SORRY IF I APPEAR TO BE SHOUTING.  I ASSURE YOU I AM NOT IT'S JUST THAT THE TANDY TRS-80 MODEL 1 I AM USING, IT'S A SWEET MACHINE I GOTTA TELL YOU, CANNOT DISPLAY LOWER CASE LETTERS.  SO HERE ARE MY SPECS:

TRS-80 MICRO COMPUTER SYSTEM MODEL 1

ZILOG Z80 PROCESSOR CLOCKED AT 1.77 MHZ (THAT'S RIGHT, I SAID MEGAHERTZ)

4K (THAT "K" MEANS THOUSAND DON'T YOU KNOW) RAM STANDARD MEMORY

FLOATING POINT BASIC PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE AND 64 COLUMN BLACK AND WHITE BUILT IN MONITOR.

EXPANDED TO 48K (REMEMBER WHAT "K" MEANS...) OF RAM AND FOUR 5-1/4 INCH FLOPPY DISK DRIVES (WAY BETTER THAN THOSE OLD SCHOOL 8" ONES AND I GOT MY EYE ON THOSE NEW 3-1/2 INCH ONES EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT) USING 720 MB DUAL-SIDED FLOPPYS.

RADIO SHACK MODEL CTR-41 CASSETTE RECORDER FOR EXPANDED DATA STORAGE COMPLETE WITH SPECIAL LINEAR AMPLIFIER CIRCUITRY THAT ALLOWS FLAT FREQUENCY RESPONSE AND NEARLY ERROR FREE RECORDING OR REPLAY OF COMPANY GENERATED PROGRAMS.

SO, WHEN I ACCESS THE WORLD WIDE WEB THROUGH MY PAID UP AMERICA ON LINE ACCOUNT AND TRY TO DOWNLOAD THIS P3D THINGY I KEEP GETTING ERROR CODES LIKE APOLLO 11 DURING THE LUNAR LANDING.

HELP!

RANDY

Edited March 2, 20188 yr by Jim Young
All caps for this topic are allowed. Please do not report as a violation.

Randy,
I highly recommend you upgrade to a 5 MB hard disk drive.  It will be noisy and set you back about $800.00.  I went straight from my cassette tape to the hard drive.  The Sopwith now reaches full speed in level flight!

Ohhh! Forgot to mention. My computer is the TRS Color Computer and runs off a Motorola 6809 processor chip.  I have a neat flight planning program written in Basic, but the CoCo basic is different from that of your trash eighty.

Do you not know about Compuserve?

Edited February 24, 20188 yr by fppilot

Ah, a fellow former TRS-80 user.  I had one years...and years...and years ago as a young lad and kept bumping my head on highway overpasses I was so proud.

Couldn't resist making this tongue in cheek post after I finished reading "Ready Player One" and it brought back some great memories despite being set in the future.  Will be going to see the movie version, too.

Seeing all the "Will I be able to play P3Dv4 on this system?" pushed me along as well.

Randy

Edited February 24, 20188 yr by Ramjett

AOL charged $2.95 an hour versus $5.00 an hour for Compuserve.  Way beyond my means.
 

Quote

 

My computer is the TRS Color Computer and runs off a Motorola 6809 processor chip.  I have a neat flight planning program written in Basic, but the CoCo basic is different from that of your trash eighty.

Do you not know about Compuserve?

 

"Trash 80", really, way to bust a guy's bubble...

Randy

6 minutes ago, Ramjett said:

Ah, a fellow former TRS-80 user.

 

1 minute ago, Ramjett said:

"Trash 80", really, way to bust a guy's bubble...

That was the label applied to it after the intro of the original IBM PC.  I was on vacation in Chicago when I read about the IBM PC news release. Saw that at first it was to be sold by Computerland stores.  That was the Sunday Chicago Tribune.  We drove a long day that Sunday from Chicago back to Oklahoma, where we stopped for the night in Oklahoma City.  We lived at the time in Weatherford, OK, another hour west of OKC.  At 10 o'clock the next morning I was camped at the door of the Oklahoma City Computerland store, waiting for it's Monday morning opening.  The store owner arrived, saw me at the door, and saw my wife and two young daughters in the car.  He looked at me and said he'd never had a person waiting at the door when he opened.  Told him I was there to put a deposit on the first IBM PC he would receive.  He shook his head no, and let me know in no uncertain terms that the first one was his.

I was the second owner of an IBM PC in Oklahoma.  

My deposit was for a cassette driven version.  By the time it arrived in December of 1981 it was a single floppy drive model.  The cassette version was scrubbed and none were ever shipped.  The floppy drive added $600.00 to the $3,150.00 base price.  I believe I still have the receipt. 

Weatherford, OK.  Was thinking Vance AFB based on your signature, but 115 miles is quite a commute.  Only reason I know that is my middle name is Vance and comes from Vance AFB...yep Air Force brat and former USAF Transportation Officer.

Best game I had for the TRS-80 was "The President is Missing" and the cassette recorder was crucial to learning where he was.

I cannot recall the brand of my first PC, but I know it came from Radio Shack like my TRS-80 did.  First game I installed on it was Sublogic's Airline Transport Pilot.  I remember a B747 simulator for the Commodore 64 as well, plus Space Shuttle and the ever present Apollo 18, the final mission that never happened so 17 was our last landing, unless the movie is to be believed.

Randy

 

Edited February 24, 20188 yr by Ramjett

I cut my teeth on the Model III. 

I do remember running FS(1?) and subLogic ATP on my Tandy 1000. It had a blazing 386sx in it and 16 color egg. Remember trying to squeak every bit of possible memory out of it. 

I thought I was styling. 

Kevin

 

21 minutes ago, Ramjett said:

First game I installed on it was Sublogic's Airline Transport Pilot.

I flew subLogic's ATP: Flight Assignment and still miss it.  That was in my days on the Prodigy network, and I was a founding member of the first ever virtual airline, SunAir, Airline of Imagination, that emerged from our group on Prodigy.  I kept ATP going like something from the Energizer Battery Bunny, with help we got from an Austrian programmer named Simon Hradecki, who breathed life into if for several years after subLogic ceased existence.  https://www.nomissoft.com/simon.html 

I logged over 5,000 hours with ATP, still the greatest number of my logged simulator hours.  I break down FS by version and am still just over 3,500 FSX hours.

For the uninitiated...there was no AOL or Compuserve back when the TRS-80 came out.

2 hours ago, Ramjett said:

SO, WHEN I ACCESS THE WORLD WIDE WEB THROUGH MY PAID UP AMERICA ON LINE ACCOUNT AND TRY TO DOWNLOAD THIS P3D THINGY I KEEP GETTING ERROR CODES LIKE APOLLO 11 DURING THE LUNAR LANDING.

HELP!

RANDY

Hate to break it to ya, but America Online won't be around until the 90's!   But don't worry, there will be this thing called BBS's soon, but you'll need to buy a modem.

2 minutes ago, Mace said:

For the uninitiated...there was no AOL or Compuserve back when the TRS-80 came out.

From Wikipedia:

CompuServe was founded in 1969 as Compu-Serv Network, Inc.

5 minutes ago, fppilot said:

From Wikipedia:

CompuServe was founded in 1969 as Compu-Serv Network, Inc.

Wow!  Are you kidding?  Well, certainly none of us teenagers knew about it then.  My first "internet" experience was in 1993.  I thought AOL and CompuServe were originally BBS's, that later provided WWW access.

We were happy just to connect to our local BBS with a modem.

Just now, Mace said:

We were happy just to connect to our local BBS with a modem.

In the earlier Compuserve day you had to first connect to your local ISP, then from there connect to Compuserve.  The first recollection I have of connecting direct to Compuserve as a standalone service was after the demise of Prodigy. That was in the mid 1990's.  So that may be what you recall.  All of that was before the advent of the internet.

I was clearly connecting to Compuserve from my home in New Jersey in the mid-late 1980's. Like 1986 on... I am from Indiana and an avid basketball fan, and my New Jersey ISP was named "nothing but (dot) net".  The ISP name had nothing to do with basketball but it was a natural match for me!  I know I had that service, and Compuserve, when my Indiana University team won the NCAA Championship in March 1987. 

I remember when Prodigy was the best thing to ever hit a monochrome monitor. 

41 minutes ago, SolRayz said:

I remember when Prodigy was the best thing to ever hit a monochrome monitor. 

?????
My first color monitor was a Sony Profeel in 1982, 9 years before Prodigy.  The Prodigy interface was inherently blue, like what you see here:

http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/04/chapter-3-part-1-compuserve-prodigy-aol-and-the-early-online-services/

Edited February 25, 20188 yr by fppilot

Also from the Wiki...

Quote

AOL began in 1983

Lotta good memories coming out here!

Randy