It is wonderful to see a new development for the TRS-80 Model II. For too long the Model II was treated like a stepsister and for her all the modernities went by. Two things I would like to say. Where is the battery on the board? Static RAM has many advantages, today it has a great price performance ratio and it is reasonable compactness when compared to classic dynamic RAM. But static RAM can also keep it's contence when the computer is switched off. I assume that 4 bit are used for switching 16 banks of 32 kB of RAM, it is merely a guess. Could it be that the other four bits of that IO byte are still looking for an honest job? If so, then an extra 512 kB could be added. What a joy that would be! Maybe the GAL has still som legs over each-other, half the GAL resting in vain. Maybe Mr. Tandy himself used up half that IO byte already. I don't know, the ways of Mr. Tandy were sometimes a bit odd, like using only seven bits in video.

Where can i purchase one of these cards?

Impressive

I don't use the Tandy PC-6 assembler code just useful for teaching what assembly language is. The programming in Basic programming languages of the 1970s is what makes that gem in programming calculators a must have for life. I have so many programs written and working written in Basic (Fortran IV in 1987 not as much). It is easily interpreted manually to work in Microsoft Viaual Basic. The Microsoft objects of pointers, labels and text boxes for input and output Basic programming are what needs to be hard manually converted. The meat of the program on a Tandy PC-6 can be better a duplicate in Visual Basic any year program. That is so important for computer cell formula calculations in Excel spreadsheets. I still love the Tandy PC-6 gaming programs based off its interesting "horse race"'manual demostrated code in Basic to write a game "Deal or No Deal", Lottery number picks, Card games of many, etc. I still am enjoying Basic programming fun in my well preserved Tandy PC-6 any programmer who loves Basic (or higher language conversion of simple low calculations programs patience to learn and convert to Basic). 😊

Wish I had this growing up

The biggest thing to me as a teenager in the 80s was the dot addressable screen. In junior high I made a “track and field “ game. Was charging a nickel to play it in study hall. Wasn’t getting much business until I added a high score page!! Forgot to mention. Only the pc-2 had it

Just finished my 24K RAM module for the PC-2. This uses the 16K Y0# and the 4 x 2K S1# through S4# chip selects that, with the standard 2K internal user memory, gives over 26K RAM. I'm using a pair of 256kbit SRAMs and throwing away the excess.

In the TTC, the 'basement' - floor 1 opened into the Tandy Center. On that same level were 6 meeting rooms and the Kornfeld Meeting room which was a fabulous place to have a meeting with the stadium seating. The second floor was the data center with the mainframes, various Unix, Linux, and AIX machines, along with all the Windows servers racks. Also on the 2nd floor were the systems programmer groups, and production control. On the 3rd, 4th and 5th floors were the corporate application development groups of the Tandy Information Services group, which comprised about 600 people. R&D if I remember was on the 6th floor. My department was on the 4th floor, and I had additional stints on the 5th and 2nd floors over the years before all of IT moved to the new Trinity River campus. The building was built to re-home the IT Department as we had outgrown a little over 3 floors in Tandy Tower 2. In fact, the IT department had a contest to name the building. Also, AST bought the computer manufacturing division, not Tandy. Tandy retained the name until 2000 when it re-branded itself as RadioShack. By then, Tandy had divested itself of most all of its various manufacturing plants and divisions, and the re-branding was a direction to focus on the 'core' of the business. Over the years, Tandy owned a lot of different ventures and created a lot of different ventures: RadioShack, OSullivan Furniture, Wolfe Nursery, Pier One Imports, Dillard's Department Stores, Alcon Labs, Tandy Crafts, Tandy Leather, Video Concepts, McDuff Electronics, Victor Computing, Computer City, Incredible Universe, MemTek, Lika Industries, Tandy Wire and Cable, and I believe there was a book store in there too......

we did have C for the TRS-80 - i have a copy in my garage somewhere: www.worldradiohistory.com/hd2/IDX-Consumer/Archive-Byte-IDX/IDX/80s/Byte-1986-03-IDX-27.pdf

weaving paper for elementary school student homework

Stewart needs to come back to TV.

Thanks for putting this video online. While I was blessed enough to see this in person, I was just thinking it would be great to go back and reference it!

Model II is a beauty. 👍

Wouldn't the Model I's Expansion Interface notoriously unreliable?

None of the "monitors" (TV sets) pictured with the CoCo 2 in the catalogs actually matched the CoCo 2's design and coloration. The CoCo 1 had the TRS-80 video display whose case mostly matched the CoCo 1's silver. The CoCo 3 had the CM-8 which for all its flaws actually matched the CoCo 3. But not the CoCo 2

The MC-10 was a disaster not just in terms of being a quickly canceled flop.. its use of money and parts thereby denied to the CoCo is arguably responsible for the CoCo 2 not having improved graphics or sound. This in turn helped pave the way for Commodore to cement the 64 as the dominant machine of this class

"Dungeons of Daggorath" is deservedly legendary but has a bug that is not well-known. Because of a programming or data entry error, the first two shields you get are useless - blocking no or almost no damage from conventional attacks - the kind you're going to be encountering in the early stages of the game. Their strong protection against magical attack is an error and a useless one at that given how you're not going to be attacked that way early on

The original CoCo joysticks had metal sticks. I got stuck with the plastic sticks and one bent so I wished I'd had the metal sticks.

The Model 4 cassette based computer had no actual Model 4 cassette programs available for it. You could only run already-outdated Model III tape programs

The book "Tandy's Little Wonder" said that Tandy's official CoCo hard drive controller cartridge was bad because it could only work with a few hard disk models - all from Tandy. And weren't those gigantic early Tandy hard disk drives worthy of criticism for their sheer size?

The CGP-220 looked drool worthy and gorgeous in the catalog but it was slow, its text printing didn't look great, and didn't it have substantial limitations in terms of what colors it could print especially next to each other? Thus preventing it from being able to actually print what the screen showed?

The official CoCo 3 monitor - the CM-8 - deserves more criticism because it lacked a composite port and thus could not show many CoCo 1/2 programs in color. You had to go 3rd party like Magnavox or Sony and use a special third party cable for the RGB picture to be able to show both RGB and composite color. Speaking of which, the CoCo 2 should have had a composite port but didn't. You'd think years of 3rd party manufacturers offering composite mods for the CoCo 1 would have made Tandy wake up and add it to the CoCo 2 but no. Combined with a very limited color pallete, no hardware sprites, no ability to delegate graphics and sound tasks to dedicated chips to free up the CPU, made the CoCo 2 embarrassingly weak and outdated when it arrived in comparison to its contemporaries like the Atari 800 line, the Commodore 64, and the Coleco Adam (despite the latter' bugs).

In defense of the DVI - a two-drive machine and monitor cost less than a Model 4 disk system. You'd be able ro come back from class or your sales trip or your research or interview and then use a full size bright 80 column screen to clean up your notes and turn them into a paper you could submit. It let your 100 become the keyboard to a desktop system -- a keyboard you could detach and use as a laptop on the go. Pretty nifty

Hhhhandheld gaming devices

in the 1980's i was a manager for a Tandy Computer Service Center in Santa Rosa CA. ..i was also in contact to all Radio Shack and Tandy stores in Northern Cal..our store sold 1 Tandy 100 to an "Executive" our store and other stores in Northern Cal solds hundreds to reporters..you can also watch White House Press Room videos from that era almost every reporter had a model 100..We also sold quite a few to "growers" from Humboldt County to manager their growing operation...also another group that we commonly sold to was university field researchers

Thank you for bringing us Drivewire!

I had an X10 setup for years, think of it as a sophisticated plug in lamp timer. (The boxes with the 24 hour dials with the "on" and "off" levers you slide around it) X10 was great for turning the outside lights on at night and off again in the morning. No more coming home to a dark house for me. (And no need to keep the lights on all day) Both of those units displayed accepted simple programs from the host computer, and then could be disconnected. There was no need to fire up the computer (coco or otherwise) to turn on a light, the unit would operate independently once it was programmed. Radio shack also sold a 16 button wired remote you'd put on an end table to allow you to manually override the programmed timers if you wanted to turn a light on remotely. Radio Shack sold the X10 products under their "Plug-n-Power" banner, they sold plug in lamp controllers, appliance controllers (Good for electric blankets to pre-heat them in the winter before bed) and light switch replacement units. The X10 technology was superseded by Insteon, which actually supported X10 for a while - before completely supplanting it. X10 would transmit their signals on the household wiring during the zero crossing of the current 120v AC phase. Since houses in the US had two phases separated from one another - if you had a controller on one phase and a receiver on the other - you would need a 240v bridge to allow the signals to cross them. Modern day equivalents are Google home, and Apples HomeKit controllers, along with Zigbee et al. Modern day units no longer use the house wiring for communication purposes - they use your home wifi network or bluetooth. This eliminates the need to bridge the phases and increases the range potential between the transmitting unit and the receiver.

Where can you get one, ready assembled? G7VFY

It was really nice to learn some of the history behind DriveWire, thank you!

13:00 Steve Jobs, hm, let me think, how i could better spend that money, i know, Superbawl commercial.. this way Steward created famous IBM/84 commercial trying to convince Jobs sponsor Computer Chronicles

Yes XENIX was quite a bit ahead of MS-DOS in the old days. Great performance, AND EVEN MULTI-USER!

Great job! Thank you for all of the great info for restoring old computers!

So where are the files to have these boards printed? Does he have a github or website with BOM and instructions for build and compiling? Will someone be selling these as complete boards or kits?

Lots of great info packed into this presentation.

Amazing that MULTIDOS author Vernon Hester is into the scene and has many TRS-80 Model IV's!

A++

A++

Great trivia, I enjoyed playing along as I watched. Interestingly enough, my Network 2 controller does not say “microcomputer” on it. I didn’t realize some did!

The cassette tool does an amazing job. I've managed to do a lot of digital archeology on old tapes and it's recovered stuff that would never read on the real hardware and original tape drive. I thought it was lost forever. Thanks Lawrence.

This looks like it was fun! I wish I could have been there! I hope to make it next year!

English is your second language?

Astounding... I have a pile of cassette tapes I've held since my youth to revisit. Thank you!

Great talk! Real blast from the past seeing the first demo. Haven't seen that running since I typed it in back in 1981 as a 7 year old learning to program. That era of graphics was so accessible in terms of actually being able to understand how everything went together. The great circuit operation descriptions in the TRS-80 service manual helped a great deal of course.

Even better than last years presentation, amazing. I will need several views to take this all in!

This was great, well done!!

Ian you did a Great Job!!!

Awesome presentation and very cool TRS-80 tools on your website! Thank you!

Great source of information. Just got the PC-2 which I couldn’t get as a teenager… I’m really impressed with the build quality and the power for an early 80’s machine. This presentation is very helpful.

"There is no I in team." Yeah, but there is an "m" and an "e" ;)

Just watched this. Great preso I’m just north from STL I have a PC-6