Item HT 1839 Personal Computer System - Radio Shack, TRS80 Model 1, 1979

Summary

Computer System - Tandy Radio Shack TRS80 Model 1, 1979.

This system is part of a collection of hardware, software, personal notes, trade literature and promotional material that was donated by their owner to Museum Victoria in 2003. He is representative of the generation that fully embraced computing when it became accessible economically but before general acceptance by the wider community. He used the TRS80 for his hobby in the 1980s. It was his first bought computer.

The donor started to build up his computer system in 1980. The basic set-up consisted of a keyboard, which contained the brains of the machine, a monitor in black and white with only upper case letters, and a cassette recorder for loading available marketed programs or saving one's own. This item turned out to be very temperamental as the volume setting needed to be adjusted for each type of tape used. Initially there was no printer.

After about one year of learning how to program the machine, the donor decided the programs needed to be printed out to find logic errors, as they were too difficult to spot on the monitor alone. Also, there was a need to eliminate the time consuming tape recorder and its idiosyncrasies. Tandy came to the rescue with a device that was a called an EXPANSION INTERFACE, which came with printer, disk drive and extra memory. He also used the Tandy model 100 (notebook sized) when he was on the move. He could move files from this to the TRS80 for storage.

He stopped using the Tandy system circa 1988-1990; but, it was a gradual change to other systems, such as IBM. He changed because Tandy systems were affected by spikes in the power supply, and because Tandy programs were too slow. To counteract the slowness, he adapted Tandy program code to IBM code. He had to change the Tandy BASIC into IBM BASIC (10 times faster) because Tandy and IBM machines were not compatible.

Physical Description

Personal Computer System consists of: a keyboard unit (flat rectangular black and silver plastic unit with inclined integrated QWERTY keyboard on top of the unit. 3 circular sockets on right-hand rear of unit. Multi-connection port on left-hand rear of unit). an expansion interface (rectangular black and silver plastic unit with black and beige power supply attached by cable). a video monitor (black and silver plastic video display unit). two dust covers.