIC on the TRS-80 Model 3 and the Commodore 64. The Color Computer would have given Commodore a run for their money if that keyboard wasn’t soooo bad. Using tapes even after the Commodore had gone to floppy disks was a mistake. And sadly Radio Shack didn’t jump on the IBM clone market until too late, but for a while they were the only place in one’s town to buy a computer (unless you lived in a big city). It was an opportunity lost. By the end, they were just selling cell phones and accessories for a higher price then everyone else and that was the end. It was very sad for those of us who had worked there.
@KarlWitsman
July 28, 2024 at 3:38 pm
Oh, and I think it was COMPUTE magazine that listed BASIC programs that you could type into various computers. It was tedious, but they worked. I learned enough to write my own game and save it to a tape. It was a dumb game, but I made it on my own! By the way, I went on to eventually get a job in IT and was very successful until I retired.
@BanazirGalpsi1968
July 28, 2024 at 3:49 pm
22:51 I had this coco!
@MaxQ10001
July 28, 2024 at 3:53 pm
What about just speaking normally and not over dramatize everything?!?
@mrburns366
July 28, 2024 at 5:05 pm
I have a few of these somewhere..
@mrburns366
July 28, 2024 at 5:11 pm
It always blows my mind how non tech savvy so called tech YouTubers are.. 😂
@vaughanja
July 28, 2024 at 5:14 pm
That was my first computer. I wrote so many programs on the PC-4.
@mrburns366
July 28, 2024 at 5:22 pm
I’m sure somewhere there’s an archive of Tandy games in WAV or mp3 format that could be recorded to audio tapes easily enough.. or if there’s not there should be. 😅
@bALDbOY85
July 28, 2024 at 5:27 pm
Thank you Kevin. Around 2016, a Sergeant giving my AFJROTC a tour of Cape Canaveral pulled a TRS-80 Pocket Computer out of his jumpsuit after I mentioned I was interested in old computers. I was absolutely flabbergasted.
@Paul_Wetor
July 28, 2024 at 5:39 pm
I bought a Radio Shack Model 16 computer in the early 1980s. It had two 8-inch floppies and cost $5,000. I wrote a bowling scorekeeping program in COBOL (I was a bowling league secretary and a programmer by trade). It’s in my basement and still works. I liked the all-in-one concept versus the IBM PC where every component had its own price. Sadly the IBM PC took off like a rocket and my Model 16 became a footnote in home computer history.
@Don.Challenger
July 28, 2024 at 5:46 pm
Much later the stores became essentially bin dives but even then they were more accessible and had better product than most of the other assorted outlets – in a pinch when you needed that adapter for a modification or capacity upgrade they were your port of call (especially in stormy weather circumstance).
@Don.Challenger
July 28, 2024 at 5:49 pm
Well, it’s nice to hear that the ancient lost city of Atlantis (surely, Tandy/RadioShack) contributed the UR-iPhone to humanity.
@teeing9355
July 28, 2024 at 5:55 pm
In the late 70s and early 80s, Bookstores used to sell a lot of coding books (written in Basic) with a lot of cool games. I remember spending hours typing them in to the Commodore 64, which was better than Trash 80. Use to save them on a cassette recorder which took a while to save and load. I learned a lot from doing that.
@jackkraken3888
July 28, 2024 at 6:13 pm
Just a heads up to anyone using a printer that uses an ink ribbon, you can often get away with just using WD-40 spray on them, usually the ink pigment is still there but has just dried up, the WD-40 is usually enough to make it wet and work again. You only need to re-ink if the ink has been completely depleted. The process is a bit messy as you have to re-‘lube’ the entire ribbon, there is usually a sproket you can turn manually (in one direction only) to advanced the ribbon, so you can keep advancing the ribbon while apply the wd-40 onto the ribbon.
@emonk042
July 28, 2024 at 6:41 pm
I have the Sharp PC 1403 and used it in College and university. It still works
@dalefirmin5118
July 28, 2024 at 6:59 pm
The TRS-80 Model 1 was sold at less than cost when it first came out. The idea was that it’s popularity would skyrocket and production cost plummet allowing them to make it up later. They were right. My first computer was a Model 1. It had no shielding and would jam television sets throughout the house and even my apartment neighbors TV. The RF could also be heard on a radio. There was even a program that you could run that would play a tune on a radio nearby. Lack of shielding was one of the reasons why it was quickly replaced by the Model 3. (The Model 2 was their business computer.) The Model 4 was an upgrade from the Model 3.
@ivito514
July 28, 2024 at 7:33 pm
Thank you for this great video, you did a thorough and accurate research, you brought back great memory. When I was a kid, I wanted to have a vic 20 very badly, it was on liquidation and at one point, my mom won at the bingo and gave me some of the money to buy one, it was like 200$ which was a lot of money (the minimum wage was like a dollar somthing an hour back then). I spent hours with BASIC and the tape player. Thank you for the video 🙂 Now remember, that was only 40 years ago, in 30 years from now, you’ll explain to kids you had iphones and stuff and they’ll be mystified and nobody will know how it used to work, but you will be able to tell them 😉
@vopieq
July 28, 2024 at 8:06 pm
Whoever wrote this drivel did not do nearly enough actual research, and presenter acts like an utter moron when dealing with retro tech. Do better.
@jonniez62
July 28, 2024 at 8:33 pm
Tandy isn’t dead. The leather company still exists.
@SecondLifeDesigner
July 28, 2024 at 8:45 pm
I had a TRS-80 Desktop not pocket computer when I was in either junior high or high school. Well, my dad bought it and said it was for me but really it was for the both of us. I wake up in during summer vacation with my dad sitting at my desk in my room trying so hard to type quietly which was pretty much impossible because the keys on the keyboard had such strong springs it was like clicking a ballpoint pen on steroids. I still have the computer to this day in a box in my garage. Yes, you loaded the programs from a cassette and that sounds brings back memories. You don’t crank up the volume to maximum though. Nore the tone all the way up. I don’t even think mine had a tone knob. If I remember right you just turn up the volume enough to hear it on the speaker then plug in the tape machine to the computer through the earphone connector. A small program take like 10 or 15 minutes to load. We got a duel floppy external drive a year or two later plus expanded memory. The floppies were 5.25 inches and they were expensive. I can’t remember if it was me or my dad that figured out that if you took a hole punch and lifted the sleeve carefully not touching the magnetic disk inside and created a second set to holes on the other side and cut out a notch you can convert the floppy into a double sided floppy. I am not even sure they ever sold double sided 5.25 inch floppy discs.
@gregfathers5548
July 28, 2024 at 8:48 pm
I had no use or patience for 80s computers back then. I could not imagine trying to fool with one now. I remember being at a friends house on his vic20 waiting for games to load on cassette and thinking how is this better than atari?
@MarekKafarek-o2p
July 29, 2024 at 4:26 pm
wow that was really catchy epilogue, got tears i my old eyes as it is what i felt back then when i started to learn about tech….
@jebeda
July 29, 2024 at 4:28 pm
This was known as a “PC” up until IBM’s “Personal Computer” was released.
@KonradZielinski
July 29, 2024 at 4:31 pm
retail hobby electronics died everwhere. Here in Australia our local store for that back in te 80,s and 90,s was Dick Smith. They slowly morphed into a consumer electronics store then died entierly. evently the brand name got sold off and is now only an online store.
@Sylvan_dB
July 29, 2024 at 4:35 pm
Some people should not be allowed to touch old gear.
@fcf8269
July 29, 2024 at 4:39 pm
I came here for a popular science video and ended up with average joe video that never turned on a computer and can’t tell apart a 5 pin din in a page description from a 3.5 jack.
Fun to watch maybe for a millennial or younger, but if you stopped by hoping to find some interesting retro content, from a very old publication; just move on.
@maniacaudiophile
July 29, 2024 at 4:52 pm
Truth be told, it is not a Tandy computer but just a rebrand. Tandy didn’t really deserve as much credit as you had given them.
@markwagner1997
July 29, 2024 at 5:01 pm
I bought a TRS-80 PC1 in the early ’80s when I was in the bicycle business.
It was the best thing since sliced bread.
One thing that always causes problems back then at least was calculating spoke length when building wheels. Lacing up a wheel with 32 or 36 spokes was a time-consuming process and if your spokes were a few millimeters too long or too short you had to take it all apart and start over again with a different length spoke.
I wrote a program in BASIC, for the TRS-80 that would calculate spoke lengths. I set up a database of rim and hub flange dimensions and the resulting system literally took all the guesswork out of the process.
I’ve been out of the bicycle business for almost 40 years now so I imagine there’s probably a free app that you can use to calculate spoke lengths, but back then it was magic.
@SergiReyner
July 29, 2024 at 5:24 pm
5 minutes of rant was enough 👋
@zorkmid1083
July 29, 2024 at 5:39 pm
There were pluses with Tandy’s tape storage: it saved the programs with a filename, could store multiple programs on the same tape, yet could also seek out the program you’re looking for, and was (theoretically) compatible with other tape players. With the Atari 400/800, it just dumped the data onto the cassette without any filename or information other than what was in the program itself. Want to store multiple programs on a tape? Make a note of the tape counter values! (BTW, the tape counters were not always calibrated the same) Plus, unlike Tandy, you needed a dedicated tape drive (the 410, or the later 1010 (?)), with its dedicated connector, but at least you didn’t have to fiddle with the volume.
@CmputrAce
July 29, 2024 at 5:56 pm
Had one!
@ConwayBob
July 29, 2024 at 6:05 pm
Ha! I had one of those for about a week. I didn’t find it useful enough to keep it.
@darwiniandude
July 29, 2024 at 6:08 pm
These were made by Sharp, and resold by Radio Shack. Sharp had a lot more models, printer plotter docks, you name it. Great machines. To really see the history of iPhone you’ve gotta fast forward to the NeXTCUBE for the software, and the Acorn Archimedes and Apple Newton for the hardware. The Acorn Risc Machine (ARM) SOC was super important.
@MorgDragon
July 29, 2024 at 6:22 pm
i have one of those!!! what a nostalgia trip. i did not have the printer or leather case. i did make a pleather wrist strap so i can have a computer on my arm and has some programs to do stuff. i ‘was’ such a nerd. 🙂
thanks for the memory lane journey.
@DoctorNemmo
July 29, 2024 at 6:29 pm
That trash computer helped me pass my biostatistics course. I’ll be forever thankful.
@washburn8049
July 29, 2024 at 6:31 pm
I had the Sharp version, and programmed it for trig calculations when I was an engineer. It became an integral part of my job.
@clayz1
July 29, 2024 at 7:03 pm
I had one of those. At least it looked like that, but it was a Sharp. You could write algebra based expressions with memory for variables and (I think) programs, brackets, conditionals, perform trig functions. I loved it for use in the machine shop.
@Pretender6
July 29, 2024 at 7:12 pm
@23:55, fun fact, there is a Dutch town called Enter, it resides in the provicence of Overijssel
@justliberty4072
July 29, 2024 at 7:34 pm
I had one in college. It was a decent calculator and you could do things like successive substitution very easily; much faster and more straightforward to program that a normal programmable calculator. I still have it, un-working, in the basement. My brother’s still works.
@wetukman
July 29, 2024 at 7:35 pm
I had that , it was great at the time i used iy as a fancy calculator
@justliberty4072
July 29, 2024 at 7:37 pm
You didn’t check to make sure the cable matched your device?
@tek_lynx4225
July 29, 2024 at 8:25 pm
Click bait title man thats beyond reaching for what this thing was. Nowonder your magazine is basically forgotten at this point. You can’t be took serious.
@Wassup-Doc
July 29, 2024 at 8:43 pm
What are fantastic channel, you just gained a subscriber
@paulcarter7445
July 29, 2024 at 8:50 pm
Great summary of the company and I can sympathize with you on the incompatibility of gear and software back then. Bought my TRS-80 Model 1 in 1978 and still have it. I wrote Game of Life on it using z80 assembler – it ran pretty fast for the time, a few full-screen generations per second.
@ThePatrickMiller01
July 29, 2024 at 9:05 pm
my timex sinclair was kick ass – shoulda done that one
@ThePatrickMiller01
July 29, 2024 at 9:06 pm
boooo – quit yer bitchin
@flufffycow
July 30, 2024 at 2:06 pm
Doom is out of the question?
@NicoDsSBCs
July 30, 2024 at 2:14 pm
I’m from a very small city in Belgium, Veurne. We used to have a Tandy store. It was amazing. Bought such a 100 in one tech game. You had to connect wires thru components to make a radio and so. I still miss the Tandy store. They had everything for dyi electronics.
@brouwereric644
July 30, 2024 at 2:27 pm
Apart from the HP calculators at the time, this Sharp was an ineradicable little PC. With the expansion slot, I learned the hard way on how to perform basic I/O functions on “basic. What an era!!!!!
@Datrebor
July 30, 2024 at 2:44 pm
I remember the TRS-80 desk top computer when it came out and I hated it myself. I love the Commodore 64 so much better. The TRS-80 you had to load everything if you wanted to do anything. Where as the 64 it was pretty much preloaded already. To me it was the TR(a)S(h)-80 computer.
@surferdude4487
July 30, 2024 at 3:07 pm
While in university, I built a M6809 based computer on a breadboard as part of a course I took. It had a screen, keyboard and cassette tape storage unit. Not bad for something I built during two class periods. It sounds like you had more trouble getting that pre-assembled pocket computer to run.
@billmullins6833
July 30, 2024 at 3:35 pm
Poor baby. Now you have a taste of “personal computing” in the early days. Me? Been there. Done that. Got a whole closet full of the T-shirts. I remember “cload” well. Want some real fun? Try programming anything useful in original IBM MS Dos batch language.
@joe-skeen
July 30, 2024 at 4:16 pm
You need to take a second try in a colab with Action Retro
@Thebasicmaker
July 30, 2024 at 4:25 pm
You cannot use a basic computer! Basic was the simplest language ever, hardware was too, just needed some simple adjustment, like volume or in case of a monitor vertical sync or the right input for the video signal, try again you’ll have more luck next time….maybe
@ajospace
July 30, 2024 at 4:34 pm
My journey into programming started with one of these. I don’t remember the exact model, but i know it understood BASIC. My life was never the same after. That was somewhere around 1995.
@techsalesandmore3649
July 30, 2024 at 4:49 pm
I had one of the Sharp variety at uni in 1984? They were totally hot stuff to own. So much so mine got stolen! No good for games though! great for complex calculations.
Totally loved your sarcastic presentation. Have you watch “cunk on britain”? something tells me you’d love her sarcastic review of british history. Its on youTube if you’re interested.
@edgargabriel6640
July 30, 2024 at 4:54 pm
I had the Sharp PC-1211 version incl. the printer at that time. And a 1280 something version. My last was the Atari Pocket PC, which got stolen at the Hanover CeBit fair in the 90th 🥲
@mattg432
July 30, 2024 at 5:21 pm
Come on. This is 1980s a rebranded Japanese pocket calculator, Sharp or Casio.
@naysmith5272
July 30, 2024 at 5:24 pm
Thanks for a really interesting video. My Uncle had one of those pocket computers in 1985 but I don’t recall which model/manufacturer. but we could write BASIC programs on it.
@the_hanged_clown
July 30, 2024 at 5:42 pm
WHAT squeal?! that just sounds like the normal clicking old computers do when they load things. no way in hell is that WORSE than the dial-up noise!
@maikerumine
July 30, 2024 at 6:00 pm
As a fan of Radio Shack and a D.I.Y. tinkerer, I found this video to be well thought out and put together, Thank you. Your saying about the only way to go to the past is through simulation, was perfect.
@MrNegative101
July 30, 2024 at 6:20 pm
That will be the longest pointless video I’ve watched in a while.
@jpennin1
July 30, 2024 at 6:47 pm
As a nerdy kid from the 80’s, I would dream and drool over the possibility of owning one of these pocket computers. In my mind, having a computer of any kind that I could keep in my pocket all day was a fantasy I desperately wanted to be reality. Surely, I would impress the ladies when I whipped this out of my pocket! Alas, I never did get to own one, but I spent plenty of time programming my Timex Sinclair and later Atari computers from the code found in those magazines. How much we take for granted now, the power of the technology we carry in our pockets!
@transientaardvark6231
July 30, 2024 at 7:12 pm
You could easily could take your ZX80 anywhere, but you needed there to be a TV available when you got there. (and some mains to plug into)
@Bobrogers99
July 30, 2024 at 7:22 pm
My TRS-80 came with a book on programming in BASIC, and I because quite proficient with it. I wrote lots of programs that were useful at my school.
@IvanEngler
July 30, 2024 at 8:12 pm
awesome content – so comprehensive, and really well done. –> just subscribed!
@thomassantillan2194
July 30, 2024 at 8:13 pm
For the missing channel four issue:
Someone probably removed it (or autoscan removed it when scanning for channels). You probably could have hooked up anything that displayed on channel 4 and then run autoscan, which would have picked it up and re-add it to the list of available channels.
@yteixeira
July 30, 2024 at 8:22 pm
The dawn of the home computer was an exciting era. I have fond memories of the old 8-bit machines of early eighties. Too bad that most of those computers have decaying eletronics and increasingly rare supplies and parts. It breaks my heart to know that in 30 or so years no one will remember them.
@rustyb1642
July 30, 2024 at 8:29 pm
after reading the instructions, did you still have the recorder on play so the game lines could load?
@andresbravo2003
July 30, 2024 at 8:35 pm
The TRS-80 looks very old than the Modern iPhone.
@salinchicago
July 30, 2024 at 8:56 pm
had one of these,
@dakohli
July 31, 2024 at 3:58 pm
In 1985 I had one of those Sharp Computers as a Engineering, then Computer Science student. It was glorious, but it was left behind oh so fast. My next computer was my first real computer, a 386-SX25 that had 3 Mb of RAM and a massive 105 Mb Hard Drive. I ran various DOSs up to 6.22 and windows 3.11 for workgroups. Those were the days.
@notagooglesimp8722
July 31, 2024 at 4:12 pm
Your TV does have channel 4 you just need to find a cheap universal remote or something and type it in. Back in the old days when we had cable or antenna, we had to program out tv to search for all channels that had static and the ones that had a solid signal. The TV would just skip the ones that had no signal each time you press the up and down channel buttons to save you the hassle. Kind of like on your radio when you press up and down and it skips all the 101.5 if you don’t have a channel that broadcasts on that on FM in your area.
@kamel6915
July 31, 2024 at 4:18 pm
There is that Finnish company who started by making rubber boots. Somehow they made mobile phones and the first smartphones. Unfortunately their mobile phone division was bought by microsoft and ruined. They still make decent winter tyres for cars and bikes.
@kamel6915
July 31, 2024 at 4:43 pm
The kids in the 80ies had more patience than you. I guess that emulator also has a tool (maybe an extra program) to create a wave file from your saved basic program. That can be played and recorded to the tape. Alternatively you can hook up a battery and a LED to that cable with the 2.5mm plug , connect the other cables to your pc and press the pause according to that LED. Have fun!
PS: My patience would have ended somewhere else. I wouldn’t wait for that audio cable and make the right one by stuff lying around. 😉
@eboyd53
July 31, 2024 at 4:56 pm
I loved exploring the books of Asimov. He eventually inspired my religious and political beliefs.
Tandy and Radio Shack had a large influence on my IT learning. I even bought a radio kit and a small bit computer to learn soldering and a little bit of electronics.
@jeffreycdrywater
July 31, 2024 at 5:14 pm
Fsck you… TRS-80 Computers were the best.
@christopherdecker3830
July 31, 2024 at 6:04 pm
I had a TRS-80 pocket computer many years ago. The tapes worked when new, as I recall. So your tapes must have degraded over the 40+ since they were produced. And good luck finding good blank audiocassettes!
Nevertheless, I got rid of it years ago. It is ashamed that Tandy and Sharp didn’t realize what they had nor did they not know how to expand their potential. I also many times thought of this product as the predecessor to our Android smartphones and iPhones, as well!
And you can use your smartphone as a “big computer” these days for the most part for most people now 😀.
@bbbf09
July 31, 2024 at 6:13 pm
Seeing it now I remember having one…I almost forgot. Memories!😀
@steliosarvanitis5606
July 31, 2024 at 6:28 pm
The Z80 will outlive the universe.;p
@erigobelli
July 31, 2024 at 6:33 pm
It’s almost like the original experience we has back in the day. Except for the fact that we could not “order” missing cables and connectors. Many times we needed to build them ourselves.
@michaelbobic7135
July 31, 2024 at 6:36 pm
These were amazing. They were intuitive to program. My first computer saved files to cassettes. I really miss the old TRS 80 and my 1110.
@michaelbobic7135
July 31, 2024 at 6:46 pm
Boy,, this makes me really nostalgic. Those old guides to programming were far superior to guides today
@michaelbobic7135
July 31, 2024 at 6:50 pm
He’s interesting but just can’t appreciate how cutting edge these games were. They were amazing. Once you learn the BASIC code,you can adapt the game to your needs
@michaelbobic7135
July 31, 2024 at 6:52 pm
I think you’ve missed a step in loading the programs or in running them.
@michaelbobic7135
July 31, 2024 at 7:04 pm
You just have to think differently. I made images of the enterprise and i made a program that plotted courses through space. Once you got basic down, you could do most anything, including statistics for my bachelor’s thesis
@Chris_In_Texas
July 31, 2024 at 7:43 pm
I purchased a full PC3 setup back in 83ish and then the PC6 much later on. 👍🤠
@erintyres3609
July 31, 2024 at 7:47 pm
Quote from Wikipedia: “Most home computers of the era have unique formats that are incompatible with anything.” I appreciate your effort.
@macsnafu
July 31, 2024 at 7:51 pm
My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20 when I was in school. Not quite the pocket computer this was.
@tronmech
July 31, 2024 at 8:09 pm
Sweet mercy, the whining…
@tronmech
July 31, 2024 at 8:20 pm
Also, look at the TRS-80 Model 100/102 (also known as the NEC PC 8200). Journalists all over the world used it for years (decades?) after it stopped being made because you got a basic editor, a built in modem to send stories to your paper/wire service, and it could run essentially forever on 4 AA batteries.
And the keyboard! Joy!
Had one and LOVED it.
@Sm2n
July 31, 2024 at 8:22 pm
OK you fooled me with your clickbait claim that this has some lineage to an iPhone. Absolutely baloney. There is no link at all. You would have been better off with an Acorn computer as at least they created the ARM processor that powers the iPhone.
@themeantuber
July 31, 2024 at 8:40 pm
It’s funny to see young people get frustrated with old computers 🙂
@Txloganc
July 31, 2024 at 8:56 pm
you put iPhone in the thumbnail i don’t think that’s correct the correct word should be phone like listed in the title
@williamhoward7121
July 31, 2024 at 9:08 pm
Back in the 80’s I purchased one of these at radio shack on clearance for $79.00. I learned very quickly that it was limited in what you could do with one line of display text. I finally wrote a basic clock program so I could at least have it tell the time. Unfortunately it killed the battery in a little over an hour. Somehow this fits your video perfectly!
@JohnGotts
July 31, 2024 at 9:13 pm
The “Trinity” in 1977 was only accessible to the upper middle class and up. Ordinary people could not afford a computer, except second hand. Even in 1982, the Commodore 64 was $2,000 in today’s money at introduction (source: Wikipedia). I was lucky enough to get a Commodore in 1985, but it was a significant hardship for my family. They made the right choice: I am still a programmer today. The major reason why young computer owners were shunned by most people in the 1970’s and 1980’s is because the former spent small fortunes on these things that were unfamiliar to most people. This seemed like very odd behavior. People forget these things when you can get computers, tablets, laptops, phones, etc., somebody else is throwing away for free or for a nominal price at a thrift store. Today computer programming is inclusive. It wasn’t always that way, and we can still improve.
@celeron55
August 1, 2024 at 1:00 pm
When I was young I destroyed my dad’s Sharp PC-1211 (the screen broke and I don’t think there were replacements available anymore in the late 1990s). But it got me introduced to BASIC and I’ve been programming ever since.
@kevinfisher5492
August 1, 2024 at 1:16 pm
Trash computer? You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. Adding you to my “do not recommend” list.
@maaadkat
August 1, 2024 at 2:14 pm
The S when you type CLOAD means Seekling or Searching, it’s waiting for a carrier signal from the tape. When it gets one, the S will change to I think F for Found, followed by a filename. The F flashes while it loads. That’s how you load BASIC programs. If you want to load a machine code program, you need to type CLOADM.
There are loads of games, and the CoCo is (mostly) compatible with the Dragon 32. You can also download cassettes and play them into the CoCo from a PC. You could probably play it off your phone into the CoCo.
@DrFruikenstein
August 1, 2024 at 2:52 pm
The first computer I ever used was a color computer without a cassette deck. Good thing it had a book with it.
My TV was a hand me down 3+ decade old Zenith B&W 19″ portable that only had VHF. It had a handle on top, was built like a car, and weighed as much as an over loaded semi.
Ironic that I was using a “Color” computer on a black and white TV.
@ac3bwdelaware638
August 1, 2024 at 3:08 pm
LMAO. I know the BASIC programming language. I learned it on my Tandy COCO II. As far as cabling the tapedeck to the PC, well, anyone who knows how to plug in headphones and a microphone can figure that out. Compatibility? There was no Compatibility, at all. This is the era before MSDOS. And since this is before the internet took off, not many were aware of HTTP.
@TheXpompier
August 1, 2024 at 3:09 pm
I miss Radio Shack. 🤷♂️
@kenmore01
August 1, 2024 at 4:36 pm
Pretty funny, trying to get things hooked up. I know the feeling!
@noiwonttellyoumyname.4385
August 1, 2024 at 5:01 pm
Oh, this brings back memories… loading programs from cassette was still better than having to type in 12 pages of text from the back of a magazine.
@viviancrompton1920
August 1, 2024 at 5:19 pm
I’m a professional software developer and I think the TRS 80 was probably the first computer I saw, though the first one I programmed on was an Apple ][ and the first I personally owned was an Apple //e. I’d rather cut my eyes out with a spoon than try and program one line at a time on that tiny screen. I still have my old Apple //e in the shed, waiting for the day I get around to repairing the power supply, but emulators online allow you to still write programs and run old games.
@ALaModePi
August 1, 2024 at 5:19 pm
I lived through these times enough to remember how amazing these things were in their time. Sure, they look primitive from our perspective of 45 years later, but imagine you cut your teeth on computers that used paper tape to load programs.
Along with the things you listed as reasons for the TRS-80 line, I’d add the failure to upgrade to the next level of processors. Commodore lasted a bit longer with the Amiga line. Apple switched from Motorola 6502s to Zilog Z-8000s and sometime later to Intel (then ARM/Apple Silicon in recent years.) The IBM-PC started out with Intel 8080s inside.
@MorningNapalm
August 1, 2024 at 5:29 pm
That looks *exactly* like a Sharp calculator I used to own. Were the Radio Shack devices relabelled?
[Edit: Ah, just got to that part of the video. Yes, they were.]
@loudenswain6972
August 1, 2024 at 5:29 pm
This guy is super annoying
@joshpayne4015
August 1, 2024 at 5:40 pm
OMG, dude. You’re exhausting to listen to. Everything seems to be an insurmountable problem to you. I guess if that’s your schtick then more power to you.
@lavawolf666
August 1, 2024 at 6:19 pm
the sound is nothing
@Lampe2020
August 1, 2024 at 7:19 pm
Aren’t you the “Vsauce2” guy?
@ggmtv1394
August 1, 2024 at 7:27 pm
Almost a triumph of resolve…almost.
@dennis8196
August 1, 2024 at 7:48 pm
I loved my Dragon 32. I am trying to repair 2 Dragon 32’s with intention of playing many of the old favourites i would play day in day out for years as a kid. Many of the chips have been out of manufacture for so long its going to be a very difficult task. A couple of the chips are known to just die of age so it might be a fruitless task.
For context, the Dragon 32 (and 64) was based on the same OS, and much of the Tandy TRS-80 series could work on the Dragon usually without much effort to modify the code.
@rpbajb
August 1, 2024 at 8:04 pm
I had a TRS 80 pocket computer, which I actually used to take monthly inventory at the company I worked for. It was minimally functional after I wrote a program for it. I still have it, but the screen has gone dark.
@Philemon616
August 1, 2024 at 8:10 pm
I owned one of those. I loved it! I had all kinds of fun with it, but basically, it was a toy.
@FarmerKen355
August 1, 2024 at 8:35 pm
yep… got one, had since 1986
@user-hb9jm1dx3o
August 1, 2024 at 8:40 pm
I had one of these. When other children were doing whatever for summer break I was taking basic classes with adults. My mother thought it would be fun for me. It must have been the pc-1 because I remember it was like $150.00. it was pretty useless but very cool especially if you know basic. I mean it is a computer after all. Trick is there was just about no memory so your app had to be super compact. Basiyand compact are things that don’t go together… It was cool though.
@matthewbloom3869
August 1, 2024 at 8:46 pm
LGR collab please
@DrunkSnowWhite
August 1, 2024 at 8:55 pm
One day in the distant future, some retro tech enthusiast will have this issue with a USB-C port
@user-hb9jm1dx3o
August 1, 2024 at 9:02 pm
It’s good for kids today to hear about how painful and tedious computer tech was and what little it gave us compared to today.
@user-hb9jm1dx3o
August 1, 2024 at 9:06 pm
I am 55. I was very young for a computer tech at that time. Most all of my colleges were young to old adults. Sadly most all in my age group would not know anything about computers until about 1998 when the newly born WWW was being discovered by the average person. Prior to this most people thought computers were big boxes with flashing light and a big reel to reel that went beep beep boop boop.
@user-wg2vw3mz1v
August 2, 2024 at 3:16 pm
Popular Science lost all credibility when, under the color of science, they attacked actual scientists and engineers who were providing actual scientific explanations as to why 3 jumbo jets could not take down 3 skyscrapers designed to survive exactly such an impact. I guess they just couldn’t part with those juicy technical specs about the latest military hardware from the pentagon.
@user-wg2vw3mz1v
August 2, 2024 at 3:20 pm
The “4K Color Computer” @ 11:10 is an absolutely hilarious misnomer in this day and age 🤣
@BradleySmith1985
August 2, 2024 at 3:33 pm
next you should look into the SEGA ir 7000
@jeremywilcox
August 2, 2024 at 3:43 pm
It’s sad you were not there to see and feel the (expensive) magic we had in those early days. I can not explaind just how excited the manager of my Tandys was in showing off how all the letters dissapeared down a hole as he held the backspace key. in the word prossor. 300 baud was a way of life then. The big names now grew on the back of early operating systems.
@robbdudeson346
August 2, 2024 at 3:51 pm
I miss Radio Shack like you have NO IDEA how handy that store Was … You didn’t have to wait days (or weeks) for Components or Chips and if you wanted to build a Computer (back then by Hand sometimes – its Literally how Apple happened) you could walk right into the Radio Shack and buy Every Single Chip and Resistor and any component Completely with Documents and Examples to try, and build an entire Computer… I would go in there as a kid and just Study components and buy all the books and kits i could find… As a kid who liked to Tinker and Study Computers it was the Perfect Starting Place… Its sad to me that Kids now days dont have a Physical Store they can go into and build a Custom Computer or Device like we could back then … It was so much fun to me as a kid to walk in there and just be in Awe at everything and it really Kickstarted my Curiosity… Kids dont have that now days… Its kinda sad really
@giorgio.
August 2, 2024 at 3:57 pm
Tip if you need an IR remote control that you don’t have. Use a device like the Flipper Zero and load the remote file you need, in this instance, a Sony one with the Enter key. If you don’t have a Flipper Zero or similar standalone device, a USB IR blaster connected to a laptop would work. Of course, there’s always universal remote solutions like the Logitech Harmony.
@LodeRunner-to2pt
August 2, 2024 at 4:02 pm
I loved your presentation of that time. Back in the mid 1980s I and my wife had 4 of the PC-1500 pocket computers. By wife was studying electrical engineering at the time. I myself bought an IBM PC-XT in 1984 and taught myself BASIC programming. The started my career in computing.
@kennetheaton1728
August 2, 2024 at 4:11 pm
I owned the calculator version of this when I was in college. It didn’t have a tape player or play games but it was great for what I wanted, which was the ability to program various engineering formulae so that all you had to do was enter the variables and get the answers. It did what I needed it to do until I graduated and is still in a box . . . somewhere.
@RS-ls7mm
August 2, 2024 at 4:39 pm
I used the heck out of this in college. Did lots of calculations and kept notes on it. Only a small mind would demean it.
@libbychang413
August 2, 2024 at 4:46 pm
OMFG i had one of those machines…
@jimeagle1155
August 2, 2024 at 5:14 pm
Miles Johnson is the ultimate porn star name! 😅
@derrick_builds
August 2, 2024 at 6:07 pm
Dude, just like Sears, Radio Shack, always used others products and slapped their logos on them.
@blai5e730
August 2, 2024 at 6:49 pm
I think modern computer convenience has jilted you… I had the 2nd model Sharp (PC1500) with the 24k expansion board that cost ~$149 AUD (for the base unit with a student discount) when I was doing Electronic Engineering at college and wrote many BASIC programs to help me throughout the course. _I never threw it out, so I assume I have it in storage around somewhere._
@bvsitephotos5189
August 2, 2024 at 6:59 pm
good enough
@jpg0927
August 2, 2024 at 7:51 pm
For a few dollars more, you could get an hp41c in 1979. The included programming language was way more efficient than BASIC and a magnetic card reader was available for program storage. Alphanumeric capability was available in 1980. They were called calculators because it was easier to get purchasing approval for a calculator than a computer.
@aaronbredon2948
August 2, 2024 at 7:56 pm
The computers of the era were: the TRS-80 line (with tape or diskette), the Atari 400&800 line (cartridges), the Apple ][ (tape at first, but you had to manually align the tape to the silence just before the correct program, type “load” and press play), and the Commodore PET (which had a dedicated tape drive, so no noise, just tellit to load a specific program, and it would find and load it from tape)
The PET and TRS-80 were character display only, the Atari had low resolution graphics, and the Apple had both low and high resolution graphics, but a less powerful BASIC language.
Shortly thereafter, the IBM PC came out with diskette drives and either low resolution 4 color graphics or high resolution text.
Then the competition really took off.
@mstover2809
August 2, 2024 at 8:09 pm
I beleive the Apple Newton was actually the foundation for the first iPhone.
That being said, I fondly remember playing with the Tandy Pocket Computer.
@HelplessReply
August 2, 2024 at 8:17 pm
“What’s with this guy? Does he have an extra GOTO:10 Line?”
@philliplabbe4409
August 2, 2024 at 8:28 pm
1:32 what’s “X?”
Do you mean “Twitter?”
Call it what it is.
@philliplabbe4409
August 2, 2024 at 8:54 pm
If you cannot see that those missing cables are easily fabricated from commonly available parts, and are again foiled by a tape deck with an open case, you are not qualified to work on computers. You video has bo actual information, and is just a guy whining into a microphone.
Touch grass. Try talking to a woman.
@CynthiaMcG
August 2, 2024 at 9:02 pm
I tried to learn BASIC as well. Trust me, I was basic.
@EarnestWilliamsGeofferic
August 2, 2024 at 9:05 pm
Half of this video is horrible speech cadence and the other half is this guy either not actually trying to understand what he’s doing, or pretending that he’s not trying.
Too obnoxious by a mile.
@laranaarana
August 2, 2024 at 9:08 pm
I remember selling several of those back in the 80s.
@trizedlyza
August 2, 2024 at 9:09 pm
As a proud 80s computer kid I LOVED reading Rainbow Magazine, for the Coco.
@zrebbesh
August 2, 2024 at 9:17 pm
I remember about the TRS-80 desktop computer that it was electronically PC-compatible, but its case was physically slightly too short to hold standard PC expansion cards. The idea was that if you had a TRS-80 you had to buy all your expansion cards from Tandy. And of course the TRS-80 was cheaper than any other PC-compatible but the expansion cards cost about 50% extra. And that’s when I gave up on Tandy computers.
@11110010
August 3, 2024 at 2:45 pm
These things were handy. I had a PC-6 that I bought in high school. I used it throughout my last two years and took it to college. I used it in all my math and science classes. Because it could both function as a scientific calculator and I could program it, I would run circles around around anyone with just a plane old TI-99.
@djadequate
August 3, 2024 at 3:39 pm
You kids have no idea what the early days of computers were like. The real game was getting things to work.
@AldoArellanoYcaza
August 3, 2024 at 3:44 pm
It seems that this guy grew up watching Vsauce 1,2 and 3.
@The_Digital_Arts_World
August 3, 2024 at 3:50 pm
Actually the TRS-80 Pocket Computers was not invented by Tandy Leather. They were actually designed by Sharp in Japan as the nest step beyond the ELSI-1211 Sharp Pocket Calculator. Tandy had Sharp cosmetically change the Sharp Pocket computer with badging characteristic of Radio Shack. This continued with in Tandy with it doing the same with the TRS-80 PC-2 pocket computer which was a Sharp PC1500 and PC1500A. Tandy continued to do this not only Sharp Pocket computers but also Casio. Tandy never released the equivalent of the Sharp PC3100 with its four line display because TRS-80s were falling to the wayside with the advent of Intel based IBM PCs. Note, that they also did not design the TRS-80 Model 100 or 200 either. Those were products of Kyocera in Korea which NEC and Olivetti capitalized on.
Sadly, the producer of this video needs to do more research in order to keep the facts straight. As a collector of pocket computers from all over the world, with many others out there as well, it really helps to know the true history behind these little marvels.
@craigtiano3455
August 3, 2024 at 4:04 pm
I had a TRS-80 pocket computer, which I purchased brand new. The pocket computer was a complete joke. I couldn’t find a thing that made it worthwhile, and returned it to Radio Shack during their generous return period. At that time, I had a TRS-80 model I, an expansion interface I built myself, a 300 baud modem that I also home built, and two single sided floppy drives in a case I made in my basement, powered by a 5v/12v supply I built from a kit. This machine replaced an Imsai 8080 that I bought as a kit a year before the TRS-80 model I was introduced. It was cheaper to buy the whole TRS-80 model I than to buy the video board, monitor, and tape interface for the Imsai. Such was the state of computing in 1977.
PC compatibility made the next generation of computers too easy for hobbyists. Before then, if you had a TRS-80 model I, you had to buy software for that particular machine (or the Model III/IV, which were faster but still compatible). If you were a true hard core hobbyist, you ran CP/M. To gain access to CP/M programs, you needed that “standard SS/SD 8″ floppy”, or a specific disk for your specific machine. And that was crazy…If you had a 5″ floppy, it could be hard or soft sectored, 48tpi or 96tpi, single or double sided, with a wide range of sectors per track. Don’t expect your 5″ Vector Graphics diskette to work in a Heath H8! When I purchased a copy of accounting software to run on a CP/M machine at work, it came on 8″ SS/SD “CP/M standard” diskettes, 16 of them. I loaded it all onto a whopping huge 10mb 8″ hard disk.
@Zoyx
August 3, 2024 at 4:32 pm
We purchased one back in the 1980s. My Dad coded a cash register program in BASIC, and then my Mom used it for her arts & crafts business.
@MLampner
August 3, 2024 at 4:54 pm
My first Computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer 1. I loved it I wrote a payroll program that actuallly ran and properly computed the various withholding taxes and used it while managing a friend’s small grocery. Subsequently I got my CPA and went to work for a small college. When it came to doing the budget – it had been done by hand I built a program in my computer to do it. Now 72 I look back on the machines I first worked on with affection though I must admit the Apple Macbook Air I am using far exceeds their capabilities. On the other hand I haven’t written a line of code for all most 30 years.
I did go on to become the CIO of a large not-for-profit and because I also had a background as a human services caseworker eventually went on to lead the organization as I moved back to the social work side. Some small part of my success in life was due to the Color Computer.
@katarh
August 3, 2024 at 4:58 pm
I too quickly learned I hate programming, but I learned enough in my classes to marry it with an English degree and become a business analyst instead. All of the fun bits of software design without any of the grunt programming work, as far as I’m concerned. Pair me with devs who are allergic to writing and we’re cranking out software at 10x speed!
@nicholashacking381
August 3, 2024 at 5:10 pm
Happy days.
When I was at University, my flatmate had a Sharp MZ700. I was fascinated by it and built an interface for it so that I could connect it to a home-made joystick. That killed it and I felt obliged to buy my friend a new MZ700. When the old computer came back from the repairers, he said that I should have it, and I became totally obsessed. I taught myself Z80 assembler and set about writing a faster operating system for it (it was very cool: you could switch out the ROM, and the video RAM, and take complete control) anyway, the point is that the best optimization that I made was to the tape i/o. Sharp had designed the thing to be massively fault-tolerant as far as reading cassettes was concerned : I was able to speed up tape reads and writes more than four-fold. I failed my finals, of course, because all I’d done for 12 months was write Z80 assembler, and I had to repeat my final year. But I’d do it again without hesitation. That year of complete immersion in coding a (now) archaic piece of junk was pure bliss. The reason that I could push the boundaries with the tape interface was that my computer was the version with the built-in tape deck. The OS was generic and had to be able to work with the less-expensive model that used an external cassette. Volume settings and clipping were the things that made external cassette drives problematic. And, if you think this is off-topic, I have a pocket computer (Sharp-branded) which is very fussy about the volume and tone settings of any cassette player that it gets connected to. Welcome to the past: it was great.
@Jimyjames73
August 3, 2024 at 5:32 pm
Very good / interesting 😊🚂🚂🚂
@mrbrent62
August 3, 2024 at 5:45 pm
I have a Sharp PC 1211. It has 1.5 k It came with a book of programs to do things like finding the center point of a load bearing I-Beam. I wrote a program to calculate depreciation by 3 methods.
@thinkIndependent2024
August 3, 2024 at 5:57 pm
Here is the Truth!!! The Blue LED is why we have today’s phone the Red & Green LEDs came 60 years earlier the blue was a long hard fight thats why CRTs went away
@CDP1861
August 3, 2024 at 6:03 pm
Look up what BASIC actually stands for and you will know that anyone who knows how to program a way out of a wet paper bag had more effective ways to implement code. These BASIC variants all were interpreters, wich made them extremely slow. Native machine code, that’s binary instructions running directly on the microprocessor without that interpretation overhead, would even back ten have done wonders in respect to speed, capabilities and also more efficient use of the small memory. And if one thing has not changed, then it’s that a bad programmer can make even the fastest computer slow, but only a good one can make something useful with a slow one,
@thinkIndependent2024
August 3, 2024 at 6:21 pm
Be Grateful BASIC was an intro I wrote my first program on that thing!! before I learned assembly language … And I had to add the memory expansion to make it work.
@autobahnmensch
August 3, 2024 at 6:03 pm
great insight into the 80’s and what the Radio Shack vibe was. you kind of always felt that Radio Shack was a cheapened, watered-down version of something that used to be great, but that’s where all the cool stuff was
@radarmusen
August 3, 2024 at 6:14 pm
I have a sharp pc1241 there got a new display from a guy re-creating them, pretty cool to do that.
@uhclem50
August 3, 2024 at 6:27 pm
FYI: Radio Shack was not a leather company.
@spinnetti
August 3, 2024 at 6:36 pm
I got mine new, and still have it! Loved it and used it as my calculator in HS. The LCD failure is common, but mine is still perfect remarkably. I got a PC2 a few years ago as I always wanted on as a youngster, though its a lot chunkier. TRS80 was the first computer I used at school, though the Timex-Sinclair TS1000 was my first computer. Seriously though dude, the cassette cable is nothing. Std radio cable – you only need one since you are just loading programs; its just not that hard.
@Deinonuchus
August 3, 2024 at 6:40 pm
Computer and software manuals of the day were amazing and detailed. You want a rabbit hole you might not make it out of? Go get a WordPerfect 4.x or 5.x manual.
@robertfish4734
August 3, 2024 at 6:44 pm
There was this efficiency engineer I worked with who had a trash 80 and wanted to make back ups of his chess game/star trek tape but somehow copy was disabled. I had a double cassette player/recorder and offered to make an analog copy… It worked. First illegal copy I ever made…
@reedreamer9518
August 3, 2024 at 6:47 pm
I still have my Sharp PC-1350? version of the TRS-80 pocket computer. I bought it back in circa 1985-ish, so it was a slightly upgraded version of the original (e.g. more memory) but looks almost exactly the same as the Tandy. It was only slightly larger than a pocket calculator, a bit wider and came with a slide-on plastic cover instead of the leather sleeve like the Tandy version. I was in my second year of mechanical engineering school and used it to write my own general purpose programs to automate very complex sequential engineering calculations that would otherwise have taken hours to calculate manually using an ordinary calculator and scratch pad. Let’s just say that I remember walking out of my final exam in 10 minutes with an A (97.5%) , while the rest of the class were there for 2 1/2 hours getting B’s or worse. Actually, I only got an 97.5% grade because the professor likely made a slight mistake in his own solution of the exam.
My Sharp Pocket PC did not come with a printer or cassette interface, so the programs I had stored on there (in memory) were volatile. For years I kept changing the batteries to keep it going, but I assume after these past years those programs I made are probably lost. Its out there in a draw of a desk in my garage somewhere or other.
@weltraumaffe4155
August 3, 2024 at 7:02 pm
I’ve had pretty good results with hammer to the my head solution on several occasions.
@jeffreymontgomery7516
August 3, 2024 at 7:22 pm
That coin flip game is great…
I know how to do that and win …..a lot more often than you’d expect. 😀
@RyanK-100
August 3, 2024 at 7:28 pm
Strange as it might sound there are people who are only in their 50s and 60s who GREW UP with this ancient tech. We are not talking about tech from World War II. They’re not even “hobbiests” – just people who remember things.
@dobythedog
August 3, 2024 at 7:43 pm
This should have been a British video. Something doesn’t work, he tries and tries, it still doesn’t work, he accepts it doesn’t work, and is never going to work. Video ends. Most American videos would end in it all finally working out in the end against all odds. Kudos to this channel.
@leifjansson8074
August 3, 2024 at 8:04 pm
This video is hilarious!! I felt your pain and irritation in every step, and laughed hard at all dead ends… Sorry!
But i suppose you made it that way, because this was great entertainment for me, who have also been down the Rabbit Hole of Old Electronics with missing cables or manuals or any of that stuff! Thank you!
@paulwebbiweb
August 4, 2024 at 3:13 pm
This is a great video – it’s the stellar performance, not the information (about stuff that doesn’t work).
@maxxmich
August 4, 2024 at 3:21 pm
I think he is too critical of this review….
Boring video
@Soyanoya
August 4, 2024 at 3:39 pm
Only selling to men? Mancave and uncle so and so – sure, wo’t be buying your products! Also, since the product was actually Sharp’s or Casio’s, an in depth analysis of their history, usage and evolution would have been more appropriate.
@Chris.Davies
August 4, 2024 at 3:55 pm
LOL, it’s just a re-branded CASIO PB-100 – of which I have great memories from back in the day!
@LSniumUwU
August 4, 2024 at 4:08 pm
Crazy to think all this stuff plus way more fits inside a brick thin as cardboard these days.
@buckaroobonsi555
August 4, 2024 at 4:40 pm
You make this all sem hard and diffacult. Your just too ignorant of how older equipment works. It is not the devices fault that you do not know what you need or how to properly operate it.
@paulnewman2000
August 4, 2024 at 4:40 pm
26:04 Bad hacker jokes, lol.
@thoughtful_criticiser
August 4, 2024 at 4:47 pm
My memory of Tandy is one of a Christmas destroyed. They had an electronics lab in a box, it cost a few pounds and allowed the user to build various devices. Except, it didn’t! It was utter crap. Nothing worked, even basic devices failed and we returned it to the store. That in itself was a serious expedition, costing nearly one pound and resulted in a credit note for components worth £15. Tandy still owed me pounds when they folded, failing to cover more than pennys in the poud.
@RootBoyJim
August 4, 2024 at 4:54 pm
I was a Computer Science student @UMD in the Early 70s. I had access to Real Computers. My Jobs had Real Computers. What were sold to the Public were just Toys.
@mjr1965
August 4, 2024 at 5:02 pm
Young boy plays around with all the stuff with which I grew up when I was a teenager. There was no Internet to consult to find all this stuff out, you young whipper-snapper.
@eknuds
August 4, 2024 at 5:05 pm
I remember trying to use cassettes with my Atari 400 in 1982. Fortunately I got a disk drive and an 800XL soon after. Since I was a twelve year old trying to teach myself assembly language growing up in rural Michigan, I know how lonely that guy felt.
I did get a much later pocket computer in 1988 from Tandy that was like a regular calculator. Or about the size as my Android smartphone. Wow, I started carrying a povket computer 35+ years ago.
@AmericanExpatInThePhilippines
August 4, 2024 at 5:18 pm
I bought one of those RS Color Computers back in the day. Back then there were magazines people bought with programs (in BASIC) you could type into the machine. Some of those programs were lots of fun.
@robertabarnhart6240
August 4, 2024 at 5:20 pm
Dude, you must have had the same Comp. Sci. teacher my mom did in the ’70s, cos she says that’s the exact same thing he told her class.
@NONFamers
August 4, 2024 at 5:22 pm
The TRS-80 bears some resemblance to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum personal computer, a specimen of which I happened to own back in the early 1980’s. After getting tired of programming games for it, I got a Z-80 assembler program for it and programmed a working clock with hands drawn on the TV screen all in Z-80 assembler. That feat was as big a reward as I ever got from the device.
@davidkeetz
August 4, 2024 at 6:06 pm
Wow…it’s crazy to realize there are people alive today who don’t know about Tandy computers….they were huge. Tandy products were everywhere when I was growing up
@davidkeetz
August 4, 2024 at 6:14 pm
Man I miss radio shack. There was always so much cool stuff to find, especially when you found one with a consignment or trade in section. Sometimes some super rare and specialized equipment that you might never see again in your life would roll through radio shack stores from some old navy engineer or a former ibm employee or something trading in some one off specially designed unit that he didn’t have a use for anymore so he could get 30% store credit on a pc a bulk box of some part bc his new hobby was building satellite de-scramblers to sell to people through mail in requests from the local penny saver.
@davidkeetz
August 4, 2024 at 6:23 pm
That tv you found in a dumpster DOES have channel four. It’s just not programmed for the channel scan. You could set it up by getting a universal remote and programming it to the tv.
@Thohean
August 4, 2024 at 7:15 pm
Sometimes when trying to “play” data audio tapes, you have to play them at not max volume, because the audio clips, like when screaming into a microphone.
@blackrock1961
August 4, 2024 at 7:36 pm
I have one of those in a box in the attic.
@sandy7m
August 4, 2024 at 7:38 pm
Had one of these pocket computers back in the late eighties. I wrote an advanced programming language (built from lots of subroutines). I spent maybe two years at it. Did home budgets and work calculations. I had the tapedeck and the printer. Then the ribbon strip broke and that was the end of it…..
Until I started using spreadsheets on the Psion 3s (and never looked at programming again.
Now I am PC laptop and Android.
@kevinL5425
August 4, 2024 at 7:42 pm
I bought new both the PC-1 and PC-2 with the 8k memory expansion module. Both are still working perfectly. I wrote a 32 room text based adventure game called “Haunted House” for the PC-2 which my friends enjoyed. The fastest they finished it was in 2.5 hours. It had vampires that would come out to kill you at midnight, starving cats that would eat you if you didn’t have cat food, and other similar cool features.
BTW there is nothing magic about that tape drive. In later years I had the audio output go to the microphone input on my Windows PC to record a wav file. I could then play that back from the headphone jack to mic input on the PC-2 to load programs. There was (maybe still is) a web site where you could upload these wav files which I uploaded my Haunted House program to. There is also a Pocket Computer emulator you can download to run on your PC. So feel free to find the site and download the game.
I also have the distinction of being the first person at my University (that I know of) to use a computer on a midterm exam. In my second year Statistics class I used what I learned in class to write a program to perform Analysis of Variance calculations, which I used to check my work on assignments. In the midterm preparation class I asked the instructor if I could use a computer on the exam. Remember, this is when that same instructor was still using punched cards to write programs which he stored on 9-track tape drives. He just laughed at me and said “If you can lug a computer in you can use it”. So I brought in my PC-2. I still did the work by hand but used the computer to check it. But really, since I understood how to do Analysis of Variance well enough to write the computer program to do it, I knew enough to pass the exam!
That shows how revolutionary these devices were. Our instructors still thought of computers as the huge room filling timesharing computers. So much so that even when I asked for permission to bring a computer to the exam he thought I was joking. The 70s through 90s were huge transitional years for computers that I treasure having lived through and contributed to.
I still occasionally use both computers. The PC-2 is still one of the best calculators I ever used, letting you assign values to dozens of variables then write the full math formula to get the result, or write a BASIC program for really complex calculations.
I even have done some machine language programming (using Basic’s peeks and pokes) to do things like speed up some screen effects in the Haunted House game.
Lots of fond memories of that computer.
@kevinL5425
August 4, 2024 at 7:50 pm
Oh, I also have the magnificent Tandy Radio Shack Model 100. The favorite of reporters at the time with the ability to write articles and then use the built in modem to upload the articles to their paper. It helped to greatly reduce their publishing deadlines because they could write the stories almost anywhere and get the text file to the main office almost immediately.
@brothervan3884
August 4, 2024 at 8:13 pm
Whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnneeee!
@xliquidflames
August 4, 2024 at 8:26 pm
24:14 I thought the lesson was going to be, “Never ever …get into retro tech. The experience is maddening.”
@RichardCyberPunk
August 4, 2024 at 8:57 pm
I learned programming on the MC-10, that I traded for an Atari 600XL 2 years later. I still have a TRS-80 model 4P, Tandy model 102 and model 200. All in working conditions.
@paulharrow7897
August 4, 2024 at 8:57 pm
TRS-80, VZ-200, ZX-81, Commodore 64, Apple IIe. Living through that period was such an incredible dream come true. Today’s generation missed the excitement and wonder that us 80’s nerds got to experience.
@yellingintothewind
August 5, 2024 at 4:35 pm
You ran that TRS emulator on top of the Dosbox emulator.
@GoofyOldGuyPlays
August 5, 2024 at 4:36 pm
Having worked for Radio Shack for over a decade back in the 80’s-90’s, I can’t help but laugh at Millennials trying to figure out Boomer technology. (never owned an old Atari or even Pong?) You want a fun-filled exercise? Research what ever happened to the Tandy/Radio Shack TRON drive, the first writable compact disc. Or the massively popular OS on RAM or Deskmate Desktop program. How they switched to selling IBM and killed the Tandy Computer franchise. The history of Radio Shack and their computers is a fascinating yet very sad story.
@craigkling5125
August 5, 2024 at 4:52 pm
Neighbor had a Trash-80. Pretty sure was ’80. Clock and battery was one and same. By 1997 the battery was dead and no chance at replacement. I gave a study and thought to make battery connect to two legs of the module. Guy took it back before I got around to it though.
?? was that little thing TRS-80? Mine was keyboard, unit that hooked to TV. It even had spaces for hard drives. I’d never done anything with it for years. – Actually, my mom bought it, and only later said she bought it for me. I did not know what a hard drive was. Played with it and lost interest. Nothing compatible with it. Bought me a uses Windows 3 computer and upgraded to W95.
@zdanee
August 5, 2024 at 4:53 pm
I had one of these – or rather my grandpa who was a nuclear physicist had it and gave it to me. They were also used on local buses, they printed tickets, you told the driver where you gonna get off the bus, it knew which stop we were currently at, calculated the price, and printed the ticket. They were used well into the 2000s.
@CuttinChopps
August 5, 2024 at 5:09 pm
Moist
@tim1398
August 5, 2024 at 5:17 pm
Haha my father bought the CoCo and I learned assembly on it… wish he had bought an Apple][e though. The tape player was always a crapshoot, you could usually read your own tapes but due to motor speed errors others could rarely read yours.
@tim1398
August 5, 2024 at 5:24 pm
The difference between Tandy and the others you mention (Dell, HP, Microsoft, ….) is that Tandy just resold other companies products, the others actually had (and have) engineers and product development to imagine, create, design and produce the products.
@Raptor50aus
August 5, 2024 at 5:52 pm
Was great working at Tandys in the 80s and was this computer was great for cheat notes 🙂
@MarceloReis1
August 5, 2024 at 5:54 pm
You’re not very smart, are you? How hard is it to understand a minijack cable?
@thanksfernuthin
August 5, 2024 at 6:06 pm
I feel for you. Our science lab had a TRS-80 in a back room when I was in high school. It wasn’t there to teach kids. This was way before that was a thing. But they allowed a few of us to play with it. It was a lot of fun for those of us inclined. Loading programs off of cassette. One “game” was Dancing Demons. I did the work to get the demon to dance to “Cum on Feel The Noize” by Quiet Riot. They thought I was a friggin’ computer genius! I allowed them to retain that misguided assumption. 😂”Trash 80″ is really a term of endearment. It was trash in comparison to the computers that followed and we were the first to experience what happens when one letter of one line of code is wrong. The frustration of dealing with computers began with that machine for a lot of us.
@PortaCoCo
August 5, 2024 at 6:11 pm
You are completely useless, you’re posting on YouTube, maybe use it, all the answers are there…. Clearly you need to be completely spoon fed everything, maybe stick with your iPhone, and complain how difficult it is on YouTube to everyone…😢
@darthdmun
August 5, 2024 at 6:48 pm
happy that i do not have a stupid so called smart phone. don’t need phones!
@arkiefyler
August 5, 2024 at 6:58 pm
You might enjoy investigating the Heathkit H11. A friend and I considered building one of these before purchasing an Apple ][. We bought the Apple after borrowing a TRS-80. Your vid certainly makes me feel my age! Loading ‘programs’ from a cassette tape was just amazing… back then, anyway! 🤪
@tsmith731
August 5, 2024 at 7:07 pm
Now I see why you left Computer school. Keep making films. Stay away from computers…….. You don’t love them.
@cindernubblebutt1340
August 5, 2024 at 7:10 pm
I had a routine on Saturdays in the 70’s. I’m sure my mom loved it. I’d get my allowance, ride my bike and go to Chucks Toys and Hobbies, look around and see if I could afford anything, if not, I’d hit the drugstore and see if any candy looked good. Then I’d ride a MILE UPHILL to go to Radio Shack and get my BATTERY OF THE MONTH. I usually went for the 9 volts as I had a LOT of walkie talkies. Then if I didn’t find anything anywhere else, I’d hit Kmart and look at all their 8mm movies of Rodan and Godzilla and model kits and maybe see if that one piece of CHARRED BLACK popcorn had BURNT off the heating element of the popcorn machine they had near the front entrance.
@williamturk2330
August 5, 2024 at 7:53 pm
I used to subscribe to Enter! It was a lot of fun.
@slipdigit
August 5, 2024 at 8:04 pm
Calm down
@Datan0de
August 5, 2024 at 8:24 pm
This isn’t a dig or a brag, but any Gen Xer who grew up with computers in the late ’70s-late ’80s would’ve checked for a channel selector switch without thinking about it.
My dad had a pocket computer like this (I don’t remember if it was this sale model or not). I programmed a simple Hunt The Wumpus game on it. Nothing special at all, but a better indicator of what that computer is capable of than a coin flipping game. (That is a dig.)
@hwertz10
August 5, 2024 at 8:27 pm
I got my hands on a TRS-80 model 100 once. WAY after it was current. That thing used some double A’s. ran apparently for like a full day powered on, just stored everything in memory but the batteries kept thay live for anout a month,. It had a likr 3 or 4 line display. it had a built in modem and was apparently very popular with jouirnalists since they could type their (newpaper) reports into it and phone them in with the modem.
@hwertz10
August 5, 2024 at 8:31 pm
Your comment about hobbyists is spot on. I’m going to be selling my old stuff… IDE hard drives, NeXT, pci cards. etc. I’m testing everything (make sure to plug the pci cards in before i sell the last pc i have with pci slots… i will give full help providing experience if they have any problems since i have first hand experience from back in the day.
@blackwing88cyper51
August 5, 2024 at 8:38 pm
the issues he says he is having getting stuff to work with compatibility will be kids and adults in 2060 with 2020 computers be like LOL instead of adults in 2020 about 1980 computers LOL
@BigPlatinumDragon
August 5, 2024 at 8:41 pm
I remember in 1982 our high school finally got in computers for a “Introduction to Computers” course. the classroom had 21 TRS-80 desktops, (20 for students, 1 for the teacher.) myself and 2 other students ended up helping the teacher learn along with the other students because we had taught ourselves “Basic” programing on our own home computers, and the class was only set up to teach the ‘basics’ of “basic” programing which we already knew. LOL {oh and we were already calling them Trash-80s in the early 1980s.} BTW the home computer I learned on the year before was a TI-99/4A Texas Instruments foray into home computers before they stopped and decided to just produce the electronics that all the other computer companies still use inside their machines.
@pbprestin
August 5, 2024 at 8:52 pm
Wow! This really took ,e back to suppressed memories of typing in programs and storing them on cassettes. Dont miss those days!!
@cfajohnson5207
August 5, 2024 at 9:08 pm
My first computer, in 1983, was a TRS-80 Pocket Computer. The only useful program I wrote on it produced code to create a crossword grid using the typesetting language I used at work. I had to manually copy the code from the PC1 to the typesetting computer. I very quickly found the PC1 too limiting and, after a couple of months, bought a C=64.
@mikekopack6441
August 5, 2024 at 9:16 pm
The MICRO Coco is a TOTALLY different computer than the Color Computer. This is the problem with Tandy stuff – so much of what they sold were totally incompatible with each other because they were rebrands of stuff from totally different original companies.
My first time touching a computer was a TRS-80 Model 3 in 1st grade in something like 1979/1980. I remember it was the silver case model with 2 floppy drives in it. I was hooked. My next experiences were messing around with a friend’s Vic-20 at his house, and the Atari 400 and 800 and Vic-20 in K-Mart and Nichol’s Dept stores. I didn’t get my first computer (C64 w/1541 and MPS802 printer) until Xmas 1983.
I have an old SharpPC-1500A pocket computer (just for nostalgia sake) and recently sold off a TRS-80 Model 3 that I salvaged, and repaired and upgraded. One of my most prized posessions is a practically mint condition Tandy Model 100 “laptop” computer that works perfectly. Wish I had the expansion system for it but those are SUPER rare these days…. I brought it to work one day and jokingly asked one of my IT guys if they could take a look at it and fix it. He was like “WTF?!?! What is this thing?!??!” I laughed. I remember LUSTING after that thing in the local Radio Shack during middle school – wanting to be able to bring it to school with me. Just the thought of having a PORTABLE COMPUTER?!?!? WOW! (It would have gotten smashed or stolen within a week considering how many calculators I had swiped from my locker…)
There was just something charming about those old systems – yeah they don’t hold a candle computationally to modern stuff. But they had character – no two systems were the same. It was a time when system manufacturers were experimenting and trying out different concepts. Today everything is so much the same. Back then there were serious arguments over who was better – Commodore, Apple, Atari, Tandy… Hell, the IBM PC didn’t even exist yet!
@markrosenthal9108
August 6, 2024 at 12:49 pm
I had one of those Model 1 cassette cables. I remember playing the William Tell Overture on the cassette motor start/stop relay with it.
@Slartybartfast465
August 6, 2024 at 1:11 pm
Did you say that used to belong to Boeing ? You may want to check the hatch / door over the batteries to make sure it doesn’t fly off during use.
@williamwhitney6473
August 6, 2024 at 1:15 pm
I don’t think it’s necessary to denigrate Radio Shack products by referring to them as “TRASH”. They were often higher quality and had more features than others that at first glance appeared to be the same. For instance, radios and other devices often had more ways to power them. Tandy computers had 16 colors at a time when IBM PCs had only four.
@russellseilhamer4552
August 6, 2024 at 1:32 pm
Growing up in the 80s Radio Shack was penultimate in cool as far as tech is concerned. We laugh today but they made very high quality radio equipment and accessories for a reasonable price. Customer service was excellent. I’ll always remember my 8th Birthday in 1984 when I received a Realistic single cassette deck boom box radio . One of the most epic presents ever!!! It had amazing sound for the time. It was my go to for 8 years
@Toby_Q
August 6, 2024 at 1:33 pm
A bit dramatic… ok way too dramatic… especially with the TV channel 4 thing… you have all of the wrong things in the whole video and just complain the entire time… I don’t get it.
@Slartybartfast465
August 6, 2024 at 2:08 pm
My buddy back then had a Tandy-1000. An hour and a half of writing lines of code from the book it came with just for a basic geometric shape to rotate on the screen. Then there was the game he got for it. The dungeons of dagereth, one of the cheesyist most basic games with almost stick figure like graphics but we loved it.
@dougfraser2131
August 6, 2024 at 2:38 pm
I had one of these from 1982 to 1992. The first five years it saw a lot of use, and I purchased three or four software packages for it, as well as writing a few small utilities myself. It was an interesting piece of kit.
@SergioNayar
August 6, 2024 at 2:51 pm
Super entertained with this nostalgic video! Thanks PS!!!
@scottwelch5001
August 6, 2024 at 2:52 pm
I had those ENTER magazines…and I used the BASIC programs inside on my Dad’s Commodore Vic 20.
@danielmarek4609
August 6, 2024 at 3:12 pm
I can remember when all the initial computers were coming out in the early 80’s. They were junk when compared to what came only a few years later. I also agree that you never through anything away that’s electronic. I have a bin in my basement full of “stuff” that one day may save the planet Earth from aliens! hah.
@rbaxter286
August 6, 2024 at 3:30 pm
It was a piece of junk with nothing but character-based graphics, at best, and the old Infocom text game, at best.
It was the “computer that became your phone” like the Flintstone Mobile was the progenitor of the Tesla Truck.
Utterly worthless. HP calculators at the time were actually USEFUL.
@randomactsofvideos313
August 6, 2024 at 3:59 pm
I remember those days …
@Tooob
August 6, 2024 at 5:10 pm
This host is an idiot. At the time in the 80’s BASIC was one of the only languages personal computers used! I learned it when I was 9 and I had a Radio Shack PC-1, PC-2, and PC-5. The PC-2 was the best, I even created a racing game using the bitmap graphics ability of the display. I made 3 “screens”, road turning left, center, and turning right. My car was a few pixels in the middle. I made a program on my Commodore 64 to create the array of numbers that made the graphics. Later in life I created and sold iPhone apps – having waited for technlogy to catch up to things I had done as a child.
@Tooob
August 6, 2024 at 5:18 pm
The more I watch, the more I realize I won’t watch another video on this channel ever again. Learn the history. Every pocket computer had software released for it. The catalog numbers of each cassette of software that was sold is on a site called Floodgap Retrobits. Had you done even a brief search, you could have found them and known what was compatible and what wasn’t.
There was never any problem at the time because only PC-1 cassettes were available when it was at the Radio Shack store. As they discontinued it and sold everything, the PC-2 became available and only those cassettes were in the store.
@DissociatedWomenIncorporated
August 6, 2024 at 6:38 pm
When are we getting a 100% speedrun of “Klingon Killer”?
@BrBill
August 6, 2024 at 6:59 pm
Meanwhile, Kroger is buying Safeway/Albertsons stores, making … mostly a monopoly of grocery stores.
@KipIngram
August 6, 2024 at 7:52 pm
Dude. That’s just a stereo audio cable. Nothing “computer special” about it. After all, the cassette recorder was made to record sound, right? It wasn’t INTENDED as a computer storage device.
@KipIngram
August 6, 2024 at 7:53 pm
No – you just fouled up. That cable with the five-pin connector was for larger, desktop models like the TRS-80 color computer.
@christiantroy3034
August 6, 2024 at 8:40 pm
I learned to program on a trash 80. (basic, octal, hex, and binary). After my first spinal surgeryI worked 5 years at Radio Shack, I even worked at the first store and first company headquarters in Boston. Miss those days. Funny thing is that L lived in a town where Texas Instruments did Al sorts of stuff even built computers.
@SandCrabNews
August 6, 2024 at 8:48 pm
I had the SHARP version in 1986, I purchased in Japan before returning to California. Imagine spending ours transcribing a BASIC from print into the computer, then 3 hours debugging. I had 2 cassette players and the 4-color printer.
@ConnorwithanO
August 6, 2024 at 8:59 pm
I bought one of these (Sharp branded) with the printer a decade ago and would take it to school with me alongside my TI-82 and TI-57. I also had a Micro Color Computer at one point. And I even had a Tandy 102 8-bit laptop. I still have the pocket computer, but the screen has degraded beyond usability, and I’m strapped for cash, so I have to let it go, sadly. Hopefully someone out there can get it back into shape!
@Ainglish-qj5bb
August 6, 2024 at 8:59 pm
Does anyone Remember the CoCo III and what happened when you poked the register to make the CPU run at 2x speed?
Psychedelics at age 12, that’s what! 😀
@arudanel5542
August 6, 2024 at 9:00 pm
Watching someone ranting about not getting Basic makes me giggle a bit, not gonna lie. In 4th grade, we were learning BASIC and TURTLE (no idea what it stood for but it was for the Apple II) in school. If you can write batch (bat) files, Basic isn’t far off from that. We would sometimes get bored and write something like:
10 FARTS
20 GOTO 10
and hit enter. So the whole computer lab would be a bunch of tandy and apple computers just spamming FARTS as fast as the text could scroll.
I had a Tandy CoCo10, though I’ve found like 20 names for the thing is was a portable kids computer. Something like 150 bucks, it had a lid and a handle like many electric typewriters of the time, and kids could take it to a friends house, and plug it into a TV set with the UHF adapter it came with. I made choose your own adventure games, and text based RPGs on mine all the time. Most of them were terrible, I was 11 after all. Like Secret of the Poops, or Nightmare Monsters from Boondangle.
@darnellgarrison1628
August 6, 2024 at 9:01 pm
Tandy also owned CompUSA and started Incredible Universe which both tanked after a new CEO basically tanked the brands. Btw, I’m a former employee
@michaelgideon8944
August 6, 2024 at 9:26 pm
If youre a centain age you probably learned how program on a Trash 80. You kids dont realize how hard it used to be. TRS-80s and walking to school in the snow up hill both ways.
@davidrumbelow
August 7, 2024 at 2:12 pm
Radio Shack even sold in South Africa
@sparky6086
August 7, 2024 at 2:15 pm
Newspaper reporters used these particular models for years, after they were otherwise obsolete to upload stories to their papers over ordinary phone lines, when they were on the road.
@sparky6086
August 7, 2024 at 2:18 pm
Radio Shack/Tandy were the first affordable & practical consumer computers. IBM wasn’t in that market yet, & the Apple II was way too expensive for most people.
Personal computer “history” completely forgets about it, giving all the credit to Steve Jobs & Bill Gates.
@sparky6086
August 7, 2024 at 2:24 pm
The name “Radio Shack” actually came more from the outbuilding which amateur radio hobbyists aka, Hams, typically kept their equipment, than the radio room on a ship.
@mcgam2000
August 7, 2024 at 2:34 pm
As a 77 year old computer geek who got into it around that time, your ranting has no sympathy from me… I learned to program on a VIC-20. I learned BASIC there and went on to earn a living doing stuff I enjoyed a lot more than you seem to… And yes making programs or copying them was a labor of love. And when it didn’t work we just went back to the listing to see where we had made a mistake…. “Those were the days, my friend”
@sparky6086
August 7, 2024 at 3:00 pm
No one could afford Apple in the early days! The TRS-80 was the gateway to home computing for millions of people. “Trash-80” was a term of enderment; owners used as humble recognition, they knew, it wasn’t the best computer, but it was the best one they could afford.
@VanWinger
August 7, 2024 at 3:37 pm
TRS-80 PC-4 found in the random remote box at the thrift store. Go to the counter. No price tag so I ask how much. Lady says what is that a remote for? I say it’s not a remote it’s a TRS-80. Lady says Oh, okay … Just take it. I was out the door so fast.
@allancopland1768
August 7, 2024 at 3:39 pm
oprry, much though they were cool, thay had absolutely nothing like the power of a modern android smartp[hone.
@rickr530
August 7, 2024 at 3:48 pm
Move along people, nothing to see here.
@lightomatic8950
August 7, 2024 at 3:54 pm
This video could have been a lot cooler if the guy put more effort into getting the computer working and less effort into being snarky.
@KentuckyRanger
August 7, 2024 at 3:55 pm
I had the Casio Data Bank.
I thought I was George Jetson, LOL!
@Robert08010
August 7, 2024 at 3:57 pm
Does anyone remember using a PC with a cassette interface. My dad bought a lot of PC clones and actual IBM PCs about when they were nearly obsolete. I discovered many of them had the 5 pic din ports on the back right next to the keyboard port. But I don’t recall every hearing of anyone who used a cassette with a PC clone. For those who don’t recall, if you started up an early PC clone without any floppy or hard drive, it would launch Basica and run very similarly to a TRS-80 or C-64. In other words, there were rom chips with this built in to may of the earliest PCs.
@chrischeshire6528
August 7, 2024 at 3:58 pm
The Pocket Computer was my first computer. And I used it for my Traffic Accident formulas as a Air Force Security policman. The only problem I had was a broken screen but when to my local Radio Shack and they fixed it in 24 hours.
@KhaoticKalm
August 7, 2024 at 4:06 pm
What a blast from the past. You know they said all of this made Gen X some of the best problem solvers…
But maybe it’s the reason we were more known for throwing up our hands and saying “screw it”
@TheMikeseiler
August 7, 2024 at 4:10 pm
Gosh. Brings back memories. But I think I lost most of my RS stuff somewhere in to many moves.
@EWDDG
August 7, 2024 at 4:50 pm
It was made by Sharp.
@Jacmac1
August 7, 2024 at 5:37 pm
I bought one when I was in High School, a lot of the nerd types had them, including me. A few people had the Sharp PC-1500 which was the real version. I still have it after all of these years and it still works.
@timsmith5096
August 7, 2024 at 5:37 pm
Your too young, try programming a zx81 with a bad ram pack connector
@hendrikbarboritsch7003
August 7, 2024 at 5:42 pm
I had the Sharp version in the 80s, learned BASIC and had heaps of fun with it.
Worked fine back then, even with the cassette player and printer.
Used it for programming my own games and solving maths problems in school.
The small screen and limited sounds did frustrate me, but it was a cheap alternative to own any computer at the time.
@JohnnyLegato6M
August 7, 2024 at 6:09 pm
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, I earned nearly $1,000,000 doing engineering work on a Radio Shack TRS-80 model III connected to a dot-matrix printer. It was never connected to the internet and never crashed once. For me, it replaced a room full of IBM 360.
@jimzoidberg7953
August 7, 2024 at 6:20 pm
My father had one of these. I loved it, it felt like a sci-fi device and strengthened my belief that my first job would definitely be on the moon base.
I wrote an adventure game in 1. Fight 2. Run 3. Bribe style – lots of RANDOM used. Great fun. The Basic sucked….I was 12 and had just switched from Lego to the ZX 81
@user-vq3zg6ks4v
August 7, 2024 at 6:26 pm
I had the calculator that came in this case. It did not have the alphabet keyboard but you could type a number 64 digits long. You could do complex math problems if you used the proper brackets inside brackets inside brackets etc… It gave you about 6 variables. My screen died, like this one is starting to do.
@josecisne7997
August 7, 2024 at 6:33 pm
I’m a 53 years old Computer Science Engineer. When I was in 6th grade, my dad gave me my first computer, a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer, with 4k RAM. It was the big gray one, I actually never saw the pocket or mini ones you tested. In my TRS-80 you could play decent games by using cartridges, similar to the first Atari game consoles. Later, when I was in high school, I upgraded to a Commodore 64, and then to a Commodore 128. Then in college I started using IBM PCs and clones with MS-DOS.
@hexdude24
August 7, 2024 at 7:06 pm
My time with a TRS-80 Pocket Computer in the late 80’s was servicing elevators. The software ran on one of these.
@MarkoChuValcarcel
August 7, 2024 at 7:28 pm
It was in need a Sharp PC-1500 with other name, I had the PC-1500 when a I was 12 years old (1985 my phater bouth it in Japan in 1982 ), I learned how to program with this small computer. It had a plotter and a tape recorder to store programs. Later I became a software engeneer, right know I’m a resercher and every thing began with this little but powerfull and flexible device. The BASIC Language had the option to use dynamic labels in GOTO instructions, instead of fixed row numbers in other computers, you could add a label to a line of you programm then wherever you wanted you could use a string variable as the parameter of a GOTO statement and the programm execution will jump to the line with the label
@netdragon256
August 7, 2024 at 10:52 pm
I have an RF adapter with a switch in a container somewhere in my basement, haha.
@henkm9905
August 8, 2024 at 12:08 am
All good memories. I used to have a Sinclair. Very much the same.
@AyayronBalakay
August 8, 2024 at 1:20 am
i appreciate your service
@MrA2intl
August 8, 2024 at 1:31 am
Correction: the very best magazine for 80s computer nerd kids was Creative Computing, with multicolumn articles of BASIC listings you could type in, of course with “addenda” for the changes required for the various BASIC dialects (MS-BASIC, AppleBasic, INTBASIC, TRS-80, and PET / C64 variants come to mind, because if you were trying to get them working on an Atari 400, you were clearly a garbage kid with finger strain from that terrible membrane keyboard)
@mistavia
August 8, 2024 at 4:37 am
Who is this guy and why does he have to shout at us from the very second of the video? I’m afraid his style of presentation turned me off from the first minute – I’m out!
@ARandomOSDever
August 8, 2024 at 5:58 am
“Kill me”
Later…
@sylakravenspine9799
August 8, 2024 at 6:29 am
Although Tandy may not have allowed computers from competitors to be sold alongside machines on the shop floor, they must have acted as a distributer for Acorn Computers, because I distinctly remember picking up our BBC Micro, under a plain brown cardboard box, from the store in the early 80s. Anyone know what that was about?
@CarnivoreRonin
August 8, 2024 at 8:42 am
I am 52 and an MIS professor at a university. I actually had the pocket computer but not the TRS-80 even though we had those at school. My pocket computer had the printer as well but it was thermal, so no ink required but proprietary thermal paper…
I also had a TI-994a which was another product of its time. One amazing thing about the TI was that it played game cartridges as well as games you could load from cassette or 5.25 inch floppy(A fun side note was that we used a hole punch to make the single sided floppies double sided since that was the only difference in them.
Buying computer magazines and typing in games in BASIC was a double-edged sword. It could be amazing, or, alternatively amazingly frustrating. Imagine typing in a program manually and getting an error, parsing the code for days looking for your typo, then next month you get the fix. The error was a misprint in the magazine!
@ancientegyptandthebible
August 8, 2024 at 11:06 am
I had a Casio FX-5200P in college. I had not idea it was the same as the TRS-80 PC7. Dang! If I has known that, I would have used its programming capabilities a lot more than I did.
@raycharles1752
August 8, 2024 at 12:30 pm
Fixing my commodore PET gave me very similar experience. These people are geniunly nice and want to help. Its a great community.
also, what you should really do for fun is get a wifi adapter for one of these machines (my commodore PET from 1977 has one, so there is probably one for the TRS80 too).
And then you use TELNET provided by the Wifi card that acts as a classic modem to log into MUDs (Multiple User Dungeons) and enjoy some of the first MMORPG games out there, some older that the World Wide Web. Its great stuff.
@claywalker1980
August 8, 2024 at 12:46 pm
I just recently found this Chanel. I love your videos. Keep up the good work.
@adonian
August 8, 2024 at 1:43 pm
I had one of those.
@ziggyinc
August 8, 2024 at 2:25 pm
As a 55 year old, I have to wonder why the history I lived through was so different from what you discovered. I would have solved the cable issue in just a minute or two, and I knew about the Tandy Sharp connection all along.
@DivineMisterAdVentures
August 8, 2024 at 2:53 pm
TOO F’N MUCH DRAMA in the style. This time. For those of us who came of age.
@proehm
August 8, 2024 at 2:57 pm
I had one. Including the docking cradle (with printer). For what it was, it worked just fine.
@solonsaturngaming3727
August 8, 2024 at 3:36 pm
I can smell his Stress Stress from, the screen lmao
@flapjack9495
August 8, 2024 at 3:39 pm
I am indeed well over 40 and remember Radio Shack and Tandy well. I had one of those PC-1 pocket computers. I remember writing a BASIC program to compute the value of pi, letting it run for hours, and coming back to find the LCD screen very dim as I’d almost completely drained the batteries. My first IBM PC clone was a Tandy 1000A.
@ggardner1138
August 8, 2024 at 4:21 pm
This reminds me of the Dallas TX FM radio station back in the 80s that on Saturday or Sunday mornings would have a show for nerds like me.
And when the time was right they would queue -up a cassette of some computer program or another and if you were ready, you could start your own recording to use on your primitive computer. Talk about mass piracy! But nah, it was probably just some other nerd’s program.
@tecenter
August 8, 2024 at 4:57 pm
I actually saw both the TRS-80 computer and the portable at my older brothers house in the late mid 70s. I was not allowed to touch either. His wife ran the computer system complete with a huge Tandy plotter for her (I guess) business, I never knew the name of. My older brother is 13 years older than I am with a PhD in nuclear physics ( that I can’t even spell correctly without spellchecks help), opps just miskeyed while typing… , So from around 74 until I got my first Tandy HX1000 in 88 with an intel 8088 microprocessor and 128k or ram I’d been wondering if and when I’d ever get my grubbly hands on anything, In 89 after buying another HX1000 for my younger brother, that eventually came back to me (I was told his wife didn’t like it ) I than set it up for my mom. Next I got the Tandy CGA monitor. After that I upgraded to a Tandy RL1000 with a 29k modem builtin and went online with Prodigy. I found a chat room called for beginners. A question that was asked in the for beginners real time chat was “what does your ideal computer look like? Even back than my answer was Everything on the microprocessor bussed directly to any peripheral(s) currently called an (soc) system in chip. I learned how to light 1 pixel on the CMS 11 CGA monitor in BASIC, than pretty much used the machine for chat since I had no idea of anything I wanted to program into the machine besides lighting up a single pixel. Funny that I’d seen it done once in a Lab at my older brothers graduate school while on a tour by him of the labs and an I think it was an Illiac but was told in 1968 it was an Eniac, it was behind glass in the Lab building in Urbana IL.) and a researcher in a timy lat was ysng a wired pen with a button on the pen to light single pixels on a CRT monitor. By the late 80’s early 90s my older brother was teaching his daughter on an apple desktop and programming color stuff on Apple hardware at work. I was again told to keep my grubby hands away from his precious machine. When I finally did touch a similar Apple machine someone else let me us, I couldn’t even figure out how to eject the floppy disk from its motorized slotted floppy disk drive. So much for Apples advertised OS Ease of Use or my intelligence of all things computers. I still don’t remember if it was a specially marked key or a single or combination hot key(s) that ejected the floppy disk as I wasn’t going to be using any other app;le products for years.
On the subject of Anti Trust I think you’ll find some others the gov thought were a threat to national security due to their size and multinational business, politics and computer related activities that also lost their cases in supreme court. Many other sup;reme court cases besides Anti Trust of long forgotten big compute companies of their day that were put out of business and had their histories rewritten over time as people memories of actual evidence dried up.
If you want to be able to experience the modern version of some of the still available historical stuff, that would be FreeBSD and it’s forks Op;enBSD and NetBSD. and their histories and relationship with UNIX. Of course you can also look into Novel if there is still any info about what it eventually was decided in court that it Novel actually owned full rights to in the SCO vs IBM case.
On and on the rewriting of history proceeds in the current industry s goal of Computer Interoperability which in name and origin is quickly fading from most of the general public and many old disgruntled computer professionals memories too. Ah, Life in our computer age, as the old saying goes don’t beleive everything you read on the internet and for me even what you are told by family..
While shopping for my first computer I was focusing on the Tandy Color Computer with the hope of being able to fill up its 64k of memory. Luckily the sales guy I was talking to at Radio Shack was into Lisp programming and steered me to the HX1000 as a much wiser purchase with 128k or ram and a 256k floppy disk drive instead of the Color Compters cassette tape drive.
@Hairy_Takoyaki
August 8, 2024 at 5:56 pm
True to your words, I still haven’t thrown away my Casio FX-720P with it’s cell battery back up ram pack of 2k bytes of memory! (which was the equivalent of the TRS-80 PC4 / Casio PB-100 in your line up)
You just never know when you ‘might’ need it again some day. 🤔
@Morganstudios
August 8, 2024 at 7:24 pm
I remember playing Parsec on my cousin’s Tandy computer as a kid. It was pretty cool because it could talk! It was the first time I remember hearing a game with voice in it.
@3henry214
August 8, 2024 at 9:09 pm
This sure brought back a lot of memories. I didn’t have a TRS-80 pocket computer, I traveled a different route… the Timex-Sinclair 1000, which, oddly enough, was also being sold in Radio Shack stores (where I purchased mine). That made me scratch my head after I learned that the T/S 1000 was a competitor to the TRS-80’s. I graduated from the T/S 1000, to a Commodore 64, to an IBM PC, and onto a 40-year career in IBM Mainframe support.
Boy, I sure do miss the days of Radio Shack stores, the Allied Radio Knight-Kit, Lafayette Radio Electronics, and Heathkit catalogs… the only thing better for wishful “window” shopping were the Sears and Spiegel Christmas catalogs.
@EduardodeRegules
August 8, 2024 at 9:16 pm
Computer in the hand, was the dream of the early 80’s
@jasonhildebrand1574
August 8, 2024 at 10:39 pm
I hope Michael White makes it to Bermuda on his 40-foot sailboat 2:00
@phenylxeon
August 8, 2024 at 10:57 pm
this guy yells too much…
@jasonhildebrand1574
August 8, 2024 at 11:18 pm
wow, there’s a lot to unpack here. I used to ride my bike 2 miles to the radio shack in town to buy individual electronic components, because I couldn’t afford anything related to computers. I would build my own little circuits based on the “Engineers Mini Notebooks” from Forrest M. Mims III . Now of course, I did have an Atari 2600 in 1983, and also at some point I had a KayPro-2 portable, and also a Commodore 64 ( in the 90s). I guess in retrospect, if I had understood anything better, I could have built my own computer for cheaper back in the day. Nowadays, building a kit computer ( CPU made from logic gates) is more expensive than an entire PC.
@lawrenceking4144
August 9, 2024 at 12:09 am
You would have had an easier time finding the cables you needed by going to your local Radio Shack. But I do have to come to Radio Shacks defense as far supposedly not selling competing computers. Radio Shack was about the ONLY place to buy a PC and the ones n California carried all brands along side Tandy. They even sold IBM PCs as well as IBM clones. I’m guessing you had so much trouble getting these computers to perform may be due to they age and what they may have been through before you acquired them. Back in the day I had the computer that connected to my TV and the tape deck to write and store your own programs and never had a problem. It was great writing your own programs in BASIC and learning to modify lines of instructions to customize the “games” making them unique to you. We were well aware even back then that Tandy and Radio Shack did not really make the computers. What they gave us was access. Through their Brick and Mortar stores located EVERYWHERE, we could see and touch every detail and pick up accessories at the same time.
@sweetmankim
August 9, 2024 at 1:29 am
That is very tiny poor things in this time, but GREAT ever at that time.
Who can image the A4 size High resolution tablet or work station level laptop which faster than PDP-11 or IBM360 at that time?
@ehudgavron1
August 9, 2024 at 1:54 am
There were various manufacturers making products, and Radio Shack sold fully assembled units. Heathkit sold units you had to assemble yourself. The hardware was good at the time.
None of that led to the PC as a phone.
The PC as a phone was the result of the “Pocket PC” which –after the PC wars where there was the Radio Shack PC, the Apple PC, the TI 99/4a PC, the Amiga, the Atari, and many other PCs– had settled on the IBM PC as the standard. Mostly this was because like its precursor, the S-100 bus computers, parts were compatible. BIOS was compatible, and your dad’s DOS (CP/M) worked on all.
The pocket PC hit its heyday in 1999-2002 and it wasn’t long before someone decided to put a phone in it, and add phone stack to the software. That would be Windows CE (Compact Edition) and while it worked, it took the FCC years to approve it, so all Pocket PC phones were years out of date. In 2003 Microsoft updated the OS to focus on connectivity so we got Windows Mobile 2003, and that had apps (“programs”) that played nice with cellular data and THE phone program. There were no open APIs.
Next up was 2005 where Apple convinced the FCC to fasttrack pocket PCs that talked celullar, and 2007’s iPhone was the first modern for its time phone that was also a computer. Note the paradigm shift — it was a phone that was a computer, not a pocket PC that had a phone program.
But before the iPhone we owe computer phones to various mfgs that produced the Pocket PC. Radio Shack was not a player,
—
In general if you want to have a personality for youtube and it consists of wildly crazy things you say and then that crazy look in your eyes, good for you. But to be an educator know what you’re talking about.
The cassette recorded everything as audio. The magic cable you purchased twice and reached out to your eBay seller for is a simple audio cable (mono, not stereo, separate mic). So you could have gone down to your regular Radio Shack… never mind, WalMart works and gotten the right diameter 2 or 3 connector cables (audio out, microphone) and slapped that analog sucker together.
Yes, magnetic tape will break and not just at the leaders. There used to be “splicing stations” which were little plastic $5 boxes with two aligned trays, holddown mechanisms, a razor blade, and magnifying class. Put the tape in on both sides. Make a clean cut with the razor. Position for some overlap. Place Scotch tape over the side. Flip. Place another on the (former) bottom. The tape doesn’t interfere with the magnetic tape and your tape is as good as new.
DosBOX is great, as are other emulators, but if you have the original hardware, that’s like 95% of the thrill. You can get DosBOX up in a minute, fire up OpenVMS and run the same software hospital laboratories use, as well as banks, airlines, etc. You can even go dance outside yelling in your freaky overhyped voice “I’mrunning a minicomputer from the 1970s-1990s” but realistically it means nothing. Go watch someone start up a PDP-11 on YouTube and when you wake up again, wash your face and all that.
I used to love popular science… before you were born. Did you just buy the rights to use that name on YouTube, or is this what you do for therapy at your “safe living home”?
@phoenixx5092
August 9, 2024 at 2:10 am
One of these turned up at highschool in the 90s, i made a program in it, the owner, a girl, then promptly didnt use the program as intended, but instead used the text input prompt in order to talk dirty to the boys in class by typing a message, hiding it on the next screen, handing it to him, letting him read it, then key in a equally pervy reply – then hand it back to her.. Good days.
@FreakyPete
August 9, 2024 at 3:34 am
What’s the point of this vid. That it’s hard to resurrect old tech? Well duh ! At the time these pocket PC’s were first released, they were as big a leap forward as the first iPhone decades later. I used a Sharp PC 1211, (with a 4 colour pen/plotter) daily from 1981 to 1986 and it saved me thousands of hours of tedium by automating my survey calculations and plotting the results. Abso;utely brilliant – wish I still had it.
@toptohyekoms
August 9, 2024 at 8:50 am
I just installed a brand new old stock of radio shock bulb socket holder in our ceiling, but instead of bulb i used outlet socket to plugged in a wifi extender! And it sure looks like a cctv! Very nice plastic hardware, and it bares a positive old upper middle class piece of equipment.
@spankyharland9845
August 9, 2024 at 9:59 am
I enjoyed this video so much, trying to get old tech to work is always a challenge- kudos to you for doing it- or at least attempting it.
@SJursa-ey4tt
August 9, 2024 at 11:00 am
pagers
@robertchorzelewski1253
August 9, 2024 at 11:58 am
Love your videos! Well made and very enjoyable to watch.
@233kosta
August 9, 2024 at 12:40 pm
Think this is bad? Wait ’til you try OG SCSI 😅
@tomsun3159
August 9, 2024 at 12:55 pm
The TRS80 is mostly similar to the SHARP PC-1210/1211. My suspission is Tandy labeled the Sharp SHARP PC-1210 and 1211. Still a stunning device.
The successor Pc1500/1500A was also available under the Radishacklogo and had expandable memory.
@user-do8zu2oy4n
August 9, 2024 at 12:57 pm
I miss Radio Shack 😔
@marcelosiciliano9365
August 9, 2024 at 1:12 pm
I´ve just saw your incredible video !!! Amazing, Im allmost 60 Years old ( turning to 60 on december 12th actually) and it was an amazing time travel to my past.. even though yuo´ve didn´t mention the TI 99 or TI (Texas Instruments ) 99/4A that was my first contact with computers at shopping malls in florida on 1978 I believe, the I switched to my first Commodore 64 and later my Commodore 128Kb with the memory expansion to 512KB !!!! Anyway I used to visit many of the radio Shack´ stores lookink for electronic devices and I used those TANDY TRS-80 !!! ONCE Again, thank you for your video !!! It´s a time travel amazing one !!! Marcelo from Buenos Aires, Argentina !!! South America…
@daveharwood2843
August 9, 2024 at 4:35 pm
Well I must admit I had forgotten they existed. I worked at Radio Shack in 1979 through 81 and used one of those. I was the young kid in the store so I was the one to program it. I ended up working in IT, and have been for 40 years.
I also remember my dad’s PopSci magazines, and every once in a while he’d have me search for a specific ‘Wordless Workshop’ he was looking for.
@artisans8521
August 9, 2024 at 4:37 pm
That was a Sharp 1211 rebranded. The first comp I touched was a TRS 80. At school, in The Netherlands. Mr. Maas wanted students of my local school to experience ICT…so 20 TRS 80 system 1 and one TRS 80 system 3 were networked together in 1980.
@jonathandrake4673
August 9, 2024 at 4:38 pm
Nicely done, perhaps a bit overly dramatic at times but an enjoyable look at your quest.
I attended a huge hamfest in Gurnee, Illinois and found a vendor with a HUGE assortment of Radio Shaft items. Everything was unopened and pristine. In the Pocket PC department I purchased the display model of a Tandy pocket pc which was cradled in a Sharp printer/microcassette interface. It came with a “business software” tape and children’s game tape. I tried it before buying and successfully loaded a mortgage interest calculator program. I ended up buying a bunch of items from him, including computer case, blank (micro) cassettes and rolls of printer paper.
I gave it to a friend who was working with an early TRS-80, writing a program that converted the serial number on the back of a cable box into the program for a 16 pin prom. After a short time, he brought the computer back, complete with his program running.
The local fire department had a donated box from the local cable company that had whatever premium channels available at the time activated. He had someone copy that serial number. He took a friend’s box, took out the socketed chip, put it into a portable chip burner. After sending his program to the chip, he plugged it back into the box WITH PIN ONE bent out so it was not connected. The box activated in a short time and had full channel coverage. If pin one was plugged in, the box reverted to the original channel line up. If you want to inquire about specifics, he is currently in the family drawer of a local mausoleum.
We all fondly remember Big Mikey.
@brianfarley1054
August 9, 2024 at 4:42 pm
Loved the video. I was 8 years old in ’83. Often typing in programs from various magazines for Commodore, IBM and other home computers. What you experienced with stuff not working at all (incompatibility) was just par for the course from about 1981-1986. I will say the text based stuff, if you got it to work, there were a lot of text based adventure games that were pretty cool. I never played D&D, but it was the same idea. If the game was written well, your mind filled in the blanks, and even very primitive computing text based games could be fun. Text games…“You enter a cave. Its damp and dark, You hear an old man say, ‘What can I do for you little one?’”- What do you want to do?______________
@user-ht8vl5vh4e
August 9, 2024 at 6:55 pm
I never had one of these but my uncle did. It was kind of a scientific calculator crossed with a graphing calculator and a basic PDA. For the price it was a decent value. He owned a lumberyard and with the press of a few keys he could calculate the weight and space needed in the warehouse with the customer’s name and job number. Connect it with other supplies for the same account from a complete stored inventory which then synched with his desktop PC. It was like a portable backup (text only, no images). He recorded details of a job site for later reference. For 1990 this was sharp. Better than scribbling in a pocket notebook. And impressed his customers. It was another tool to him and he got very good use of it.
@233kosta
August 9, 2024 at 7:02 pm
Wait, isn’t it a thermal printer?
@233kosta
August 9, 2024 at 7:13 pm
Can the pocket model be directly programmed in Z80 assembly? Or does it only accept BASIC from the keyboard?
@mdamaged
August 9, 2024 at 8:21 pm
23:58 the center button in the middle of the 4-way circle is the enter button.
@dwiedmaier
August 9, 2024 at 10:25 pm
thanks! that was a great video
@rodrigogirao8344
August 9, 2024 at 10:30 pm
Back in 1960, the IBM 1401 was marketed as a “portable computer” because they managed to fit a complete setup inside a truck.
@jeffh8803
August 9, 2024 at 11:56 pm
Looks like most of your problems were self inflicted
@dylanakent
August 10, 2024 at 12:24 am
Sorry but you can’t buy anything unless you give Radio Shack your name, address, phone number, social security number, mother’s maiden name, name of your favorite pet, the street you grew up on….etc… And you only wanted to buy a battery.
@arthurhu2290
August 10, 2024 at 1:17 am
thanks for posting I used to read popular science in the 70s, did basic on a HP9830 desktop computer that had a computer controlled cassette. HP also did pocket BASIC computers but they didn’t have cassette storage.
@williamdixon7306
August 10, 2024 at 4:22 am
what happened to Heathkit?
@Foxy_Fan472
August 10, 2024 at 4:31 am
Speaking of thrills of the past, as a 17 year old of the present I really wish I could experience the 80s and 70s computers more easily, but where I live that seems to not be the case. Everywhere else it’s all somewhat possible, but where I live? You’d be lucky to get a complete windows 8 laptop that wasn’t missing a bottom cover, or a drive-bay caddy.
@don_n5skt
August 10, 2024 at 6:21 am
Look at the TRS-80 Model 100. My wife and I had 2 of those. My wife used it to take notes in college and the professors thought that was amazing. But as far as Radio Shack goes, there are still Radio Shack’s open out there if you can find them. As Amateur Radio Operators, we still look for them. We remember walking in there and grabbing radio parts. Ah well . . .
@robertmuller1523
August 10, 2024 at 9:03 am
One of my school friends in the early 90s had a Sharp pocket computer and I actually wrote a game for it back then. It was a kind of reaction test in which you had to press the buttons shown on the display at a constantly increasing speed. You had a maximum of three failed attempts and at the end you got a score.
@robbannstrom
August 10, 2024 at 9:16 am
Very nice, thanks for this. I bought something similar to one of these pocket computers back in 1992 – it also had the BASIC programming language, 16kB (or 32?) memory and a 4-line LCD display. I wrote several programs for it, first on paper, then coded in by hand, including one to calculate coordinates of points of intersection of lines and circles, which helped me to write accurate G-code instructions for CNC mills and lathes – all before CAD/CAM systems were available. Interesting times…
@danielhumphrey5231
August 10, 2024 at 9:58 am
Somewhere between 1983 and 1984 I purchased the Sharp version (maybe the equivalent of the PC-2?) for $99. It did have a memory expansion slot, but being a student at DeVry I didn’t have much money. The first program I wrote was for tracking milage and fuel when driving my 1964 Dodge Dart wagon to/from California on family visits. Then, when I started my career in the HVAC Building Controls Industry, I wrote several programs: calculating Wetbulb, Dew Point and Relative Humidity based on Dry Bulb Temp and one of the other two; Energy conversions between BTU, KW, HP, KW; Airflow Volume based on average multi-point Velocity Pressure measurements. It still works.
@michaelarnold6848
August 10, 2024 at 12:24 pm
i remember my trs-80 pocket computer. it was pretty cool
@jifchosehismother
August 10, 2024 at 3:48 pm
What an annoying, hateful video.
@donnierussellii4659
August 10, 2024 at 4:42 pm
Learn a programming language?!
@breslins
August 10, 2024 at 6:32 pm
I’m 52, I remember being frustrated with any device calling itself a computer. I absolutely remember everything from Radio Shack being garbage.
@cgraham6
August 10, 2024 at 6:46 pm
I’m not sure in what capacity this thing could be called a ‘computer’, but none that I know of.
@PhillyMJS
August 10, 2024 at 8:01 pm
I also dropped out of Drexel, back in the early 90s. But I made it to sophomore year, after my first co-op job. No idea what it’s like today, but back then their Computer Science curriculum was ridiculous, entirely too much chemistry and physics and hardly anything relevant to what I’ve spent the last 30 years doing in my career.
And I read Enter Magazine religiously in grade school, and loved it.
@videooblivion
August 10, 2024 at 10:09 pm
This video has no redeeming qualities. Delete it.
@firmager1
August 11, 2024 at 2:56 am
If Jesse Pinkman had actually paid attention in Mr Whites class….
@christianlohmann8577
August 11, 2024 at 8:45 am
I miss those days: started with 1kB ZX81 and some tape recorder 😂
@charlesjmouse
August 11, 2024 at 11:49 am
Gee-whiz vs useful…
I remember getting such a device as a much wanted birthday present, only to discover what should have already been obvious – they were useless!
But when I moved from general medicine in to anaesthetics my disappointing paperweight because really useful – all those dosage charts and equations I previously had to keep in my head and calculate on the fly suddenly became a little bit of BASIC code I could keep in my pocket.
@arathron1239
August 11, 2024 at 1:20 pm
This is crazy, man
@infocuslearning
August 11, 2024 at 1:25 pm
I had a Tandy 286 PC in the early eighties. It was one of the first IBM PC AT clones and was cheaper and faster than the IBM itself. Cost me around $3000 which, in those days, was a huge amount.
@DocMicrowave
August 11, 2024 at 1:32 pm
I still have my Sharp PC1500 and Sharp PC1500A. Both with the Printer attachments. The computers actually still work. Screens are clear. The printers, not so much.
@CindyBcr
August 11, 2024 at 1:37 pm
When I was in high school, my father bought us the new TRS-80 color computer. Your problem was that you have the Micro-Color, which doesn’t have the slot on the side. We had slalom, Poltergeist, and other games that came on a cartridge. To write our own programs on the owner’s manual, which was really a pretty good way to get into BASIC, we could store them on cassette tapes. They suggested a Radio Shack one, but any at the time could work, but we soon learned the need to plug the tape recorder in, because it took so long for programs to download that batteries would die (which you found out). Thanks for taking me down memory lane.
@Conn653
August 11, 2024 at 2:13 pm
I miss “The Old Radio Shack”. If I needed a transistor, capacitor, resistor or cable connectors, I could go in and get what parts I needed to complete the build. Those days are long gone. 😞 Now, I use Mouser Electronics on-line for the same things.
@leannevandekew1996
August 11, 2024 at 4:31 pm
The first handheld computer was the HP67. Programmable, magnetic tape drive, rechargeable battery,. 1973.
@larrymohr
August 11, 2024 at 6:48 pm
They really need to get someone who is tech savy doing these videos. You bought the wrong cable because you didn’t read the
specifications. You make a big deal about games II for the PC-1. Perhaps there was games I and games II for both units. You claim they didn’t need backup. You ALWAYS need a backup, everything can fail. You wonder that 40 year old magnetic tapes are not working properly. Gee, how strange. Also, I feel like you are always yelling. Very poor video.
@gavinsimmonsmccullum4219
August 11, 2024 at 9:10 pm
Re: 2:52 Boeing products were quality products back then. That was before the merger. MD was a trash company with a trash culture and a trash record
@pricelesshistory
August 11, 2024 at 11:07 pm
Thanks for showing us an important footnote in computer history!
And welcome to the frustrations of trying to dig up lost history, and the very occasional joy when your Indiana Jones quest finds gold!
@BroadcaststoNowhere
August 11, 2024 at 11:44 pm
I bought a Sinclar ZX-81 in high school because the ZX-80 was harder to get and the PC-1 too.
Your video was a joy to watch.
We felt the same way about our programs back then… all that typing with minimal output fun… but we loved it.
Either you could see the possibilities, or you couldn’t.
I still love computers. The dream lives on.
Now if you will excuse me, I need to get back to the thrilling conversation I was just having with chatGPT 4o which recommended your video…
Oh yes, the dream is still alive !
@bodhiench
August 12, 2024 at 1:29 am
I still own mine – it’s the PC-2, bought new in the mid-80’s when they were discontinuing them. I picked up both the computer and the plotter dock for $200. I recently dug it out…
@brianfrance6283
August 12, 2024 at 3:17 am
I had a zx81 computer.
@scotshabalam2432
August 12, 2024 at 9:18 am
TRS-80 pocket DID NOT BECOME A PHONE. You could claim any 80’s calculator contributed as much to smart phone development as the TRS-80 did.
@joshs.6608
August 13, 2024 at 11:42 am
In fact, the path to what would become the IPhone or smartphones in general started much later…. In the mid 90s with the IBM Simon.
@user-fc9ms9nc8n
August 12, 2024 at 10:59 am
I have inherited sharp version still in mint condition
@MrMalaprade
August 12, 2024 at 11:07 am
Collecting vintage electronics seems relaxing: chin to chest, marching briskly from one disappointment to another. 😂
@GianniBarberi
August 12, 2024 at 12:05 pm
I had it, sharp
@jerrydurand4127
August 12, 2024 at 2:34 pm
I started programming in the early 1970s, TRS-80 was out of my budget and way too complicated.
Until I started designing stuff and then, well, my stuff amazed a sufficient number of people.
@HalfwayAerial
August 12, 2024 at 10:44 pm
I miss radio shack. So many times I’ve needed a resitor or whatever random electrical component and they always had it in their cabinet of parts
@autoantics
August 12, 2024 at 11:26 pm
Who remembers the free battery every month punch card from RS?
@slimjimjohn4671
August 13, 2024 at 12:33 am
Everything Tandy sold was rebranded. Tape deks by Toshiba. Stereos by Onkyo, etc. If you ought Optimus audio, you got the best Japan had to offer. Except, some speakers were Sansui.
Had a Tandy 3000 PC (286) as well. Bulletproof.
@mycosys
August 13, 2024 at 5:36 am
How is RTFM the main takeaway from a POPULAR SCIENCE video??? seriously all your troubles are you not reading the whole page for stuff you order. How are you even on this channel?
@mycosys
August 13, 2024 at 5:50 am
This Verge PC build level nope.
@mycosys
August 13, 2024 at 5:52 am
Worst tech vid ive ever watched
@waltperko8389
August 13, 2024 at 8:34 am
How can you be so stupid not to just buy a couple of mono audio cables and a control cable? Too Stupid 2 Watch by the time of the Merch Ad … Get a real job!
@joshs.6608
August 13, 2024 at 11:32 am
Why am I watching a man complaining about those 70s and 80s technology for over 30 minutes?
@ArmyK9
August 13, 2024 at 2:28 pm
I don’t care what you say. The IBM 5100 is cooler because of John Titor’s mission to obtain it! 😆
@Dlikee
August 13, 2024 at 2:42 pm
can it doom?
@elpelu123
August 13, 2024 at 3:46 pm
You look like the guy in Vsauce 2 or 3
@rillloudmother
August 13, 2024 at 5:36 pm
you are kinda helpless and dumb
@Aussiesnrg
August 14, 2024 at 7:48 am
I hope it was just an act… But the first cable showed a 5 pin din for the other end on the webpage… Soooo perhaps not
@Jims_Camera_at_dawn
August 13, 2024 at 6:05 pm
RS died because of the most loyal customers ever. They kept coming back till the over priced items were too costly to keep their loyalty. This breaking point was too much too fast for the company to react to. Had they embraced cell phones as they had once embraced HAM radio, The Shack might still be around. They took their devoted customers for granted. They did not maximize their strengths. They did not minimize their weaknesses. IMO
☕️☕️🎶🎵🎶
@Aussiesnrg
August 14, 2024 at 7:46 am
I’d agree and add the cost increases, decreases in quality, only being able to buy certain quantities of electronic components not just the one or two you needed.
In Australia the company Dick Smith gave Tandy a good run for it money
@Yetanother_online
August 13, 2024 at 6:55 pm
As a follow-up, look into the Sharp Wizard & Zaurus electronic organizers. they did some pretty cool stuff in the 80’s / 90’s, make sure you get cables and cartridges. Also, grab a cheap universal remote. (there’s a GE branded one on AMZ for $10-15 that works on all kinds of consumer electronics going bask to the 90’s.)
@MarkHudson2
August 13, 2024 at 6:57 pm
Nice history detour around the 9:00 minute mark.
@BarrettCharlebois
August 13, 2024 at 9:06 pm
Isn’t this the guy from Vsauce two or something?
@KentBunn
August 14, 2024 at 12:44 am
Pier One spun out of Cost Plus, sorta.
Franchised CostPlus locations were turned into Pier One. While the wholly owned stores stayed with the parent.
@newgravityfilms
August 14, 2024 at 11:56 am
Great video, but you have absolutely no patience. All I saw was anger that you had to find pieces to a 40-plus-year-old piece of obsolete equipment. What did you expect? Are you surprised that a computer game played on a calculator in 1980 was bad? Traveling from 1970 to 1980 it was a genius device, traveling from 2024 to 1980 it’s a joke from a tech standpoint but appreciate the awesomeness of what it did for the time it existed.
@cannibalbananas
August 14, 2024 at 12:48 pm
Your story of trying to get all of these products to work 1) makes me feel better about current technology issues and 2) shows the importance of compatibility between the generations, ie. not having an Enter on one Sony remote, but having Enter on another Sony remote
@JazzDogTraveler
August 14, 2024 at 1:30 pm
I had the TRS MC10 micro color computer. I always had problems saving and loading games and programs to/from cassette. It could be because the cassette deck I had was a Sears special.
@armisis
August 14, 2024 at 4:14 pm
Awe you forgot the Tandy Zoom pocket PC or PDA!
I worked for Tandy from 1992 to 1995. I was one of their tech experts. It opened the door for me. After my first computer a timex sinclare 1k followed by a c64 and C128 before I went to a Tandy 1000sx. Running a BBS from 1985 to 1995.
@armisis
August 14, 2024 at 4:24 pm
Wow I had a box of the TV adapters for that at one time haha most of your issues I remembered how to resolve.
@armisis
August 14, 2024 at 4:26 pm
I used to have a subscription to enter magazine
@02Lemonhead
August 14, 2024 at 5:19 pm
I had a Radio Shack portable color tv that worked great until HD/digital technology took over broadcast signals and those with analog tvs had to get converter boxes.
@markpugner9165
August 14, 2024 at 6:26 pm
Could have plugged in the source and ran a channel search to get it to see something on channel 4.
@markpugner9165
August 14, 2024 at 6:36 pm
Time to buy yourself an inductive amplifier or multimeter to figure out the pinouts on proprietary cables.
@stickyfox
August 14, 2024 at 8:14 pm
Radio Shack’s pocket PCs have nothing at all to do with modern smartphones. I actually owned and used a PC-2 and a PC-5 when they were new. It was 100% computer.
The “Personal Digital Assistant” craze started at least a decade later. That’s where all the crap apps like the useless calculator, memos, expense trackers etc originated.
Also, the TRS-80 has *always* been affectionally referred to as the “trash-80.” We called it that in the RS store where I worked in the 80s.
@stickyfox
August 14, 2024 at 8:26 pm
And also also, the thing that killed Tandy was probably the thing that killed Radio Shack… turning all of the stores into cell phone dealerships and mail order hubs.
@ZA1US
August 14, 2024 at 11:41 pm
My cousin had the PC-1. My neighbor had the MC-10. I used the Model III and 4 in high school. Picked up the PC-4 for $40 in 1987
@jimbotron70
August 15, 2024 at 2:38 am
Those were wild in the early ’80s…
@roysutton577
August 15, 2024 at 5:06 am
Clearly you know nothing and have no appreciation of the best technology. Remove the title TRASH as it is inappropriate and the reference to phones is nonsense. In 1980 I taught myself Celestial Navigation with a sextant and within minutes of a sight of the sun, moon, planets and bright stars I could produce a fix with the Sharp / Tandy PC. A few lines of code equations would replace a dozen heavy volumes of printed tables. Tandy were an innovative company and invested in technology far beyond selling leather. The 80 was probably a reference to the year and the Z80 CPU was not used in battery powered pocket devices as it was too power hungry, too big and not low power CMOS. It displayed 24 characters of scrollable text of width 80.
@MrNoahTall
August 15, 2024 at 7:25 am
Millenials getting all in a lather about can-do Boomer tech that I lived with and loved. Yes, I owned one with the thermal printer, and (along with my aging TI-58C and TI-66) had so much fun. For a real computer, I’d switch to my Model 100, the original devbook. Those were the days.
@chak9232
August 15, 2024 at 9:03 am
are you stupid? that’s all that i can get of your video
@TeddyCavachon
August 15, 2024 at 10:03 am
The first computer I bought in 1983 was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 “laptop” which was the same size and weigh as a ream of typing paper with a full-size keyboard and 8 line x 40 character LCD display and built-in 300 Baud Model. It ran on four AA Batteries or a plug in transformer. Programs were at first stored on cassette tapes but later I was able to purchase a 3.5” diskette drive for it.
I was working for the Printing Division of the US Information Agency at the time and in my previous job as production manager and system manager at commercial printing companies I had created multiuser job tracking databases, estimating and billing application in BASIC on WANG MVP and DEC PDP11-44 computers but the IT Bureaucrats at USIA would not give me a computer to develop applications on so I went down the street to a Radio Shack store and bought the Model 100 with my own money, selecting it instead of a desktop machine so I could carry it between work and home on my motorcycle. Not without some irony after the USIA Newswire service whose office was across the hall from ours saw my Model 100 it purchased then for all of its field reporters who has previously been filing stories by calling in via photo and dictating.
A few years later in 1987 I again did battle with the IT Bureaucrats over purchasing Macs to do page layout on. They refused to authorize the purchase saying that Macs were not “real” computers and from that reason they would not support them. The fight reached the Deputy Director level and when they told him that in a meeting I simply agreed, telling him that Macs were actually typesetting equipment we were authorized to purchase without IT approval and that we didn’t need IT support. From that point forward Macs were deemed “printing equipment”. A week later I had six of them on every desk in the office connected via AppleTalk sharing a laser printer. By the time I retired in 2010 I had automated our entire domestic and overseas printing operation with Macs and FileMaker Databases. 😊
@ytacc3980
August 15, 2024 at 4:21 pm
Geee… when I see videos like this I feel reallly, really old…
@markw9285
August 15, 2024 at 5:03 pm
‘Halt and Catch Fire’
@EndDims
August 15, 2024 at 5:19 pm
I went to school with a girl who had one of these that she was using as a calculator at school (high school, early 90s). It was basically a cast-off from her dad.
@wesenforce8602
August 15, 2024 at 6:07 pm
There is no excitement in computers now. Used to spy and scam. It is very sad kids won’t know it when it was fun.
@IDRIS-Music
August 15, 2024 at 6:36 pm
you got me at channel 4….I am shitting my pants wahahahhah. mannn I really feel your struggle damn
@Cannibal666Corpse
August 16, 2024 at 4:14 am
Well, the next time someone asks me to explain Murphy’s Law, I’ll re-direct straight to this video.
@IanZainea1990
August 16, 2024 at 11:41 am
wow. what an obnoxious intro
@IanZainea1990
August 16, 2024 at 11:44 am
I know you’re trying to be cool and “youtube” but the presenter here is just so hard to watch. Just take a chill pill, lay off the coffee. Idk. But pop sci… stop trying so hard to be cool. I doubt this guy talks this way normally, so some director/producer is telling him to act this overly excited and in your face kinda way. And it’s awful.
@IanZainea1990
August 16, 2024 at 11:51 am
11:59 yeah, idk why you ordered anything. you just needed to go buy some aux cables at walmart…
@imagenerdery
August 16, 2024 at 3:38 pm
Banging my head against the screen watching the part where he thinks he needs to order a cable online just to connect 3 simple jack plugs and to top it off he then orders a cable with a DIN connector on one end because it says TRS-80 cable. Are millennials completely deranged? Isn’t there any sense of DIY left in these people?
@grcarvalho
August 16, 2024 at 9:01 pm
here in Brazil we call this the “mimimi” generation….. i think this guy would not survive the 80’s
@rickhunt3183
August 16, 2024 at 9:57 pm
I still have my pocket computer 2 and it works just fine with it memory expansion. what happened to my plotter printer and the rs232 is anyones guess.
@Demosthenes84
August 16, 2024 at 10:29 pm
This was awesome
@phred7112
August 16, 2024 at 10:52 pm
If you really want to see something exciting, look for something written in Z-80 assembly because BASIC was not fast enough, called Android Nim by Leo Christopherson. That was truly mind boggling for the time.
And if you want to see something really interesting, again remember this is before the PC, or Macintosh, read up on the Color Computer (Not the crappy micro version) and look at some early operating systems which could be run on that little 32K (but could be modded to 64K for those brave and handy enough with a soldering iron), sub 1MHz (895KHz) 8bit (although there were a number of 16bit functions and registers), wonder called Flex or even OS-9. Those were multi-user operating systems which ran on the little Motorola 6809 8bit CPU which had a rated speed of 1MHz.
The kids of today with their pre-made gameboys and hand held toys, have no clue about the feeling of literally having to make your own video games because the selection of pre-made literally sucked.
I wrote my own pong, adventure games, utilities, drivers, and even dabbled in writing my own assembler and disassembler. The CoCo was actually an impressive little device for its time and it only cost me $339 to get started. I used the CoCo daily until the original Macintosh came out when I blew a kilobuck on that piece of garbage which resulted in me hating, no despising, no loathing that company with every fiber of my being until present day… but that is a bit of a convoluted tale.
@JonSchwark
August 17, 2024 at 12:00 am
I had a TRS80 CoCo2, and tose tape drives were complete garbage even new.
@tonywood3660
August 17, 2024 at 1:17 am
Brought the Sharp version of this in 1982 for A$ 290.Still works although the screen is almost dead. Has survived in a machine shop.
@user-xg8yy7yl1d
August 17, 2024 at 1:42 am
Is Charles Tandy the irl inspiration (or one) for Cave Johnson? Him plus the guy behind “The Works” the first attempt at a movie generated in 3d graphics.
@hank3327
August 17, 2024 at 1:49 am
In the magazines pages he showed also the Sinclair ZX80 home computer launched on 29 January 1980 was visible which was much better computer then the TRS-80.
@user-xg8yy7yl1d
August 17, 2024 at 2:03 am
You should get a flipper zero if youre not somewhere the authorities have a massive SUA about them. If ur not a malicous POS u can keep one quietly and use them to feed the “correct signal” to any old TV.
@ihamarcelo
August 17, 2024 at 2:20 am
Yeah, the oldware hell !
My sugestion is you redirect your rage to the present, against the the modern calculator makers who stops upgrading programmable calculators in the last years.
Besides charging monthly or yearly for editing software.
By now even 99cents store calculators would have programmable funtions and spreadsheets… and we should have the possibitlty of programming and running on the road on our iphones… (Old Man Yells at Cloud meme)
@markedtky
August 17, 2024 at 3:16 am
lmao my dad still uses that as his main calculator
@DrunkenWarlockDWEI
August 17, 2024 at 3:44 am
31:07 see you on the flip side
@eliotmansfield
August 17, 2024 at 5:17 am
I was 10 in 1980 and would
would drool over those little tandy computers in the catalogue
@nowster
August 18, 2024 at 6:59 am
My first computer was a clone of the TRS-80 Level II called the Video Genie. It was missing a couple of keys compared with the original and had a built in cassette recorder (which didn’t work).
@Martyn500B
August 18, 2024 at 7:19 am
Many years ago, I had a ZX80. I loaded programs onto it, that I had written myself, with an old reel to reel tape recorder.
@ryanstevens3822
August 18, 2024 at 11:38 am
i remember hearing these were popular with reporters on the go, could write a draft and modem it over to the editor
@TheCerealHobbyist
August 18, 2024 at 11:52 am
So it sucks because he didn’t know what he was doing. Got it.
@theraven6836
August 18, 2024 at 6:51 pm
Dude, just take a drive over to your neighborhood RadioShack store and, …., hmmmm, yeah, no, never mind. 😂
@mtnclimberut
August 18, 2024 at 9:37 pm
It was my first computer. I was the only person (kid) at the time who had a programmable computer, which I mowed A LOT of lawns to save up for. The thermal printer, docking station, and cassette storage device was magical at the time when nobody had computer equipment in their own home. I began learning to program and work with files and printers on it. Loved the tiny quality built 8k memory device.
Now I work on machines that are millions of times faster with tens of millions of times the memory and storage. But I still would love to have one again to tinker around with.
@josephsheranda
August 18, 2024 at 10:22 pm
Starting at 22:10, I am wheezing! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣My man, you followed the exact same comedy of errors I did 30 YEARS AGO when I tried to connect my TRS-80 through my NES. Glad to know I’m not alone!
@OGteddlesruss
August 19, 2024 at 9:08 am
Having grown up with Hollerith cards and paper tape, the cassettes were magic. But I found that the play head of the cassette deck was a source of most problems. It needed to be cleaned (isopropyl alcohol on a cotton swap) which made many tapes properly readable but some others still didn’t load properly – garbage character etc. for those, I found an azimuth alignment tape and small screwdriver invaluable. If the head is slightly angled from the vertical, some of the higher tones weren’t able to be read, and I found that it happened remarkably consistently in the same place each time. No idea why, but as soon as floppy disc drives became available it was a changed game…
@IrishCarney
August 19, 2024 at 10:47 am
“Trash 80” wasn’t a result of Charles Tandy’s death, as if his existence had upheld high quality and good luck and _après lui le déluge_ . Instead it existed from the start, coming from the usual first-product glitches and bugs, exacerbated by Tandy’s efforts in initial development to find every possible cost saving. From the latter came finicky tape drives, solder-coated (rather than gold-plated) connectors that became less conductive over time, dropping their connection (and suddenly rebooting the computer, wiping out unsaved data), etc. Tandy fixed these issues later
@peczenyj
August 19, 2024 at 11:46 am
I read long time ago that one easy way to connect old computers to a tv is via a VHS cassete
@nmarks
August 20, 2024 at 3:16 am
1.21 giga watts?
@CB-ce3kk
August 20, 2024 at 1:46 pm
I had the original TRS-80 Color Computer with the silver coloring and chicklet keyboard. I even paid to have it upgraded from 4k to 6k (which is what I remember, but it may have been 8k). I bought it within months of the Commodore 64 coming out, which totally blew it away. That sucked. I had the tape deck for loading and saving programs and the drawing tablet. It did not come with the video adapter, it had to be purchased separately. I used to get Byte magazine and wrote programs in BASIC. My dad got a used Apple II, which was also way better, but he paid $2k for it. He gave it to me at one point and I really wish I’d kept them both.
@CB-ce3kk
August 20, 2024 at 1:51 pm
Oh, and the portable I always wanted was a TRS-80 Model 100, but they were so expensive. I played with them in the store many times. I saw a plugged in and working one for $40 once and am still mad I didn’t buy it. I just couldn’t justify having it. I could get one now for not too much, but it would just be silly. Still…
@CB-ce3kk
August 20, 2024 at 1:56 pm
Reading a bunch of comments in here now, I have to add that I’ve been working in IT in various capacities since the 90s. My parents saw the value in it, but only enough to put me in touch with someone to help me figure out what to buy, not to buy it for me. Their first computer was an iMac.
@TaylerKnox
August 20, 2024 at 9:26 pm
Excellent. It was a nice little device at the time, We knew there would be better so enjoyed the tech as it came.
@BigBoy4004
August 21, 2024 at 10:13 am
A lot of my fellow students and I owe our chemistry and physics uni degrees to a large part to the trusted Sharp PC-1401/1403. Mid 80s, this was the best money could buy and you did not have to follow the reverse calc input logic of the larger TI pocket calculators. Kudos, Sharp!!! 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
@CoyoteSeven
August 21, 2024 at 3:08 pm
One thing about 80s tech that doesn’t seem to be as important nowadays, apparently. When it comes to combability between devices and how they all interconnect with each other, you have to be VERY, exceedingly specific and exact about everything. Even the tiniest bit of ambiguity or ignorance can invite situations where you got the wrong cable. Or the cables connect but the devices don’t communicate. There were so many proprietary “standards” and almost nothing was universal. Not just between companies but also between different systems made by the same company. That all gets exacerbated by the age of all the components nowadays.
@brianpack369
August 21, 2024 at 8:59 pm
Maybe the One Arm Bandit game didn’t work because you gave that tiny computer a 24 bit number.
@pryles2000
August 21, 2024 at 11:01 pm
Well done video…that was awesome.
@macavree9464
August 22, 2024 at 1:51 am
Your frustration face and crackling voice when running into problems is pure comedy gold bro!😂😂😂😂
@primodernious
August 22, 2024 at 4:54 pm
i for a second tought ps stood for piss.
@Dennis-Earl-Smiley
August 23, 2024 at 6:15 am
Do you want me to write another simple game for you? I should be able to write something very interesting for you, if you’d like..
@gabrielsierra6890
August 23, 2024 at 11:58 am
I still have mine!
@gabrielsierra6890
August 23, 2024 at 12:20 pm
Do one of the Tandy Color Computer 3, their best ever, so good, that it was slowing the PC compatible sales so they retired it. But the problem was cnot the COCO 3; it was that the Tandy PC SUCKED BIG TIME!
@isaacclark9825
August 23, 2024 at 3:13 pm
You are making mountains out of molehills. Not great theatrics for me.
@AcmeRacing
August 23, 2024 at 9:47 pm
My car club had a timing rig based on the Tandy Color Computer board that we were still using in the late 1990s. Manzanita Micro had built them in an aluminum case, a firmware ROM, and an interface to read infrared sensors like the ones in burglar alarm systems. I spent many sunny days at autocrosses, squinting at a cheap portable TV between runs.
@BoxOfFeet
August 23, 2024 at 11:07 pm
You should try the TI-74. It’s all the fun of single line programming and very customized interface cables, but also terrible tiny cartridges!
@bolesawmayzel6476
August 24, 2024 at 6:51 pm
I don’t get why you are so frustrated.
@fixups6536
August 24, 2024 at 11:26 pm
For a short time I owned this computer (a.k.a. PC-1211) circa 1982, and I had to write a program on it for a customer. It was a nightmare, even then. My computer at the time was the TRS-80 Model 1, with a great keyboard and luxurious 64×16 characters screen, and 48kB or RAM (yeah I had the extension box that went under the monitor). The PC-1211 was just a turbocharged calculator. Impressive at first glance, but you couldn’t do much with it. It was too early.
@britzman9905
August 25, 2024 at 3:56 am
Can it run crysis?
@DavidJacobs-y5j
August 25, 2024 at 4:44 am
I bought the Sharp version in the early 90s from Currys (UK Electronics store) on sale for work – I wrote a few small programs which were very useful. I still have it – I replaced the batteries a few years ago – and it still works fine
@crusader2.0_loading89
August 25, 2024 at 4:50 am
Thuy guy doesn’t know jack
@jonroth6981
August 25, 2024 at 5:39 am
this guy is an idiot scammer talking about nothing
couldnt understand a TRS cable
@flyabusa
August 25, 2024 at 8:43 am
I had a subscription to Enter Magazine when I was in grade school. I remember spending a weekend with a friend copying lines of code for a game called “Threshold” from the magazine into the C64. And then debugging it when it spit out errors because we made a typo or two on various lines of code. Eventually we got it running, it was a decent Galaga clone.
@davehendricks7023
August 25, 2024 at 8:50 am
Boeing made airlines possible, but do please keep sh!t talking.
@devereuxbirdzell
August 25, 2024 at 2:29 pm
I think this could have been a great video with LOT less snark. Ill stick to the 8 bit guy.
@user-wc6ri2tr5q
August 25, 2024 at 2:40 pm
You need an external monitor
@M.EdwardBorasky
August 25, 2024 at 9:28 pm
I had the second version of that – Radio Shack Pocket Computer 2 in the Sharp version: Sharp PC 1500. I loved that little thing!
@williamedwards6607
August 25, 2024 at 11:02 pm
Man this is bad. Nonstop complaining.
@jimmyporter8941
August 26, 2024 at 12:43 am
I lusted after one of these. Or one of the similar Sharp pocket computers.
@MovieMakingMan
August 26, 2024 at 2:05 am
Radio Shack was great! I invented several things using parts I got at Radio Shack. One invention was an intervalometer to automatically control film cameras. Nothing like it existed. I was in moviemaking class at the University of Houston-Clear Lake when I invented it. I needed a device to operate a film camera so I could do time lapses and other tricks with my cameras. My film professor was impressed. I received an award for a film I created using my intervalometer.
I used to go to Radio Shack regularly. Sadly, virtually all electronics part companies no longer exist.
Now, a lot of what my intervalometer could do can be done using smart phones. But to many, they don’t realize the world where people had to use their wits to create things from nothing.
@MovieMakingMan
August 26, 2024 at 2:25 am
Luck was key to computer companies surviving in the 1970s. I worked for Computer Design in the early 1970s. Our company made unique computers targeted to specific professions like architecture, engineering, etc. Our computers were handheld and sold for $599-$799. That was a lot of money in those days. Hell, you could buy a car for twice the cost of one of our computers. I went from a technician to manager in just two years. Sales were through the roof. But in a matter of days our company went from thriving to bankrupt. Texas Instruments decided to screw us by stopping the sale of key computer chips. Without their chips we could no longer manufacture our computers. Remember, there were VERY few chip manufacturers then. What poured salt into our wounds was Texas instrument ended up buying out what was left of our company. When I realized Texas Instruments was acting so ruthlessly I spent my past two weeks selling service contracts for all the computers that were already sold. I sold a ton of contracts to business firms, school districts and many others. Texas Instruments would have to honor the contracts. I kept getting commission checks for over a year after our company went bankrupt.
Luck was key in computer companies’ survival. I learned wealth is almost all tied to luck. In my short two years with Computer Design my salary tripled. Had the company survived I would’ve moved near the top of the company and I would’ve made millions. Sadly, capitalism doesn’t reward the best products. It rewards the most cutthroat psychopaths. Since then I have heard of countless small companies that created new hardware or software and big companies like Apple and Microsoft either bought out those companies or they used tactics like Texas Instruments to crush companies. The best innovations come from small companies but they fall prey to dishonest, manipulative companies, and the psychopaths who run those companies.
@richj120952
August 26, 2024 at 11:29 am
With it’s printer, we were able write a program to graphically plot a line of site path for a microwave link, and calculate the received signal strength. This little computer was a great thing for us. By the way, Sharp had one too.
@lewwetzel
August 26, 2024 at 11:47 am
This guy is apparently spoiled on the technology that grew out of TRS-80 pioneering work. Poor abused thing. We should all feel sorry for his suffering.
@hervevazeilles3790
August 26, 2024 at 1:14 pm
You know that in the 80’s we were kids and we figured out those computers, and we programmed our own games, without anyone’s help other than the manual given with the computers. In 1983 at the age of 11 I programmed my first video game on a ZX81 plugged into my grand parents black and white TV. It was a racing game, top down vertical scroller, with cars and oils puddle to avoid. It was less than 1Kb of code. And I had to recode it from scratch everytime I wanted to play because I didn’t have a cassette player to save my code. So everyday i programmed a slightly different game than the day before. What you are missing is the insentive. We were extremly motivated to program our stuff because it was all new, never done before, and we had no choice or no better things to fall back on. You definitly can’t get the same kind of motivation nowadays, when you can just download thousands of games, made by hundreds of thousands of game developers, over multiple years of work, for free. A single kid can’t compete with that. But back in our time in the 80’s, we could do better games than the ones that were sold ourselves. And we did it because there was next to no competition.
@byronneedham529
August 26, 2024 at 5:02 pm
You need to relax big time! If you are going into 1980’s computers do your homework first rather than ranting.
@ValensBellator
August 27, 2024 at 1:00 am
That Tandy guy sounded pretty amazing. This is now the *second* time I’ve heard of a leather company that got into early computing. Weird 😂
@two-chicks
August 27, 2024 at 3:56 am
I remember basic and ascii codes and yes I do like cowhides.. but you’re making me feel old
@korhaneser3356
August 27, 2024 at 4:57 am
jesus what the hell was that intro… def going to avoid your channel
@jamesmurphy449
August 27, 2024 at 8:55 am
A clue if you’re watching a video about 1980s computers: it was half a century ago. If the guy in the video doesn’t have any gray hair, don’t necessarily take his word for it.
@mybrainlikesthings
August 27, 2024 at 8:43 pm
I can’t watch this. I want some emotional maturity and aurhoritative knowledge in my presenters. There is some information in here, but the signal-to-noise is low.
@ititonsiti1258
August 27, 2024 at 10:17 pm
I still have my ZX Spectrum 48 I bought in the ’80s.
It still works, but I do not have a power supply anymore, I don’t have a tape cassette player anymore, the keyboard membrane has disintegrated because of age. It makes me worry because I am a few decades older than that computer.
I have well-preserved colour book from that era that documents all the machines of that era.
I even have a Commodore 64, but it came without anything else and I never used it. Probably dead…
I laughed a lot during your video.
Great video.
I subscribed.
PS: I have a number of books on programming the Spectrum and other books from that era.
I eventually studied Computer Science and was in ICT for a number of years.
Long live the ’80s!!!
@TimePilot2084
August 27, 2024 at 11:35 pm
I owned a TRS Micro Color Computer that I bought for probably $3 at a yard sale, just because I didn’t have one and wanted to see what it was like. (I was a Commodore guy, owning a VIC-20, Plus-4, C64, and Amiga.) I’d learned BASIC writing games for the C64 (8 hardware sprites!), so I wrote several programs for the Micro CoCo but didn’t have a way to save them, despite owning a Commodore AND Texas Instruments data tape deck. Incompatibility is a common problem with devices from this era. Sadly, Hurricane Katrina took all the software I wrote that I actually DID have a way to save, which was mostly C64 games, written in BASIC and compiled with BLITZ! for speed. Those 5 1/4 inch disks are probably buried under piles of garbage somewhere in the woods of Mississippi. Sure wish I still had that stuff, man. I spent most of my childhood programming. I secretly wanted to be a game designer.
@bodyshoplaboratories501
August 28, 2024 at 12:42 am
Sad.
When my generation dreamed of the future, we envisioned a world of smarter people than ourselves.
Now, those of us who are still here can only look around and say…
Doh! SMH
@google_is_a_criminal
August 29, 2024 at 6:01 pm
Had a chemistry set in grade school that’s illegal now.
Built and flew model airplanes.
Built shortwave radios and oscilloscopes and built and flew model rockets.
BEFORE I started middle school.
It was a different era for sure.
@TheChickenx18
August 28, 2024 at 8:53 am
At USCD, a ton of research equiment is still using Tandy BASIC scripts… I know where the skeletons are hiding hehehe
@gman102formyspace
August 28, 2024 at 10:12 am
This is my first time finding this channel, and I love it. It’s like a mix of MrBallen telling a story, and Malcom from Malcom in the middle.
@google_is_a_criminal
August 29, 2024 at 5:57 pm
Malcom on meth.
@darrenerickson1288
August 28, 2024 at 11:01 am
Oh puhleeze. If you can’t straight up build an audio cable from compact casette to a pocket computer with parts from digikey you’re a normie hipster wannabe and have absolutely no business making this video. Go back to your modern PC or Mac and be confused when you downloaded PC software for your Mac. This is a field for serious hobbyists who actually know something. And TRS-80 was the overall brand for Tandy’s computer line through the Model 4 era when they rebranded to the Tandy name when they got on the pc compatible train. Again, you don’t know that you have no business buying trs-80 stuff off ebay. But that’s my opinion. Let this stuff remain Unpopular Science so those of us who put in the time and brain keep the prices reasonable. Oh well. Rant done. No edited: we called them trash 80s BEFORE the pc killed everything but the mac. It was a term of affection for those of us using them and your using it may be equivalent to a non-black person using the N word. So stop it.
@google_is_a_criminal
August 29, 2024 at 5:57 pm
The people that bought this stuff were kids in middle and high school, they’re like 60 now.
They used to do things with their hands kids now can’t even imagine. It’s weird.
@rocksnot952
August 28, 2024 at 1:34 pm
Welcome to the world before the binary choice of PC or Mac. It was a compatibility competition. No real graphics, either.
@Pheas-pleas
August 28, 2024 at 3:41 pm
I knew that machine as the Tandy MC-10, when I was growing up in Australia. I even managed to programme some graphic games on it!
@SuperchargedC5
August 28, 2024 at 6:50 pm
I still have my PC-1 and PC-2
@drewpaschal9294
August 28, 2024 at 7:21 pm
Man, this is painful to watch. Cool that you are into retro but us GenXers saw you struggling with phono cables and cassette tapes. 🤣😬
@xeroinfinity
August 28, 2024 at 9:07 pm
I got my TRS80 pocket pc in 1979, took less than a year to learn basic and I was only ten yrs old. Its a lot easier than any new code IMO but as you witnessed its limited. Luckily my screen still looks new i think its heat that destroys them? But i bought one of those replacements a couple years ago just in case mine went out, or they stopped selling them. RS was the shit back then
@calebsavage4631
August 28, 2024 at 9:47 pm
very annoying host
@carlnelson8472
August 28, 2024 at 10:47 pm
Dr. Asimov was a scientist first and foremost. Top 3 sci-fi author for sure, but his library is much more expensive than just his fictional works.
@Milarz
August 28, 2024 at 11:44 pm
Then i can’t imagine what Asimov’s reaction to today’s cell phones would be as, in many respects, they surpass scifi imagination circa 1960-70s. Star Trek communicators are bulky, one-trick ponies by comparison.
@nocomment1212
August 29, 2024 at 5:51 am
Radio Shack was such a great resource
for anyone with an IDEA.
You could almost always find parts to assemble in ways previously unimagined.
@michaelchurbe-yl7wh
August 29, 2024 at 9:47 am
You wasted more money on stuff that barely worked. I was playing personal computer games on the cheap with my paper routine money 😂
@valuemastery
August 29, 2024 at 3:01 pm
When I saw the “36: 2……………” display, I immediately felt like pressing and holding the “up” button.
@StephenKlitzky
August 29, 2024 at 7:17 pm
I have one of these somewhere in my house
@Vector_Ze
August 29, 2024 at 8:21 pm
Believe it or not, not everyone in the world is obsessed with smartphones. In fact, some of us don’t even own (nor desire to own) one.
@sternschnupper
August 29, 2024 at 8:33 pm
showing two devices with the same set of three jacks as connections, and then buying a cable with a 5 pin connector on one end gives me a bit of a headacke, or at least headshake tbh 😆😆
@MrBecker666
August 29, 2024 at 11:15 pm
It was the sharp pc-1500 that came out with basic as the main language, cassette tape backup and a little printer
@embie5119
August 29, 2024 at 11:54 pm
My dad got one of these – the Casio version, however – as one year’s yearly bonus from Prudential. It started my fascination with computers. It literally jump started my entire career. I’m forever indebted to this incredible (at the time) little machine.
@JordanHowellMusic
August 30, 2024 at 12:34 am
23:28 or so,,.. um. you have to just get a different tv? dude are you serious? come on man.
i’m really surprised at you on this video you basically spent 2/3 maybe 3/4 of it kind of complaining about things that yes a little bit annoying but, you could’ve glossed over (with all of your edit shots you already do!?) and just got to the point. im surprised.
well i still love your past work and hope my ad revenue helps you to think next time about, “hey, should I include half of my video of just things that are basic knowledge to probably a lot of people watching like a 2.5 to 3.5 adapter or, I don’t know, getting a different TV instead of one you picked out of a dumpster?” EDIT: and fucking just turn the trs over and see yes 😮 most things from our generation could switch to channel 3 or 4!?!
I’m serious man. There’s a certain point where you lost me here.
Hopefully somebody else agrees with me. I’m not trying to be rude. It’s constructive criticism. thanks 🙏
@mUbase
August 30, 2024 at 9:52 am
It didnt load the “games” properly because it needs to be completely flat. The solution ? Take a heavy mallet and hammer it completely flat. Terrible. May I suggest going upmarket and buying a ZX80 ? 😆
@Squid-Lips
August 30, 2024 at 5:57 pm
@popularscience 100% accurate description loading (saving) programs via cassette. If that had worked reasonably I’m sure I would have dug deeper into computing back then. I had the TRS-80 CoCo 16k. I wanted to upgrade to 32K to play Zaxxon but was so frustrated with the loading/saving purgatory. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the coding books and some games with hideous graphics.
@alecrisser12
August 30, 2024 at 10:26 pm
It’s crazy how technology evolves. A little over 10 years ago I got a really powerful laptop. It’s stopped working, so last year I got a Steam Deck for a third of the price of that laptop. Cheaper, uses a tenth of the power, and slightly more powerful, then a top of the line laptop 10 years ago.
@delscoville
August 31, 2024 at 3:16 am
You know, I have a Commodore SX-64, the very first portable (luggable) color computer, and it’s like 99% compatible with the Commodore 64, which has one of the largest software libraries. It’s not the hardware the impresses me anymore, but the software. Genius programmers are still figuring out ways to program around hardware limitations. Mostly by using extremely tight timing and raster interrupts. You can’t fool the computer hardware, but you can fool the human eye, and that’s where the magic happens.
@PoppyFord-h2w
August 31, 2024 at 4:38 am
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding about ourselves.
@crazysk8rboy
August 31, 2024 at 5:29 am
For me even conception that tvs has pre build channels sound ridiculous. And not having ability to tune them even more ridiculous.
In my country all the channels you are supposed to tune manually and from oldest black n white tvs to newest you can tune them obviously.
So just very weird stuff you guys had.
@dropmeshort
August 31, 2024 at 11:25 pm
Can’t finish the video. This ridicule, I can not watch.
@Ashton351
September 1, 2024 at 12:56 am
I LOVED that computer.
@jabl
September 1, 2024 at 3:13 pm
You sure get frustrated easily.
@andrzejzub8988
September 1, 2024 at 6:12 pm
Idiokracy – level expert!
@kevinbarnard3502
September 1, 2024 at 7:40 pm
PSA: Do not confuse your music cassettes with your data cassettes and put data cassette into car stereo with volume cranked. Data cassettes do NOT make music that is nice to listen to 😛 Always keep your mix tapes and data tapes separate and your ears safe.
On a side note, I used to work for Radio Shack back in late ’80s and early ’90s – just before the “Realistic” branded electronics started becoming garbage. I knew a decent amount of Tandy Corp’s history. Never knew they owned Color Tile and those other companies. Great video.
@user-qx3we1mk5m
September 1, 2024 at 11:20 pm
okay first of all — you come across clueless. you didnt even try a 3.5mm audio cable to read the tape. but whatever. charles tandy was cool as far as i can tell. you left out that the “DIY Leatherworking” he was doing was to help PTSD in veterans. he did acquire a ton of companies, but as far as i can tell, he didnt just buy them out, fire everyone, and enrich himself. he had a personal passion for DIY. he was so excited about the trs-80 he leaked the plans to the press without even telling the engineers he liked it, even though the accounting program he was trying out crashed when he put in his income! (150k) towards the end of his life he also helped with a lot of downtown renewal in fort worth TX where he lived. his wife was pretty cool, too. independently wealthy and a big philanthropist. terrible luck with husbands, though. for you to dismiss his legacy as ‘trash’ is just fscking rude, man. i’m a big ‘eat the rich’ kind of guy, but guys like tandy and woz are cool. you owe him an apology.
@lovemadeinjapan
September 2, 2024 at 12:21 am
Radio shack built no portable computers. Kyocera and Sharp did. If you see the garbage in your Ebay box, you can see it was a bit of “test equipment”. The real portable multifuncionals were the Epson HX-20 and the Kyocera Kyotronic 85. Those were actually usable, with great keybord and decent matrix screen.
@borispolonski
September 2, 2024 at 12:51 pm
I actually use my Sharp PC 1403 and PC 1262 to cheat in school.Had all of my needed formulae stored in an primitive self written programm.The teachers back,in the 80ies here in Germany didn’t know what my gadget actually was.We were allowed to use very basic pocket calculators without memory not programmable.Eo it was an easy deal for me.Suddenly my math class instantly became a success for me😉
@PleaseGetReal
September 2, 2024 at 1:02 pm
It was made by Sharp.
@PerspectiveEngineer
September 2, 2024 at 8:38 pm
Good work nstuff
@BitwiseMobile
September 3, 2024 at 12:05 pm
My uncle, who was a professor at LBSU and UCR taught English. Back in the late 80s he was working with someone to create a program to help ESL students learn English. It was written in BASIC. I was in 10th grade and was taking Advanced Algebra. In the unit around factoring there was a little sidebar with some BASIC code demonstrating an algorithm to discover the GCD. It completely made sense to me! After my uncle showed me his code, and my mind was blow away with that BASIC snippet I asked him to use his TRS80 Model 100. The first “portable” computer. I spent the weekend without sleeping and taught myself BASIC. Tandy Radio Shack will always have a special place in my heart as a result. Not to mention that as a kid I used to LOVE to got to RS and read the Forest Mims books. I wanted to be an EE. I ended up majoring in CSE – two loves in one. It’s a ménage à trois! 🙂
@arthurmann578
September 3, 2024 at 3:37 pm
A guy wanted to sell me his TRS-80 for $100 back in the day, but I couldn’t afford even that great price back then. 🙁
@jonathanjackgoodman2764
September 3, 2024 at 4:02 pm
I found a number of these things tucked away in glove boxes of cars and in long forgotten boxes in closets but one time I found one in perfect condition that still worked. My eyebrows about leapt off my forehead when that brick turned on.
@Eternyl_bliss-nj9se
September 4, 2024 at 3:14 am
I somehow grew up on the Tandy Color Computer. I was in Rainbow magazine (don’t laugh not ‘that’ kind of rainbow – this was in the pre pride/lgbqt+pred era nonsene’) – I was in the pen pal section which within months turned me into world wide known pirater trading disks in the mail. I had people all over writing me – hey I heard you have all of the games. The computer was obscure – it didn’t have the impact Commodore 64 had at time time. A lot of games were 3rd party copies of popular games. Like Donkey King (Donkey Kong) / Buzzard Bait (Joust) / Gauntelet (Gauntlet) etc. The text/graphic adventures were cool though. In the end someone did come out with Quest for Thelda (Legend of Zelda) I sold everything off in a garage sale then started getting into collecting vintage gaming consoles in later 80s. I tracked down the girl through my aunt that bought the comptuer and bought it back. I think I have a few hundred disks – drive was temperamental but I think I have a couple of them. I may have some games on cassette too. The games weren’t on the same level as other computers but it had a low budget charm . Kinda like Asylum movie company making their own versions of popular movies on a budget. I never understood how to write programs – I understood what the code did but not able to write games in basic. I was always dissapointed in myself since there were kids half my age that were writing some of the adventure games!
@barilochebarracuda846
September 4, 2024 at 2:14 pm
You have no idea what these pocket computers were for early 80s computer geeks. We dreamt of having one. As teenagers most of us couldn’t afford one. In France there even was a magazine called ‘pocket computer’ devoted to these machines we would get every month and dream over the new casios, HPs or sharps… I learned programming on a friends ZX81, the first affiordable home computer, it had 0,8k of total memory, that’s it. Maybe ask some older people when researching your videos?
@ionageman
September 4, 2024 at 7:13 pm
Welcome to 1980 computers .. there’s nothing heroic in these computers and no reason to turn back the clock .
@folive64
September 4, 2024 at 8:33 pm
Great video! Great performance! Not one second bored, I watched it non stop till the end. I had my Sharp PC-1211 when in the university and programming in BASIC was so fun! It’s a pity the display was one line only. I kept my PC-1211 for about 20 years. Then, one day, I found out the display was stained. I thought it was useless withouth the display so I threw it away, but with a deep pain in my heart. I loved that pocket computer!
@karlschulte9231
September 4, 2024 at 10:41 pm
You should get tbe game cartridge for coco. Sadly i threw my games. Typing and spreadsheet ones away along with the pc when i had to leave big home for retirement. Still have pc2. I used both for learning basic
@giuliomoro7940
September 4, 2024 at 10:53 pm
If you’ve never owned or used a TRS-80 Model PC-4 then you have no idea just how much you could do with one using simplke BASIC programming and even with an attached thermal printer. Or a TRS-80 Model 100 notebook, a true first generation laptop with built-in work processing, and spreadsheets. Ever heard of Lotus 1-2-3? This unit used another similar program. Built-in serial and parallel ports so direct connection to a printer wherever you found one and needed to print. All running on batteries, long before what a laptop looks like today. Then when the ZX80 came along it was a game-changer for the personal computer industry, and then even more so for their ZX81, the only 4 chip computer system ever made back before Y2K, complete with output video and up to 2KB of RAM in which many of wrote some of the most powerful an useful programmers you can’t imagine. From spreadsheets, to games, word processors, office and control automation, and even incredible chess games that went head-to-head with Russian Grand Masters and ended-up in a stalemate. To date, no other 4 chip complete computer system has ever been built and sold to the public at a mere 99 pounds Sterling, and I’m NOT talking about systems built using SOCs either.
@r-platt
September 5, 2024 at 2:15 am
My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1 with 4K of memory, cassette recorder, and a b/w monitor.
@Glx-u7e
September 5, 2024 at 5:05 am
Never, ever throw anything away. Ever.
@OMGItsJimmyNash
September 5, 2024 at 10:58 am
I just make my own cables and adapters for this sort of thing… It saves so much time, money, and stress.
@RyanMcDonald
September 5, 2024 at 4:02 pm
I owned this model computer. It truly was awesome.
@franceslarina5508
September 5, 2024 at 11:23 pm
Me, Gen-X: It must be rough on kids today, expecting everything computer to just work all the time.
@andrewcocos
September 6, 2024 at 2:33 am
Kevin looks like millennial, but his attitude is more like zoomer. Disgusting.
@adewouters
September 6, 2024 at 4:32 am
My first computer was a SHARP PC-1211, I learned programming with it… And I was going to the local Radio Shack store regularly just to dream about everything. As a teenager I was unable to afford any of these magical things.
@paulor.dellani6934
September 6, 2024 at 6:40 am
Wow OP seems to be really stressed, I am not gonna watch all this complaining LOL
@shadowsources
September 6, 2024 at 11:39 am
2:40 This shot was reused when I recently watched the video on the Sega Interceptor (In talking about unboxing the power adapter), the only other popular science video I’ve watched. Is it a popular callback shot used in many episodes, or am I just lucky?
@longislandstu
September 6, 2024 at 5:16 pm
The TRS-80 Color Computer wasn’t developed by Tandy! It grew out of a Department of Agriculture project at Grumman Data Systems. Grumman contracted with Tandy to build a prototype system into a TRS-80 keyboard case. The device was designed to allow a user to enter a selection of screens by number using a keypad, connect to the Dept. of Agriculture using a modem and download the requested screens. A high school student was hired to mock up sample screens. Amazingly, Tandy used images showing those screens in early ads for the Color Computer!
The developer at Grumman was understandably upset at never getting credit for his invention. I know this because I was a programmer at Grumman Data Systems at the time and assisted on the government project.
@frenchfriar
September 6, 2024 at 7:21 pm
Tandy Leather, and Radio Shack. Fond memories of both.
@ChrisWade-l6n
September 6, 2024 at 8:14 pm
You should try spectrum it’s cassette tapes and program mobile really good games on the spectrum for its time enjoy
@DonnyHooterHoot
September 6, 2024 at 9:15 pm
I had that TRS-80 in 1978. Paid a small fortune at that time. It’s fun to remember the stone ages of PC’s!
@nikbl4k
September 7, 2024 at 12:16 pm
you have a really good way of talking with enthusiasm and way of making everything sound exciting. and itwas an interesting story as well.
@Juan-qn3yl
September 7, 2024 at 2:54 pm
I think it was 1985 or 86 when I bought a TRS-80 PC2 with the first check I ever got from my first job ever. I blew the whole $165 or so dollars on it. My dad was beyond mad and made me return it, telling me on my way out the store something like “You don’t understand the good that I am doing for you, keeping you from losing your money on that computer fad that will go nowhere.”😂
That same year my uncle gave me the best Christmass present: a TRS-80 Micro Color Computer.
So: why Tandy computers died? IMO it was all that damm cassette tape as a program storage. It was way too unreliable. Then when Tandy began selling floppy disks well, they were super expensive and very incompatible with older TRS-80s. By the time gh
RadioShack began to sell DOS based computers their competitors were waaaay ahead in pricing and compatibility.
@allenwilson5235
September 7, 2024 at 3:20 pm
I miss Radio Shack. It was like a hardware store for electronics.
@maxcarter3413
September 8, 2024 at 4:51 am
Hilarious!
@maxcarter3413
September 8, 2024 at 4:57 am
How do you find the time and the motivation to relive the past?
@dstamura
September 8, 2024 at 5:10 am
Own one in the late 80s. Casio brand with detachable mini dot matrix thermal printer. It runs BASIC programming language and can be connected to a cassette tape recorder to save and retrieve programs.
@rayspencer5025
September 8, 2024 at 11:45 am
I still have mine somewhere. I bought it to help save lab time by calculating estimated titration points for chemical reactings.
I also wrote a program for it to ask a girl for a date that includes subroutines for when she said no. I actually got a little disappointed when she said yes right away because I want to really show-off my brilliance in writting the program that would convince her.
Why would anyone call me a nerd?
@osoeduardo
September 8, 2024 at 3:12 pm
I had the casio FX-850P……..
@jimmyguitar2933
September 8, 2024 at 5:09 pm
Wjat a nerd you are! Very entertaining, though…
@NurchOK
September 8, 2024 at 7:44 pm
5:12, that’s not 16 ounces 😛
@larrycolen6123
September 9, 2024 at 2:03 am
If he was blown away by Radio Shack, just wait until he finds out about Heathkit.
It’s too bad he tried to do something with this rather than the Model-100, one of the most amazing machines of its day, just for it’s portability and utility.
@LANCEYPOOHFlyingSpaghettiMonst
September 9, 2024 at 2:40 pm
dude I LOL’ed hard at “Gardene” 😂😂
@regueton
September 9, 2024 at 11:14 pm
Boy… I had never seen somebody miss the point of something as blatantly as you did in this video… please don’t make any more. It was painful.
@screscenti
September 10, 2024 at 6:21 am
I remember winning a state programming contest in 8th grade and did it all on a TRS-80. It was a lot of after school work on the computer and the cassettes I would reuse/tape over to allow me to write them again… If it wasn’t for that computer and the wonder it gave me, I wouldn’t be in technology today… 🥲
@mikeal51
September 10, 2024 at 8:24 am
These were pretty neat back in the day. In the late ’80s, I worked for a land surveyor and we used these little jewels to calculate coordinates from our field data and to set irons. Worked great.
@michaeldibb
September 10, 2024 at 8:38 am
It’s interesting that Tandy were originally a leather company and went into electronics. Just like another leather company Coleco (Connecticut Leather Company) went into electronics.
@CoreyChambersLA
September 10, 2024 at 11:45 am
Pocket Computer was limited but fun. I made the most or it. It was useful to keep notes with no paper.
@ivantuma7969
September 10, 2024 at 2:45 pm
I owned a TRS-80 CoCo … but for pocket computer fun, I found I could write basic code in my TI scientific calculator (late 80’s). I still have both to demonstrate my hoarding tendencies.
@ivantuma7969
September 10, 2024 at 2:56 pm
The CoCo did have decent graphics ability (the equivalent of shape tables in Apple IIe). I also remember making a tail-gunner game on my own using text based graphics.
@ghost9199
September 10, 2024 at 4:58 pm
I had to deal with that tape noise in the 80s with my Texas instrument TI 99/4a untill I got my 5 1/4 inch floppy drive working which took up my entire desk.
@cidercreekranch
September 11, 2024 at 9:43 am
Who had a Battery of the Month Club card?
@daveman1975
September 11, 2024 at 9:47 pm
We used something similar in the US Navy up until the early 2000’s for Anti-Submarine Target Motion Analysis.
@13DKA-kg2fz
September 12, 2024 at 10:08 am
OMG I’m so glad that I’ve been around when these things were da shit and got to get old enough to watch this and laugh so hard that I might need new dentures. 🤣
@DeHelmonder
September 12, 2024 at 2:34 pm
why is vsauce kevin here
@jakefiersing
September 12, 2024 at 3:19 pm
So the leaf to commodore 64 was huge back then.
Games with animated pictures became real. Though the sharpness could not at all come close to nowerdays ones.——
Problems by loading programs from a cassette could also result from a slightly wrong positioned reading head in the cassette player.
By the way the old commodore 64 equipement turned out to be reliable over several decades.
@sethlopato4702
September 12, 2024 at 4:59 pm
My father had one of the sharp versions in the early 80’s he used it primarily for contacts and calender he kept it in his briefcase later he got a sharp wizard
@REKlaus
September 12, 2024 at 11:04 pm
Thank you for a very entertaining video. I couldn’t help but chuckle at watching a modern, tech savvy person struggle with what some of use started out with in the 1970’s and felt were so wonderful state of the art devices.
I did not have a TRS-80 pocket computer (way out of my budget when they were new) but I did have a TRS-80 level II, TRS-80 Model III, Texas Instruments TI-99, Commodore Vic-20, Commodore 64, Commodore 128 and a Magnavox game console that all used “Basic”. In the early 1980’s I took courses in Basic, Fortran, Cobal and LIsp at a local college. I created an inventory program for musical instrument rental for a music store in Fortran on a TRS-80 Model III. I also made a few bucks fixing problems in some “Canned” software when the company producing the software wanted $50 every 15 minutes to fix in the programs they wrote.Those where great times
@Itsgonnabeok1325
September 13, 2024 at 3:33 pm
Fyi-ladies love PS too. Also, I had a TRS-80.
@cargo_vroom9729
September 13, 2024 at 3:48 pm
10:10 Note how this competition that produces innovation isn’t a product of capitalism. It’s what you get when you interrupt Capitalism to break up companies that have done Capitalism successfully, like Tandy. The entire concept of capitalism is consolidating wealth and market share into fewer and fewer entities, either acquiring competitors or driving them out of business. We Americans are indoctrinated to believe it causes the situation is destroys. Controlled markets and government oversight produce competition. Capitalism produces Monopolies.
@mstecker
September 15, 2024 at 2:05 am
Dude, it’s painful watching you do this. It’s a simple audio cable. Get one or make one. No complaints.
@rar2k11
September 15, 2024 at 7:52 am
what cocaine are you on? Why youtubers must act like clowns I just don’t get it.
@jmar1973
September 15, 2024 at 4:34 pm
@4:07….See I knew there was a reason why I was addicted to your quests to make these relics work again….
Left-hand writers unite! ✍️ 😹
@mahboudzabetian5114
September 17, 2024 at 4:30 am
Having grown up in a place without RadioShack stores—a fact I frequently lamented — I never experienced a TRS-80 in any form. I had heard of Sinclair and Apple computers, but I had no way of getting or even seeing one in action. I was, however, fortunate enough to find that we had a regional Sharp store nearby, primarily focused on their business machines. From them I got my first real computer, a step up from my programming calculators, a PC-1500. This was more advanced that the TRS-80 you featured, and not only did it have a more reliable, and faster, cassette interface but it also had an optional 4 color plotter which could print in different font sizes or draw graphs, curves, and formulaic shapes. The audio capabilities were also impressive and one could program it to play tones of varying frequency. I recall hand-typing in the program to make it play Für Elise, which at the time, pre-sound cards and pre-MIDI, seemed symphonic!
Sharp would later release the PC-1600 (which I only acquired some 20 years later). It had more RAM, a larger display, and it was overall a better pocket computer. However, this product is even lesser known than the PC-1500 and TRS-80 pocket computers, and it really did not garner much attention or even make it into many markets. Growth in the computing needs and expectations had made these things with only 2k-16K of RAM, with no high speed non-volatile removable storage, and without a large screen, uninteresting and obsolete. DOS PCs were sporting 640K of RAM(1M total), floppy drives were ubiquitous, and support for TVs and monitors were standard (not to mention color displays). In fact, the PC-1600 was introduced two years after the Macintosh debuted! Sure, the Mac wasn’t a pocket computer or portable computer*, but it rewrote expectations of what a computer needed to be capable of and pocket computers were left looking quite inadequate.
Despite all that, holding a PC-1500/1600 today, turning it on, entering a simple program with just a few keystrokes, brings back memories of the empowerment that these small devices offered at the time. You literally could pull one out at a cocktail party and write a program in minutes that would continuously display successive prime numbers. It wasn’t very fast after the first few thousand, but most of us can’t do this today on our smartphones.
* The Mac had an optional carrying case which students could use to lug their 16lb/7kg Mac from dorm room to library and back (I did this exactly once and regretted it). Or take it home over the breaks as carry-on luggage on an airplane (I did this less and less enthusiastically each successive year of college).
@Jon-o7j
September 17, 2024 at 4:43 am
I think your computer teacher had a near miss
@rja5748
September 17, 2024 at 10:50 pm
This is not trash this is innovation
@Rabblewitz
September 18, 2024 at 4:11 pm
My first computer was the TRS80 CoCo II (not the micro CoCo). In general, it was a great little computer, especially for the price. On the good side, it had my favorite processor (the 6809) and an (unfiltered) bus on the side that I could connect my own hardware to, as well as various accessories like a sound synthesizer. The downside was the number of characters and lines that could be displayed on a TV screen, as well as the fact that instead of using lower case characters, it used inverted upper case … to better support text based games, I assume. There was a fair amount of software available, plus magazines like Hot CoCo if you didn’t mind typing the code in (and I did quite a few, as well as writing a number of programs for my own use). I did buy an aftermarket dual floppy drive for it (the Radio Shack one was full size, single sided and so had a lot less storage) because using a cassette tape kind of sucked. As a computer engineers in college, we didn’t think much of the IBM PC hardware architecture when it came out … I think the success of the PC was the IBM name, their advertising budget, and most importantly, the internal bus that anyone could make cards for. A friend and I were designing our own computer, but when we saw the Commodore Amiga … it was everything we were designing plus a lot more. Too bad that computer was badly handled by Commodore. In the late 80’s I played around with CP/M computers for a while … I modified the BIOS, had a C compiler for writing code, WordStar and tons of free software pulled off the internet (pre-WWW internet) or shareware ordered on floppies. When the IBM 386SX came out, I finally switched to a PC … a 286 made cheap because of the 386SX. Even though I didn’t think much of the PC hardware architecture, there was just too much good software at that point. As for not throwing anything out, I do still have my CoCo, one of the CP/M machines (a Xerox 16/8) and that original 286 PC, but most everything in-between has been recycled. My other CP/M machines were recently donated to a museum and are now on display, which is kind of cool.
@SMunro
September 18, 2024 at 10:56 pm
Tandy should sue the government for breaking up the company. Every company is huge.
@SMunro
September 18, 2024 at 11:09 pm
Code a telephone dialup system?
@laszlogman2545
September 20, 2024 at 12:59 pm
The scientists for the nuclear I.C.B.M. missiles went to Radio Shack to get electronic missile parts because they were on back order from the government for over one year
@Gunzee
September 20, 2024 at 10:00 pm
My dad bought an Atari 2600 from a store I forget the name of. UK store which was the predecessor to Tandy. It was a tech store similar to Maplins (R.I.P) lots of computers, DJ equipment, lots of electronic components & small electronic games and trinkets (pens with an LCD clock at the end, those keyring sound machines. Made a loud and distinct siren & laser noise).
@StfuFFS
September 21, 2024 at 12:02 am
26:15 Bro, you programmed a game called “Heads I win, tails you lose” and then failed to read the first paragraph in the description: “When you play this betting game with your computer, you’ll see how this program got its name. No matter which combination of heads and tails you bet on, the computer can pick a combination that gives it a better chance of winning.” Programming a BASIC version of the Kobayashi Maru and then complaining about the no win situation you painted yourself into might be the most satisfying own-goal that my cynical little GenX heart has ever beheld.
@another3997
September 21, 2024 at 5:57 pm
Tandy/Radio Shack computers were very early to the party, but they failed to keep up. They weren’t as popular outside of the USA anyway. They had nothing to do with “becoming your phone”, or anybody elses. Just think, if you had put your brain into gear, sat down and done some research beforehand… you could have saved yourself, and us, some excruciating pain. 😂
@tomray8765
September 21, 2024 at 6:33 pm
I had one of those with, believe it or not, a small color printer. I programmed it for my oil well mud logging job, where on every drilling interval,(1 to 5 feet of hole dug) I had to calculate about five equations, including drilling rate in feet per hour, and various hydraulic factors. Worked really well. (I learned how to program on my 16K TRS80 computer about a year before)
@Curt_Sampson
September 21, 2024 at 7:15 pm
Started by a leather company? Sheesh. Thirty seconds on Wikipedia would have told you that that computer was actually invented and built by Sharp, and Tandy merely re-badged it. (Over the next several years, Sharp, Casio and others improved on it; every single Tandy hand-held model was a rebadged version of one of these.)
Japan also invented the first real notebook computer, the Kyocera KC-85, which again Tandy (as well as NEC and Olivetti) rebadged.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t some truly significant U.S. contributions to the personal computer industry. Consumer personal computers we pretty clearly started with the 1977 trinity: the Commodore PET, the Apple II, and the TRS-80 Model I. (Japan had its own large and vibrant personal computer scene, but was generally 1-2 years behind the U.S. on this, though in certain areas, particularly graphics, they tended to be ahead.) And of course U.S. inventions such as the Apple Newton and the USR Palm Pilot really brought handheld computing to consumers.
But to start out so wrong, well, just go do some research next time.
(Oh, and by 1980 Tandy, as Radio Shack, had been a large player in home and hobby electronics for more than two decades. It’s misleading as best to call them a “leather company” at that point.)
@walteringle2258
September 22, 2024 at 3:59 pm
@22:15 This is one of those places where Mr. Tandy was innovative, but not exactly in a good way. They would sell you the $499.99 (No. Really it’s $500. People lose a penny and don’t freak out. It’s $500. Stop trying to hack our brains.) and then load you up with “extras”.
Like cables.
“Oh, you like the price on that, yeah? Do you expect to connect it to a TV? Oh, in that case you need this $(insert ridiculous price point for a cable). It’s a proprietary design, but you can jerry rig something, but you’d need these three things… Do you have a soldering gun? No? Oh, that would cost you this much. So you just want the cable sir? Very frugal of you. It’s another word for ‘smart shopping’. Come this way and I’ll ring you up.” –RL conversation I overheard in a Radio shack.
The only thing that keeps a handful of Radio Shacks open in the US after the buyout that allowed some individuals an option to buy the property out and keep the name are the cables, the resistors. the vacuum tubes, etc. They are still known for that in the few isolated places they exist physically. (Often near military bases. Sometimes government shutdowns make it difficult to stay battle ready and there’s a slush fund on every base for necessary off the shelf parts.) They kinda went back to their origins: HAM and cb radios, accousics, etc. for people who wanted to repair their own stuff or dabble with making their own pen-testing tools.
@davidt-rex2062
September 24, 2024 at 4:02 am
oh dear god you are pathetic
this is what the older generation had to deal with. so fucking dramatic.
@pauls5745
September 24, 2024 at 12:13 pm
I had one of these. I think for $129 back in the 80’s. My mistake was not getting the printer dock and you could also save from that. 2k memory, but you really only had like 1.6k available. Loved it!
@JayDoggy520
September 25, 2024 at 2:11 pm
Brother I feel your pain so much. Try to do one thing and end up having to troubleshoot 10 devices that all have problems that are specific to your situation. But would work fine in any other situation. God help you. Just know I have been there. And seeing this video helps me to realize that other people have been there. I was beginning to think I was just cursed with whatever specific curse had me.
@billc.riemers3245
September 25, 2024 at 10:19 pm
For its time, this was a fantastic portable computer.
Frankly, I never knew you could buy programs for it. The cables you needed for the cassette are just standard audio cables. Dollar Tree still carries them today.
I had the whole package. But the cassette loading worked so poorly I just rewrote programs on need.
The thermal paper was too expensive so I stopped using the printer. But I actually owned three of these. I would drop one on average once a year, and the LCD screen always cracked.
Pretty much all affordable machines of the time used BASIC. It is an incredibly stupid language. But it is easy to tokenize and beat writing assembly.
@billc.riemers3245
September 25, 2024 at 10:32 pm
The TRS-80 Color Computer was first, then the Color Computer 2, then the Color Computer 3, and lastly the Micro Color Computer. The games you purchased were for the original Color Computer, which also had a game cartridge port that was the preferred way to buy games. By the time you got to the Color Computer 2, everyone would buy the floppy disk drive with it, so I doubt anyone made cassette-based games for the newer versions.
@girlkisser420
September 26, 2024 at 8:48 am
later.