Trs-80 Model 4, A month of use reviewed

[Compumater]

OK, oK...

 

 

The Radio Shack Trs-80 Model IV. I computer that almost wasn't, and a computer that lived all the way to 1991 being sold new in a world overrun with 386-16 windoze computers!

 

 

So here is my story witht the Model 4. I got mine as a hand me down in 1991, a 1984 unit with 2 180K drives,64K of ram, and a "green" screen. I used it to log on to the local bbs scene until 1993 when I "upgraded" IBM XT. After that it lived in storage until 2003 when I dug it out and began to tinker with it again. At that time I Upgraded it to dual 360K drives, and 128K ram. This made it quite the Z-80 computer. I had "double Duty" that made it possible to switch from one program to another at the touch of a button. "Think multitasking... well, sort of" and plenty of on board storage. Most programs were in the 16K realm, so 720K of storage was like having a hard drive!

 

Anyway, I farted around with it until 2005 when It again went into storage. I actually sold it on flea-Bay, and then backed out of the sale when I realized I still wanted it. Thanks to Ira's site, I had a TON of programs for model 3, and 4 saved away on floppy.

 

 

SO fast forward to early August of this year. I'm "purging" the attic, and there it sits. My trusty Model 4. I pull it down, intent on selling it and clean it up for some pictures. But the Damn thing strikes again!

 

I end up playing with it all night, and then the next day, week, and now a month. Its Still A great and usefull computer. I still get my butt kicked by the computer in Zchess, loved playing a bunch of simple knock off versions of donkeykong, pacman, defender, frenzy, and so on. Dug that 1 channel sound that plays xmas music, and various songs from the early 80's. I don't have a hi-res card, but I can imagine a Gif to R/S converter looking cool on the green screen.

 

I used to to type a 2 page letter on Supersubscript, and then converted it to an IBM doc to print out. And It worked just fine.

 

 

 

And, and this was the mother of all Model 4 tricks. I used D-Term, Hooked to the serial port of my model 4 and a PC running Windows 98 with 64 Server to telnet to the WEB! Thats right, I surffed the "WEB" (Ok some old telnet bbs sites) with my model IV. and it worked just fine.

 

 

This is truly a great little computer, and after all these years of use, it still works, and is workable in the modern era. Thats my report!

 

 

What are your TRS stories?

[+thegoldenband]

When I was young I had an Atari 2600 and 5200, but the only computer we could afford was a CoCo 2. It was a great machine and eventually we got a disk drive for it, and I had a dozen issues of RAINBOW (give or take) plus several books, so I could type in a few programs.

 

Still, the programs in RAINBOW were mostly primitive and a pain to enter, and didn't have anything like the complexity of the Infocom text adventures and Ultima-style RPGs I read about in magazines like Electronic Games. Plus you can't really type in a BASIC adventure game without spoiling it, right? And I didn't know anyone from whom I could borrow CoCo disks; the few friends I had who owned computers had either Macintoshes (rich families!) or TI-99/4As.

 

Sometime later, maybe around 1985 or 1986, my mom brought home a Model III from her job to use when working from home. Most of the software was for bookkeeping, but it came with a few disks that had a dozen games or so on it, most of which were RPGs (Quest for the Key of Night Shade), text adventures (Paper Chase), or simulation games (Galactic Empire). There was at least one arcade-style game too, called Kitchen Sink.

 

I was totally hooked, and would hop on the machine whenever I could. Night Shade kicked my butt, and I don't remember doing terribly well with Galactic Empire either, but the difference between those and the crude CoCo BASIC equivalents was like night and day. There was another game I still haven't identified, involving robots called "Garcon" and something about suspension of disbelief...and maybe there was another text adventure where one of the items you could get was an aborigine? Or that might've been Paper Chase, not sure.

 

Anyway, ultimately the machine went back to the office (maybe when my mom started a different job), and I was crestfallen. But I still remember it fondly, and if/when I buy a house and have some more space, I'm definitely planning to pick up a Model III or IV, not just to play the games already familiar to me, but to investigate some new titles. I had no idea how much software was out there for it -- thousands of programs!

Edited September 5, 2011 by thegoldenband

[HuckleCat]

My very first computer was technically a TRS-80.

 

I had gotten it for Christmas in 1983, I had been wanting a computer for awhile and my dad picked one up because of the convenience of only having to do shopping at Radio Shack. See, he had gone there to get himself the TRS-80 "laptop" so he could use it for telex stuff. Anyway, while I was young, and was happy to have gotten a computer at all, my mother reminded me of the advertisements I had been seeing for about a year in my issues of 321 Contact, and the ones she had been seeing in a few of her magazines, as well as some papers.

 

The Apple //c.

 

I had been wanting one - bad, but it actually wasn't out yet. Apple had been showing the damn thing off literally a year before it's release. Well, while I did not know any better, my mom did, and she took my dad aside and made him realize that what I wanted was a "big deal", and what he brought home was a "piece of shit".

 

So back it went, and my dad took the funds and pre-ordered the Apple //c.

 

Looking back, man, I am so glad my mom stepped in.

[JamesD]

I learned BASIC on a Model I at school when I was a freshman. They had one computer for the entire school.

By the time I was a senior, they had purchased a Model III for the school office and my first computer job was work study writing the software to track the school budget for the different accounts. I wish I had the source code to that program.

 

I loved programming on the III. The keyboard is possibly the best of any 8 bit machine and I have pretty good sized collection to compare with.

[TwiliteZoner]

A friend of mine growing up had a model 1 with a couple of floppy drives and of course the cassette player. I always loved the look of those systems (model 1 - IV).

[+save2600]

In junior high, we had a whole row of Model III's. Learned BASIC and the ins and outs of computing on those when I was in 6th/7th grade. Bought a couple of 'em for the heck of it not too long ago and made one nice 48k example with two drives out of 'em. Got in touch with Ira as well who was kind enough to send me some disks. The arcade type games I never even knew existed, are really well done! Someday, I'd like to get more games and apps for it though. Haven't spliced a DIN cable (or whatever the cassette cable is) yet to get sound out of it either. Another "one of these days" projects. lol

 

[jhd]

The very first computer that I ever used was the Model III. About 1982, my school bought one. It had a single floppy disk drive; I have no idea how much RAM.

 

I was too young to take the BASIC programming class (I was only in about grade 6), but I did get to play some games on it. One of my (older) classmates was quite bright and he developed several rather fun games in BASIC; I don't think that we had any commercial software for it (at least through 1985 when I started at a new school).

 

I actually miss the blue phospher screen; it was very easy to read.

[Hatta]

Wow, these are great stories. I happened across a TRS-80 Model IV last winter, but I've yet to do a thing with it. I have to figure out some way to dump software on to this thing. Problem is, I don't have a PC 5.25" drive. Wonder if I can write TRS-80 format disks with a 1571 drive.