The Trash Computer That Became Your Phone

[@mrflamewars]

Stop all that hating - Radio Shack was the stuff of dreams during the time this was available.

[@Poodleballin]

I drooled over the Radio Shack catalog for years. And had one of these pocket computers. So cool at the time.

[@Demotricus]

@@Poodleballin Me too. I used to virtually live in the Tandy stores when they were a thing. There's nothing like them anymore in the UK.

[@Quidisi]

Yep. Every town of any significance had at least one Radio Shack. I was the poor kid. But I loved to walk through the store and dream!!!

[@OrinThomas]

There was a kid who had one of these at school in the early 80's and he was lord of the nerds.

[@thedave7760]

@@OrinThomas My school had a few (made by sharp) we were allowed to borrow and I used to take them home sometimes on the weekend to play with. I never found any use for them but they were such cool things to have and hold, so advanced for the time.

[@j.tann1970]

Having owned, and still own, Sinclair computers with tape loading I can tell you that many systems required the volume of the tape deck to be around the 70-80% range. This prevents the tape deck from possibly making the audio clip. You said yourself that you turned up the volume to the max, this is likely why your games failed to load correctly.

[@stighemmer]

Ah yes, the volume had to be set just right, not too high and not too low. There was a bass/treble setting that had to be just right too. If you got it wrong, rewind the tape and try again! We had lots of spare time in those days. And different tapes had different sweet spots.

[@j.tann1970]

@@stighemmer Yep, most commercial tapes for the Spectrum computers and others of the era were mastered at agreed levels so once you got your tape deck adjusted for one tape then most would work without adjustments. But your computer was before the standardisation so yeah, keep adjusting per tape lol Making backup copies of tapes introduced the same issue. It took a lot of trial and error to get the copies within the sacred levels! lol BTW Perfectly legal as long as you do not sell or pass on the copies because software copyright laws allow for backup copies which current licenses and DRM systems violate! 🤫

[@Chipchap-xu6pk]

And it absolutely wasn't because of third generation copies made on twin tape to tape cassette decks.... Probably with high speed dubbing left on.

[@kameljoe21]

Today you could just load this data on to a mp3 player and play all of those games.

[@jameslocke1416]

That was exactly my thought - max volume is never the right level. Whoever advised you to do that had zero experience with this. Find a Gen-X with a woodgrain rack of floppies and cassettes to be your computer guru. He’ll answer all your questions for a 12-pack of RC Cola and some Extra Strength Tums. 😆

[@mikebell2112]

You could have just run down to Radio Shack for that 3.5mm adapter.

[@volo870]

@@mikebell2112 They don't sell Tandy in Radio Shack.

[@michaelturner4457]

But Radio Shack stores doesn't exist any more, unless you have a time machine.

[@volo870]

@@michaelturner4457 They sorta-kinda still are. There is like a dozen of phone stores branded Radio Shack. But yes - there are no more places that could consult you on DIY.

[@lesliefranklin1870]

@@michaelturner4457 There are a couple of Radio Shack stores that still exit. He might have been able to order the right cables if he could find an open store. Of course, Radio Shack also has an online presence...

[@Jhawk2112]

@@michaelturner4457 They are still around in Canada... branded The Source now.

[@tomlake2732]

I feel sorry for those who weren't alive in the '70s. It was a wonderful time! Everything was new and exciting. Just being able to run BASIC at home was incredible. We all bought up Kilobaud, Byte, Interface Age, Creative Computing magazines and typed in the BASIC listings. Then the fun of debugging began just to find out we mistook a 0 for an O in line 1279. Once we got the program running, we had hours of fun hunting Wumpuses (Wumpi?), walking around Colossal Cave, etc. It was an age that will never be repeated.

[@Aussiesnrg]

I agree and Hehehehe I still have a book with "Find the Wumpus!"

[@newgravityfilms]

Wow I so agree... Even Toys were better back then.

[@stickyfox]

it always fascinates me to see young people on YT telling everyone what life was like in the 70s and 80s. But I guess it doesn't really matter if they get the clicks and subscriptions they need!

[@czeslawmeyer7871]

10 print "I'm glad I'm not the only one who had problems coding wumpuss hunt" 20 goto 10 Run

[@paulharrow7897]

So true. I wrote my version of Space Invaders and many other games of the time. With only 4k RAM and a slow processor, you really learned how to optimise code, which was half the fun!

[@nocomment1212]

Radio Shack was such a great resource for anyone with an IDEA. You could almost always find parts to assemble in ways previously unimagined.

[@Tortenkopf]

Kids these days. Back in the 80s we did not even have the cables or the docking station and had to type all of the code by hand. And we were grateful!

[@626jean]

My dad figured out the cheat code to this... get your young kids to do the typing!

[@LR-dj8fz]

Yup, I have the Sharp PC-1500 version of it and boy did it help me getting my degree in the early 80s. None of the crap he's flipping out about ... and I even have some 8 K byte memory modules that still work. The kid doesn't seem to understand how amazing these pocket computers were at the time they came out ... bloody spoiled by today's electronics and no clue about it. Wonder how he feels when he has to start up an old IBM machine, or a Wang word processor ... Guess he can't drive a stick shift car either 🤣🤣🤣

[@michaelarnold6848]

I remember days of typing code in manually from a magazine. the one program that comes back to me was avail, a lisp processing program aimed at AI. it was a lot of fun when it was done.

[@gavinsimmonsmccullum4219]

I remember writing similar BASIC code to add Drug Wars to my calculator back in college. I think I went to Drexel 5ish years earlier. What a difference. We used to learn C at the turn of the century.

[@karlaboerger3619]

​@@gavinsimmonsmccullum4219A forn C is used to program NINTENDO SWITCH games?

[@themaskedcrusader]

One of Tandy's computers was an Apple ][ clone. My grandfather gave me an apple ][ and the Apple-compatable Tandy (I still have all the floppies) and told me "Learn this, sluggo. this is the future". 40 years later, I am a senior software developer with over a 20 year career in computers and technology.

[@dh2032]

"Tandy's computers" it a bit ? tandy make a lot models, TRS-80, most of them? then what ever came next in the name " ?

[@jimb032]

What model was this? I know of no Tandy machine that was apple ii Compatible, and I had 4 Tandy machines and lived in radio shack. Tandy never sold competing machines Sears had one, but not radio shack

[@capfam2018]

There is no tandy apple 2 compatible. It doesn't exist.

[@imodern]

No apple-compatible Tandy computers exist.

[@zanyzapper6904]

One of the retro channels showed a clone apple ii that wasn't a tandy, but the company that made it put it in a case that was a clone of the TRS-80 Model I. Maybe that was it? Wish I could remember where exactly I saw it but it's been over a year probably.

[@toddbu-WK7L]

I was 17 years old when the TRS-80 Pocket Computer came out. I bought one as soon as I could afford one, at which time I probably made around $2.50/hour so 100+ hours of part-time work. Since I had already been writing BASIC programs on a PDP for a few years before that, all I wanted to do was write code (just like today! 🙂). My high school math class was doing conic sections (Ax^2 + Bxy + Cy^2 + Dx + Ey + F), so to do my homework I just wrote a program that took the six coefficients and would tell you what type of section that it was (circle, ellipse, hyperbola, etc) and its coordinates. I was so happy to do my homework in just few minutes (after hours of coding, of course). The only bad part was that I got a note on my homework that said "show your work!". I didn't care. And even though that was 44 years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday. Did I mention that I love to write code? 🤣

[@kaseyboles30]

should have gave the teacher a copy of the code. That would indeed show your work. Hopefully the teacher would realize how well you had to understand the math to write such code.

[@advance-heating]

In 1984 our techn drawing teacher gave us an A0 sheet of paper each and we had to draw elevation and plan of a bent steel bracket. Then we had to use our pencil, protractor square and rule to plot out a new 30° oblique view of the bracket, and from that rendering a new 50° oblique view, and another 6 derivative views around the edge of the paper sheet. The final views of all 12 students were all a bit wonky and diverged somewhat from the teacher's 'master drawing'. I knew it was a bad idea at the time but I put my new HP 31CV calculator into action, wrote a program to perform 3D space tranformation, and fed in the key data points of the steel bracket. The floating point precision of the pocket calculator would easily outperform our lead pencils, and so I just plotted out the final view the bracket from the Hewlett Packard data, without bothering with the intervening views. In fifteen years of this class no-one had ever seen the real definitive final view of 'the bracket'. Even my 23 year old autistic self realised that teacher Tony Hunt might not be best pleased if the master drawing were proven defective, so I softened the blow by only drawing the final view at 2x the normal scale. Judging by his face, that was tactically a very good idea.

[@dv8inpp]

I spent a couple of weeks doing the same for simultaneous quadratic equations, quite satisfying at the time. Sadly drop it one day and cracked the screen

[@SuperHaunts]

I had every model TRS80 until the Color Computer line. I still to this day miss running BASIC on my PDP 11/45 running RSTS/e

[@kaseyboles30]

@@SuperHaunts I miss my C64

[@missameliasara]

As a formal RadioShack employee familiar with the TRS-80, the cables you're looking for should basically be 1/8 inches audio cables. Most devices from that era used RCA and 1/8 barrel jacks, they were used like the C-Type USB cables we have today.

[@rpelzer]

As a former Radio Shack Computer Center tech-support person, I can confirm that a LOT of their later hardware was modified from other manufacturers' gear. Usually, with modified ROMs to ensure you HAD to buy RadioShack software to match. For example, the DMP-2100 24-pin dot matrix printer was a relabeled Toshiba P351 but the character set was shuffled AWAY from standard ASCII so you had to use only Scripsit for word processing. But then, we discovered a secret DIP switch they left on the board so you could return to true ASCII translations...

[@BillAnt]

Yikes! Well, the greedy American capitalism was alive and well back then too. Nowadays if you just swap the screen or any other parts between to new identical iPhones, both will pop up a "Non-Genuine" message and cripple some features. It sucks!

[@jrbenning]

I got a TRS-80 Model I for Christmas as a young child. It was a defining moment in my life and led to an extremely rewarding 30+ year career in software. Thank you Mom & Dad… and Charles Tandy!

[@glashoppah]

Which came with the best tutorial for intro to programming ever written.

[@Demotricus]

Same here, I didn't get mine as a gift but it certainly shaped my interest in computing and electronics, leading to a lifetime working in (mainly) telecommunications and electronics manufacturing. I'm retired now but I still remember my Trash 80 fondly. Remember dancing demon at all? lol

[@jrbenning]

@@Demotricusoh my gosh. Dancing Demon was magical! Thanks for bringing back that memory.

[@williambell4591]

PROPS, Brother, PROPS - similar life story here as well! 👍

[@brianmi40]

I was a 20 year old Radio Shack store manager. Went on to manage the large mall store in NW Indiana (Merrillville) that had a computer center inside it. So we sold not only the Model I that you had, but the Model IIs, and also the Color Computer, Model 100 portable, etc. It was a great start to a career in IT for me!

[@andywest5773]

Had to laugh at the idea of Tandy being a "fly-by-night electronics company". Tandy computers were EVERYWHERE in the 80s.

[@bellemorelock4924]

did he say that? yikes how wrong. Packard Bell _was_ a fly-by-night company. It just mashed HP (or maybe Packard cars) and Bell Telephone names together and legally got away with tricking you. That would be like naming a new phone company "Samsung GE" today. Packard Bell sold the worst garbage PCs in the late 90s. I took one apart myself, and I built them in the 90s. It had two hard drives on one cable (that could slow things down), and these were both 2 years older than the PC. They were almost certainly used Hard Drives. They had a UTILITY program that ran in the DOS portion of WIN95 that bound the two drives into ONE, so it had 140MB (could have been 200-300, can't recall) of capacity on the C-drive. This was factory "Packard Bell" at their peak in 1996. Radio Shack was a reseller like Sears, when it came to technology. They sourced from Taiwan, and used the same methods as Apple does today. Sears did _only_ rebranding, like this Sharp product being reviewed. Tandy also had their own designs. Apple might have learned from Tandy, as they have entirely the same kind of supply chain. Is Apple also flying by night?

[@andywest5773]

@@bellemorelock4924 It's out of context. Can't find the point in the video where he said it, but he was basically saying that to people who didn't live through the 80s, Tandy probably sounds like a fly-by-night company. Not that it actually was.

[@bellemorelock4924]

@@andywest5773 ok, i never heard him go there.. but I think Packard Bell deserves a slam video. They've been gone a long time anyway. also I wrote a note about this video. short take is, this guy should do biographies, not tech. he is the least able of anyone I've ever seen attempt it. not even joking.

[@leland818]

@@bellemorelock4924 what are you talking about? They didn’t randomly pick the Packard car company and Bell telephone to make up their name. The founders were named Leon Packard and Herb Bell

[@dookdomini6535]

tandy's battery deals - get tokens in exchange for batteries - memories.

[@viktorakhmedov3442]

My boss (an architect) STILL uses one of these, he says he has dozens of new-in-box ones as insurance, he loves it that much. He is super old school. He designed our campus in 1980 and I'm sure he used it then.

[@KlodFather]

THey were real good at doing complex strings of equations because you could type out a big crazy expression with lots of variables, constants, and operations and get the whole thing done quickly and efficiently. Many calculators even to day cannot do what that pocket computer did easily by just typing it in on the command line. I used it that way and had great success with it in high school and college.

[@andywest5773]

That's great until the capacitors leak and the screens melt. No amount of "new-in-box" can prevent that. Better off selling them to a retro computer enthusiast who knows how to preserve them before they're beyond repair.

[@tsm688]

someone better get that man an emulator before its too late.

[@KlodFather]

@@andywest5773 - The caps in those sharp computers were Tantalum. I still have one of these and it still works fine. The display is the only thing that can be scary. I also have my HP 11c and HP 45ii calculators and some other things. All very old and all still serve me well.

[@4Fixerdave]

@@tsm688 "That's great until the capacitors leak and the screens melt." Yeah... I've got 2. Nowhere near "new in box" but rather very, very used... a long time ago. But, I seem to never throw anything away. I dragged them out a while ago (like, 2 years ago) and both screens are done. Very sad. And yeah, I still didn't throw them away.

[@nunyabusiness7602]

It was 1980, I was 12 years old. My father comes home with a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III. Within a month I was writing my own software. Two years later I had mowed enough yards to purchase my own TRS-80 Pocket Computer 2. Within a few days of that I was sent to the principal's office by one of my teachers for having "a cheating device". My PC-2 was banned from school. Short sighted fools I thought. Over the next few years I learned how to program in Z80 and 6809 assembler. Since then I have been in the IT industry as a programmer, computer repair technician, Systems Administrator, and Computer Science Teacher. Thank you Charles Tandy for making computing available to the masses. The local Radio Shack was my drug of choice. I still own my PC-2 pocket computer and it still works. I still have my Tandy Color Computers, and they still work. My MC-10 still works and my Tandy 1000EX and 1000HX systems are still going strong. Amazing machines then, amazing machines now. Those were the glory days of computing, not this mega corporation spawned crap we have today.

[@Robert08010]

Apps.. Who want apps? Give me a desktop to program on anyday.

[@richbarton1683]

+++!q

[@thommysides4616]

For the start of the school year in 1973 my mother bought me a handheld science calculator for $34.00. I remember how I showed up to my 7th grade math class with it, and was told, "We don't use those in here!" I remember too, how I use to sit at home, and add, and multiply large numbers on it for hours.... wondering how this small machine could do such an awesome thing in a split second of time. Little did I know then that it was only just the beginning!

[@gabrielsierra6890]

I also liked the TI-99, great times, so much innovation. In comparison, we are now like in Star Wars technological stagnation, or very close to it.

[@Clos93]

People like yourself, helped build the IT world we take for granted today. Thank you sir! I may only be in my 30's, but when I was a kid, you had to have at the very least, some basic computer knowledge to access the web. Now anyone with a phone can say the most asinine things. I miss the gatekeeping... 😂

[@paulharrow7897]

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.

[@niftybass]

I think it gave us insight and context that's just not the same anymore. It was easy-ish to know everything about how a Commodore 64 worked. Contrast with a modern gaming PC. C64 boot process? jmp ($FFFE) PC boot process? (16 but) BIOS, read boot loader from disk, do initial preparation (i.e. can you still read the boot media when BIOS becomes unavailable when you flip to 32- or 64-bit mode, continue boot...

[@BillAnt]

Radio Shack was my second home, I remember spending countless hours browsing their gizmos, cables, and transistors. That's what started me on the electronics career which worked out pretty well to this day. :)

[@grandetaco4416]

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.

[@Demotricus]

" _I'm really old_ " 😂 Yep, that definitely resonates...🙂

[@Bobrogers99]

Practically any device that used your TV as a monitor had a 3/4 switch.

[@sybrrr]

Literally no one who lived through the 80's would have missed that switch, lol

[@LR-dj8fz]

@@sybrrr well he's too young, and just doesn't get how revolutionary it all was ...

[@mycosys]

@@vwestlife he was clearly desperate for an alternative to RTFM and making meaningful content.

[@QuintarFarenor]

So this is how it looks like you have a small interest in retro computing, no clue but money

[@MINKIN2]

That poor seller just wanted rid of the damn thing too.

[@JPs-q1o]

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 2 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.

[@michaelmartin9022]

​@@JPs-q1oI've not heard of any incident where three Boeing 747's crashed into three skyscrapers and caused them to collapse. I'd have thought it would have been on the news or something.

[@kittytrail]

​@@michaelmartin9022 as american are usually prone to boasting and exaggeration, it, allegedly, might have been smaller than "Jumbo" jets, only two planes and three buildings. _allegedly._ 🙄

[@cyberpunk120.]

@@JPs-q1o How do any these comments about Sept.11th have anything to do with the topic of the video...Retro Personal Computers?

[@chris-mccoy]

I have the PC-4, and it works. It was my first computer as a child that nobody else in the family cared about. I learned BASIC on it. Thank you Radio Shack.

[@JonathanMaddox]

PC-2 here

[@lanatrzczka]

I have one also. Tape drive dock and the thermal printer too. I recently got the memory upgrade for it, I think it's about 1.6k now.

[@Robert08010]

I still have a PC100 which is pretty cool.

[@VanWinger]

I scored a PC-4 from a thrift store remote control horde and when I took it to the register they said I could have it. Have to hold a W when you can I guess.

[@prutok]

My opinion is that there is nothing intelligent at all in a "smart" phone until you load an 80's programmable calculator emulator into it. Engineers need computing power for their ideas. This clown's emotions don't lead me to any positive thought.

[@BillLoguidiceAuthor]

When we wrote the CoCo book, as the title implies, we only focused on the Color Computer platform. Tandy had many different computer platforms, many worthy of their own books (which are out there). It would have been weird for us to devote more pages to an unrelated platform like the Pocket Computer series. 21:26

[@Dingomush]

Radio Shack was my normal hang out. Where else are you supposed to get parts for the stuff your friends blew up?

[@BryanArd62]

I walked three miles each way to work as a busboy at a restaurant and walked by a Radio Shack. I would spend hours typing in programs in the store on the Model 1. It took me almost a year to save up the $600+ dollars to purchase a bare bones machine (Level 1 ROM, 14K RAM), that was 1977. :)

[@BillAnt]

It was my go to source for making Red-Boxes for phreaking made out of pocket phone dialers and quartz crystals. hehe

[@CB-ce3kk]

I also did electronics. Small kits and projects, science fair stuff, that kind of thing. I was a regular at my local Radio Shack.

[@mjdxp5688]

If you want a better look at 80's pocket computers, I suggest looking up The 8 Bit Guy's video about them, it's much better and from the perspective of someone who was actually around when these pocket computers were widespread.

[@brj_han]

I was around, and watching these guys attempting to figure it out is pretty funny. Ever see Space Cowboys, where the astronauts from the digital era can't figure out what the guys from an analog era are doing? Same thing, lol...

[@patrickcardon1643]

Also ... page contains all the info on the cable ... but we'll just hope it's the right one with reading all the info ... yup, kids ...

[@kneel1]

i was one of those 80s computer kids and its hilarious watching younger people who don't know that every computer or console back then had a CH3-CH4 switch, and the struggles of figuring out what typo in the magazines' programs is causing it to not work, or how to translate BASIC across devices like C64, TI994a, AppleII, TRS-80, Spectrum etc. with literally NO HELP. I guess one could ask around in BBS's but I couldn't afford a modem until I was like 14 y/o with a 33mhz PC running WIndows 3.1

[@lewwetzel]

I bet this quy couldn't use a rotary phone either.

[@matthewmaurysmith2486]

He definitely seems constantly stressed out.

[@harrkev]

In case you haven't figured it out, back in those days, cassettes stored sound. So in theory, you should just be able to download sound files and play those from your big computer into any of those other computers, and that should work just fine. All you need is the right audio cable. Typically there were three cables: one for audio out, one for audio in, and one control to start and stop the cassette motor. To load, all you need is one cable.

[@brianmi40]

I was a Radio Shack store manager when I was 20. You had to manually start and stop the cassette recorder to load or save programs as well as get the volume just right so it wasn't distorting (we'd usually pull the audio plug and listen out the speaker a bit to set the volume, then rewind and plug it back in to kick off a load command on the TRS-80). I had a owner of a small realty firm using "cassette payroll" and write the chairman of Tandy Corp about the problems with it and the poorly written manual for it, but praised me for helping him so much. Fun times!

[@hwertz10]

Yep. And the Atari, they actually used stereo. there were language tapes where it would load the next program (from one stere track) while voice giving spanish lessons or whatever (they had i think 4 languages) played on the other audio track. instead of just listening to 600 baud beeps or whatever for several minutes they took andvantage of that time with the audio track.

[@mycosys]

The irony he couldnt figure out to use his phone...........

[@bobsemrau5311]

​@@brianmi40 Commodore had a special "datasette" recorder that controlled the cassette motor and had a fixed volume setting, which made things a little easier.

[@johntetreault]

Well. I'm here to tell you that you absolutely did go back and experience these computers exactly as we did. I remember spending 6 hours trying to get a program to load from cassette tape, the volume had to be just right...too loud or too soft, and the load would fail, of course you wouldn't know it failed until it hit the end block of the program. And I cannot tell you the countless hours of typing in programs from a magazine, only to be rewarded with a program that was far from impressive.... But here's the thing....back then, if it did anything, we were impressed, because computers were brand new...so a computer asking What is your name? And me responding "John" and then the computer replying "Hello, John" was positively mind blowing... It lit a spark, and from there I wanted to learn more, I even learned how to program rudimentary animations on my Sinclair ZX-81 in a whopping 1k of RAM on its horrific membrane style keyboard. It was sheer hell...but I loved it. I still have that ZX-81... I don't know if it still works, but I keep it, because it was my first ever computer.

[@beastmastreakaninjadar6941]

I still have my TI-99/4A, somewhere.

[@JPs-q1o]

The "4K Color Computer" @ 11:10 is an absolutely hilarious misnomer in this day and age 🤣

[@626jean]

I remember my family's Sinclair ZX-81 fondly. That sleek little black wedge will always be a bit magical to me.

[@Robert08010]

Scotty: "Eventually you find out that you can't fall in love again. Not like that!" - Relics

[@mycosys]

@@JPs-q1o it has 4K RAM and colour

[@sybrrr]

"This must have been the greatest magazine ever for early 80's computer kids" YES it absolutely was! I loved Enter Magazine! I remember typing in a BASIC program that was basically a stick figure walking across the screen with sound effects onto my Commodore 64 computer and saving it onto a cassette drive. It literally took hours to save and load the program for a few seconds of animation. Thanks for the walk down memory lane. Enter Magazine was one of my favorite things from my childhood.

[@jackkraken3888]

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.

[@SuperHaunts]

You beat me to this hack...

[@DoctorNemmo]

That trash computer helped me pass my biostatistics course. I'll be forever thankful.

[@gabrielsierra6890]

My Tandy COCO3 was instrumental in my technical report class. I made a 200 pages report with it and printed it on my Dot matrix printer, which took forever, buy boy, what a nice report came out! And, the word processor I used was Color Scripsit II, which was a cartridge, turn the computer on and boom. there it was, load the file and go!. That COCO3 I still own and still works!

[@WahooLee]

I used to have 1 of those pocket computers with all the accessories! I'm a locksmith and wrote some BASIC programs to decode key codes, tell me how to set up locks given master keys and change keys, and some other useful info I needed. I never was interested in the sample games, but often used the BASIC functions when I needed a calculator for long math problems. When I moved up to a 80286 desktop computer, I ported my BASIC programs to it and kept adding features and moving to newer software and hardware. I retired a couple years ago, and the new locksmith had no idea how to get my old programs to work on 64-bit machines.

[@alexkirwan7146]

They could use some sort of emulator

[@emuhill]

Tell them about PC-BASIC written in Python. It handles both IBM BASIC and GW-BASIC programs.

[@JPs-q1o]

​@@alexkirwan7146 ...or create a virtual machine with an old OS like DOS.

[@romulusnr]

yep i had the printer attachment for my PC-8

[@Zoyx]

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.

[@josecisne7997]

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.

[@lesliefranklin1870]

I've worked with computers since 1975. It sounds like you have gotten the authentic experience. Congratulations! You're a winner!

[@JohnJones-oy3md]

Welcome to the wonderful and relaxing world of vintage computing, where everything just magically falls into place. LOL

[@andywest5773]

On the other hand, nobody ever had their identity stolen through their TRS-80 Pocket Computer. Nobody's TRS-80 Pocket Computer was ever bricked by a forced firmware update. And I'm fairly sure nobody was ever bombarded with fake news through their TRS-80 Pocket Computer.

[@cypherian2]

When I worked for Radio Shack in the early '90s, they had essentially thrown in the proverbial towel on their own brand of computers and were beginning to focus on name brand systems. I bought Color Computer 3 from one of the stores I worked at for about $100. It had been returned by a customer along with a whole treasure trove of games on both disk and cartridge as well as a few other very cool programs. I tracked down new old stock components at other stores in the area, including a 5.25" Disk Drive, RGB Monitor, and a printer. I used it for a couple of years and eventually moved on to a PC running Windows 3.1, and from that point there was no looking back. But sometimes I do look back, and remember opening that box the first time, and miss the experience.

[@bellemorelock4924]

I still have one of those industrial Dells from 88-90. Desktop form, preferred in industrial application and hospitals then. You need a forklift to move it around, or rather, it weighs double-plus what a cheap 90s computer did. As a kid then, I thought nothing serious predated windows (3.1) and DOS, unless you went back to around 86 and the Commodore. The dying light of non-"IBM clone" is missing from my memories.

[@tsm688]

@@bellemorelock4924 Before there was IBM clone, there were the BASIC machines. Freaking everyone ran microsoft basic -- commodore, atari, altair, texas instruments, and even the first IBM PC's had BASIC in ROM so you could power them on and instantly have BASIC loaded. And that's it. No operating system. Not even files. You could use a proprietary extension to load a program from disk which understood how to use disks, but it was its own closed universe and probably didn't understand other program's files or disks. Which meant that when you got a computer, you probably used it for games, and maybe **one** really expensive proprietary program with all the fancy bits like "storage" that could perform actual work as we understand it today. You couldn't do what you did in DOS - throw programs and files from disk to disk and use them where you please, and hand your disks to other people in the expectation they can use them at all. In 1981, being able to do that was a Big Damned Deal. This is kind of the computing we are evolving back into with our locked-down smartphones and tablets.

[@zdanee]

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.

[@cannibalbananas]

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

[@ItIsNotMeReally]

"Never ever throw anything away', because you may need it later! Always. My wife hates that I do this...

[@Luthiart]

That's because it's a disease akin to hoarding. I'm afflicted as well. It's good at helping you amass a lot of junk that you mostly don't need. And on the (very) rare occasion that I actually DO need one of those items, I can't find it among all the other flotsam that fills my drawers, cabinets, boxes, etc., and I end up buying another one anyway.

[@ItIsNotMeReally]

@@Luthiart OMG. I literally just did that with a wifi extender last week...

[@ItIsNotMeReally]

Now I'm looking for some mini HDMI cables that I know I have, somewhere....

[@douglasmaass7530]

I have file drawers full of old cables and power bricks. They have saved my butt a few times.

[@JohnDlugosz]

No, you sell it on e-bay. At least that keeps it around in the ecosystem.

[@vonwux]

Ah, that loading noise. It's like going back to my very early days and my parents regretting buying that ZX Spectrum all over again!

[@mean1979Brains]

And my acorn electron! 😂

[@johnd6487]

Lol.. my partner and I were laughing at that bit as well... although I thought it sounded a bit more pleasant than my old Speccy

[@domfjbrown75]

Oh, the joys of almost 10 mins to load 'Spyhunter'...

[@williambell4591]

LOLz, yall - LOL!

[@michaelmartin9022]

I got a computer of "that era" a bit late... probably in 1989 (I was only 4 or 5), but it had a 5¹/⁴-inch floppy drive. I didn't know how good I had it! Just pop in the disk and (most of) the games play! Of course, what I really wanted was a Nintendo or Sega

[@Melds]

The tapes didn't have any error correction, just a checksum. It also didn't have any tape control other than pause/play. So every block was put on the tape twice in hopes that one of the two read correctly. If not, try the other side. Usually the tape liner would tell you what tape footage to fast forward to before loading. Also, "Trash 80" was more of a term of endearment.

[@j.tann1970]

He said he put the volume at max. That is more likely the reason for his loading errors. Tape decks set at max will often cause the audio to clip introducing errors in the data stream making it fail the checksums.

[@JPs-q1o]

Wow, so not even some semi-advanced redundancy like XOR binary values for resiliency/error correction? Instead wasting bandwidth with duplication?

[@Melds]

@@JPs-q1o Yup! It wrote straight to memory and there wasn't a lot of processing time or memory to calculate and repair the block. There weren't a lot of support on the CPU for support functions and only a couple of registers for math. Not even a memcpy opcode.

[@lovemadeinjapan]

Enter the mighty 1981 Philips P2000T. Mini-cassettes with full automated loading, searching, all at 15 times the speed of regular tapes (reading a 15 min tape side takes 1 minute). Even the mechanical part is cool: no coroding rubber bands. These drives all work like clockwork today, they only need a cotton swab with IPA now and then for dusty heads.

[@CarnivoreRonin]

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!

[@sharoyveduchi]

Having a physical keyboard like this makes it more of a computer than today's smartphones.

[@RationalistRebel]

As an 80s tech nerd, I really don't miss those "good old days". LOL We only put up with it because there wasn't anything better that was affordable. That said, other systems with more polished games can be actually be _fun._ Other systems with little to no support feels like the stone age in comparison. Well, it's a step above punch cards at least. Getting those old systems running and connected to anything to actually use them nowadays is another matter. One of the problems was adapting a digital system to an analog video display. The only option the average home user had was a TV. Sure, there were digital displays, but only "professional" systems supported them. Even worse, before TVs supported direct connections for video equipment (and computers), the only option was the "RF" input that was only designed for an antenna. That left home users with a blurry fuzzy, and sometimes temperamental, picture. Even more confusing for modern retro users, many early systems used an RCA jack for RF video output. Later systems and TVs that supported direct "composite" video also used RCA jacks. Most people stick to RCA cables and try to adapt it on the TV RF input. The problem is that RF video is far more prone to interference, and standard unshielded RCA cables offer no protection. Many also get hung up on the "switch box" problem. Unless you trying to connect the system along side an old school antenna, you can usually ditch the switch box altogether. They're nothing but headaches and a huge source of video degradation. Next, you can pony up for a _shielded_ RCA cable and get a much cleaner picture. Personally, I use an RCA male to coax female on the system (opposite of what he used in the video). Then run a RG59 coax directly to the TV. Of the common grades of coax for TVs, RG59 is thinner and easier to use. It's widely fallen out of favor as cable and satellite TV providers use a heavier grade coax. RG59 became the cheapest option that's more available than shielded RCA. Sure, it's still analog video over RF, but it's a huge improvement nonetheless. If you happen to have other systems with RCA composite video, it's worth getting a shielded RCA cable anyway. It's not as big of an improvement, but it's noticeable. That said, I don't mess with retro equipment much anymore, for all of the reasons he mentioned. A lot of it doesn't work right anymore, as it was poorly handled over the years or simply degraded over time. Getting it work well, if at all, can take a *lot* of time to fix and adapt old tech to the modern age. Emulation sidesteps all of the headaches and addresses many of the inherent shortcomings of the original systems. I get it that some enthusiasts still prefer the hands on feel of flying by the seat of your pants with actual retro hardware over a cold virtual simulation. Unless you're really hardcore enough to develop the long forgotten skills required to handle and maintain those systems, it's not worth the hassle. If you want to tinker with them merely out of curiosity or to kickback with some retro games, emulation really is the way to go. There's also a middle ground of "hardware emulation", using modern tech to simulate old hardware, but that's a topic for another rant. You can look up retro FPGA based systems if that's of interest.

[@FalconFour]

Oh man. I dove into these Pocket Computers with the intention to repair them. I really got all the way from front to back, top to bottom. I repaired the printer docks (as in the video) which all have ruined internal batteries (video didn't even touch on that nightmare) and that often breaks circuits inside too. Ruined displays, missing cables, nuances of power adapters (just being "center negative" is the tip of the iceberg!)... and then interfacing it with a modern PC as well to load downloaded or custom programs, or save programs and have them on your PC in text form! So many little skills are needed - batteries take a special level of electronics nuance to understand (battery chemistry and behavior), printer mechanisms, soldering, finding service/schematics, interfacing modern PCs with analog tape interface, using the command line tools... there are so many places to get lost. Especially with old, forgotten tech like this. But it's dang rewarding when you can take a system that had a fully destroyed LCD display, replace it with a new display that another god-tier nerd reverse-engineered and built with modern processes, fix the printer with a new NiMH battery pack, diagnose and repair the broken circuits in the printer and cassette signal path, lube up the old ribbon with WD40, and... have it print its first "HELLO WORLD" in 35 years.

[@volo870]

Older systems are easy to understand and are accessible to repair - just read the manual. I have no idea what you are rambling about connectivity. Just solder an RGB wire, connect it through OCCS - you'll get the best image quality possible! Quite simple, actually. I would discourage having opinions on old systems based on emulators - yes, you have access to software, but you lack the sense and context of the hardware. It was funny when one reviewer gave all Amiga racing games bad reviews because it is uncomfortable to push "up" on the gamepad to accelerate. 😵 Duh! You weren't supposed to use a gamepad! 😡

[@RationalistRebel]

@@volo870 Apparently you haven't recapped a mainboard LOL. That's NOT covered in most manuals, and not everyone has the equipment or skills to do it. BTW, I still have some of my old systems from the old days. I never said that emulators gave the true experience, quite the opposite really...if you actual read my comment. If you thought it was just "rambling" then you don't know what I said and yet decided to comment about it anyway. If that's too much for you, I doubt you RTFM either. LOL

[@RationalistRebel]

@@FalconFour My hat off to you. I can't do much of that board-level work anymore and have mad respect for those who take the time to learn it. There's lots of little bits of random info required to work on retro tech that can only be learned firsthand, much of it isn't in any damn manual. Aside from working with those tiny surface-mount chips, the basics are still applicable to modern systems too. I'm sure you'll have many fun adventures ahead. :D

[@volo870]

@@RationalistRebel I am in the camp of retro enthusiasts, who believe recapping to be an unnecessary fad. I have yet to find a physically intact capacitor going so bad, that it affects digital circuitry. My experience is that analogue circuits do a decent work of warning that caps are going to expire. If sound or video go muffled and are not as crisp as an emulator - you need to do the job. Otherwise - why bother? Only if you are bored. For the recapping job, one does need to make a small extra investment and spend $16 for an electric solder-sucker. That shouldn't push one into insolvency. Most old service manuals include capacitor listings, though sadly, not the physical dimensions. P.S. Feel free to imagine abbreviations like LOL, ROFL, LLAH, PMSL, FTW, so the text feels more understandable to you.

[@darwiniandude]

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.

[@NinerFourWhiskey]

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]

I could tangibly feel the slide when they began devoting half the store to cell phone sales.

[@tsm688]

@@k.b.tidwell Radio Shack was so used to selling repackaged crap at an immense profit margin that they failed to notice when china cut out the middleman. A lot of the non-hobby stuff radio shack used to sell, you can find in dollar stores for what its really worth. Switching to cell phone accessory garbage, they'd already been beaten to the punch by like 5 years.

[@williambell4591]

PREACH! I HATED when they gave up on electronics components and started selling "Optimus" stereos and cellphones BS! (I will admit, my first Beeper (LOL), and Cellphone I bought from RS) 🤭

[@k.b.tidwell]

@@tsm688 I remember my local store had an atmosphere, a feel, before all of that, that was like going into a big general hobby store, or like when you walked into one of the old Woolworths, as if there was a new unfound treasure on every aisle. It felt like that to me as a kid anyway. Adventurous. The store was great even if the employees always seemed as if they'd rather be anywhere else because they had no idea what potentiometers or resistors even were, and didn't want to be bothered about such nerdities. After the change it felt to my kid brain like the employees had finally changed the store into what they wanted it to be, but I'm sure they never had a clue or influence, in reality. Part of that adventurous feel was because of the electronic project books by Forrest M. Mims III, which opened up worlds of fun for me. I've always wondered how my parents, who were never into electronics, ever even found out about the books in order to give them to me.

[@brianmi40]

Store manager there from '78 to '82 including our district's mall store with the larger computer department in it selling Model IIs. You have it backwards though, from Tandy Leather, they then went into consumer electronics by buying a failing single store in Boston called Radio Shack in 1963 which grew to around 3,000 locations in the USA in 1976, and THEN the TRS-80 Model I came out in '77 kicking off the personal computer era for them, following Apple into it. I also had a Model 100 that I used in college to type class notes into and print them when I went back to school to finish my degree. I had other students offering to buy the printed notes! Their death was largely a result of consumers no longer fixing things in our disposable society. They got a few more years out of selling cell phones, but the bits and pieces of electronics market just disappeared and what little was left was online ordering.

[@SocialStudiesBob]

Welcome to my childhood. I grew up with Tandy computers and Radio Shack, literally. First computer was TRS-80 to the Tandy 1000 before getting my first Windows computer in 1993. I graduated High School in 1994.

[@jerrywatson1958]

I am 65, I lived thru all of this. I wished my mom had the money to buy that Altair 8080. I was building a lot of radio kits from Radio Shack back then. My first computer was the Timex Sinclair. I hated basic but typed in the programs and watched the 1 line display play out like you. My next "home" computer was the Commodore Amiga 500+ w/dual floppy drives and a Commodore color monitor. After two weeks of loading programs by multiple floppy disks. I bought a $800 40MB SCSI HD with 2MB of Fast Ram. With Wordperfect 5.0 It was my main computer for 4 years Until I got a Amiga 2000 with PC card and HD. I wish I had kept all that equipment now. Nothing like your 1st love.

[@JerryEricsson]

Over the years, I have owned many Tandy machines, all of them gave me some joy, the little palmtop between the two machines you highlighted, the Tandy 100 and 102 both served me well in the squad car before the police departments discovered the mar mounted radio controlled Toughbook's of todays policing. I used to write reports on the little guy and print them out on an old Epson Printer, some of them are probably still in the records of the police agencies I worked for in the mid 1980s to the mid 90's when I pulled the pin and became a legal assistant.

[@Nick-b7b9s]

You don't have 3.5 and 2.5 milimeter jacks... ?😂

[@autohmae]

The irony of putting phone in the title...

[@a9ball1]

Back then in the USA they were 1/8 inch and 1/4 inch . Only those dumb countries used mm..

[@forbiddenera]

​@@a9ball17mm is 1/4.. 2.5mm is smaller than 1/8

[@romulusnr]

he probably can't even convert the metric

[@EconAtheist]

@@a9ball1 that never happened so much that it almost made other things that never happened happen

[@BeeCeeJay]

The end picture reminds me of an assignment in middle school writing BASIC for the TRS-80. I drew a picture of a dog with floppy ears that then inverted colors. I was so proud, and my teacher was impressed but still gave me a lower grade because my code looked like crap on paper. Funny memory, and a great video to bring it back. Thanks Kevin.

[@williamhoward7121]

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!

[@SergeantExtreme]

I never thought I'd see the name Popular Science again. Unlike Radio Shack, you guys just won't die.

[@crnkmnky]

But at least the kids at Radio Shack could still point you to the dark corner where the interface cables were buried. Between trying to sell you a mobile phone. 😑

[@luisgrimaldi936]

I guess this is what happens when you put Jesse Pinkman into making a video of retro computers...

[@TadiclsOperator]

God that's not nice but fuckin hilarious. You and I are friends now

[@JPs-q1o]

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 2 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.

[@VRtechman]

​@@JPs-q1oTHAT RIGHT THERE! THAT'S IT! 😂 It was TWO Jets into the North and South Towers. 😏

[@drj113b]

Wow dude - that was harsh - Hilarious - but harsh - Like another person said - You and I are friends now.

[@wailingalen]

It's Kevin from VSauce2!!!!

[@robertgaines-tulsa]

I'm an 80s kid, and you managed to make me feel both as an expert an old man. Anyway, my first game console was a ColecoVision, and nothing since then makes me feel the same way as it did.

[@kaseyboles30]

Don't worry about feeling old. My first console was a black and white pong clone with two paddle controllers hardwired in with all it's b&w glory. We got an atari2600 a bit later. My mom was actually a fan of the Infamous ET game and preferred it over most of the others.

[@joesterling4299]

@@kaseyboles30 A yellow or white Magnavox Odyssey? I had the yellow one. Actually, my family got it for Christmas. I was still a teenager. My first game console as someone who could buy his own stuff was the Sears Tele-Games console, aka the Atari VCS, aka the 2600.

[@kaseyboles30]

@@joesterling4299 I don't think it was that big a brand. mostly black with I think some thin trim lines that were tan or brown or some such. This was 45-50 years ago.

[@alexgayer85]

It’s been my experience that Tandy folks are the friendliest and most helpful. I’ve got 6 Tandy machines all still humming along thanks to all their help.

[@sloanlance]

5:00 - he bought the wrong cable, but the web site clearly shows that it has a 5-pin DIN connecter at one end. There's a photo and a diagram of it. The TRS-80 pocket computer clearly doesn't have a place to plug that in and it's not mentioned in the product description, so I guess the summary is: Pay attention to the specifications when buying equipment.

[@sebk42]

A brief interaction with a TRS80 in 1980 during my first stay in the US completely changed my life. I got hooked to computers and programming and now over 40 years later my entire professional career is around this.

[@lotterwinner6474]

Crazy to think the government cared about monopolies at some point.

[@glenncurry3041]

They tried to break M'$oft up in the late 90's. But change in admin in 2000 killed that.

[@lotterwinner6474]

@@glenncurry3041 to big to fail should mean too big to exist and it should be broken up IMO.

[@glenncurry3041]

@@lotterwinner6474 As the Democrats try every time they get in control. The the Republicans get in and remove all restrictions again. Clinton went after M'$oft and won in court. Dubya immediately overruled the courts.

[@markmuir7338]

The monopolies got so profitable so fast, they bought the government. And so here we are today - paying taxes to the monopolies (subscription services).

[@pixelpatter01]

They only care about the monopolies that don't donate to the right reelection campaign funds or are owned by the 'wrong' people. For example, why didn't the government break up the media companies that now form a single voice extending over legacy media in print, TV, radio and entertainment?

[@JohnDlugosz]

That was my first computer; I got a paper route and saved up for it. It was very formative. Like many 8-bit computers of the era, it came with an excellent manual that taught BASIC and basic programming techniques. It has 1K of RAM (a very expensive component at the time!) and a 24-character display. I dearly remember the catalog page at 0:14. That would have been the 1980 catalog, IIRC. 1:00 I remember that article too: the author is astonished to find that his research folder, which felt a little thick, actually contained one of the devices. I helped assemble a friend's ZX-81, which came as a kit: bare printed circuit board and many, many components. 1:08 That "Luggable" also cost $10,000 to $20,000 (in 1975 dollars!) Note that it's true that -80 originally referred to the Zilog Z80 CPU, the name TRS-80 went from the specific product name to the name of a product line; all Radio Shack branded computers. The original TRS-80 became the Model I. Of particular note, the PC-1 under discussion did *not* have a Z80 CPU.

[@NicoDsSBCs]

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.

[@dougfraser2131]

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.

[@BigBoy4004]

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!!! 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

[@paulvinoski8023]

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.

[@dannyhilarious]

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!

[@80s_Gamr]

How are you gonna host a series of videos for "Popular Science" and not know what 3.5mm stereo cables are?... and looking right at each port not realize one end of the cable you're ordering has no where to go?

[@vdeovisuals]

It's like who doesn't have audio jack cables in there home, and why order one online when you can buy them in a convenience store? It's just nonsense fluff for the sake of views!

[@HaakonAnderson]

This whole video just makes me feel old, I'm only 40

[@bauhnguefyische667]

@@HaakonAnderson I’m only 60 and I put ‘only’ in front because it sounds like less 😂 It isn’t 😂😂

[@raycharles1752]

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.

[@BitwiseMobile]

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! :)

[@jrbeeler4626]

You're playing with a MC-10, not a "CoCo" as we called it. The CoCo came out in 1980, the MC-10 came later. The MC-10 was not nearly as powerful as the CoCo -- less memory, and it wouldn't take the "Program Paks" that allowed you to add things like a disk drive to the CoCo. The CoCo was meant to compete with the Commodore VIC-20; the MC-10 was meant to compete with....and it didn't last very long. It broke the basic rule that you release the less powerful system first (e.g. the VIC-20), then the step-up (e.g. the Commodore 64). If I remember the story correctly, the MC-10 did not have the bitmap graphics that the CoCo had, so little if anything written for the CoCo would have run on the MC-10. The really nice thing about the CoCo was the Microsoft BASIC, which was very similar to their BASIC for the IBM PC. After using Dad's CoCo, I got a Tandy 1000, which is what the IBM PCJr should have been. I used that machine for 6 years, and had fun. I think what drove Tandy out of the PC industry was the deal they made with IBM to get access to Micro Channel Architecture, which replaced the ISA bus when they built the PS/2 series. IBM apparently made MCA licensees pay a fee for every PC-compatible computer they had built. To top it off, MCA turned out to be a dead end, as many powerful PC clone makers chose an 'open' alternative to MCA called EISA. Tandy was less competitive after that.

[@FalconFour]

This video came through my Algorithm feed. And I nearly jumped when I saw my eBay listing there! Small world! Yeah, you think THAT was the sound? Should have played the sound from the actual tape, without the cable attached ;) THAT'S the modem screeching ear-blast I was expecting. haha. Glad I could help bring this to life! Fantastic story and REALLY loved the responses throughout 😂

[@popularscience]

Thank you for all your help! I really have been amazed by hobbyists like you who are so kind and patient to someone trying to crack how to use this retro tech for the first time.

[@Jims_Camera_at_dawn]

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]

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

[@rrad8106]

The TRS-80 Pocket PC!!! I scraped together all my pennies and bought one. I LOVED IT, and it still has a soft spot in my heart! It's saved my ASS in College Accounting! Instead of memorizing all the damn formulas, I just programmed them into the PC an called them up during my exams! Of course, I also programed a way to delete them of the Prof got wise, but it was SO new that he just though it was a fancy calculator. I had it all - the THERMAL printer doc, the cassette connections, some games. Taught myself BASIC programming skills on it, made a program to emulate lunar landing where I had to calculate propulsion, moon gravity and speed. It was heavenly! I have no idea where it went to; I managed to lose it over the years. A packing box left behind somewhere. Loved that pocket PC!

[@phoenixx5092]

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.

[@HaakonAnderson]

Anyone else over 40 pulling your hair out with the way this guy is dealing with the solutions he's coming up with for his, "issues?"

[@bob3zaaafs]

unwatchable IMO. on to the next.

[@dr.strangelove5708]

yes I am way over and my attitude what a silly whiner read the manuals :) Also ask people who played with the stuff then they had commonalities like the channel switch :)

[@Luthiart]

I think one of his main problems is that he didn't READ the listings for the stuff that he bought carefully enough to make sure that it was actually what he needed. Another Zoomer with zero attention span.

[@TonyRudzki]

lol. Exactly. The "horrible pig squealing sound"..I listened to it and thought.. "ummm and?". The tape having the "back up" on the other side...umm 1) magnetic particles glued to a plastic tape. 2) why leave side 2 unused and blank? 3) complains that he barely got 3 programs working, but having a backup is a bad idea. His commentary on all the things that just don't work after 40 years is hard to listen to.

[@Darkyryus_]

yikes

[@The-python-guy]

hey my grandpa milled the mold for the plastic casing on that, be nice to it

[@carlam6669]

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.

[@kaseyboles30]

I think I downloaded a copy of that from a local bbs in the mid 80's just for fun once.

[@brianmi40]

I was a Radio Shack store manager from '78 to '82. In college prior, my best friend and I wrote some games like that on the IU mainframe in Basic. He wrote several that got picked up and published in a magazine back then called Basic Computer Games I (and II). He wrote a popular one called Camel, where you tried to cross the desert and had to decide whether to travel, rest, give your camel water, etc. and not die!

[@a9ball1]

You older folks ever get a copy of elisa in basic? Not sure if that's the correct spelling. It was a fun one back then. It was a basic psychiatrist who would ask you questions.

[@kaseyboles30]

@@a9ball1 Got in in a magazine, so I had to type it in.

[@GreyGhost70]

I had one. I used it in Caterpillar's tool room to calculate measurements on tapered ring gages using dial indicators. I could set the diameter and depth of the dial indicator's measurement contacts from sharp edges to balls on stems. The program even calculated the difference between the tapered contact point and the contact point on the parallel set gage.

[@mtnclimberut]

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.

[@argentlupin]

Born November 1980! This was an awesome retro video for some one that grew up with a lot of this. The Event magazine sound cool. had Boy;s Life from BSA that at the end tended to have simply basic program yo could type up n any word processor. Growing up I did play with a Tandy PC for s little bit plying games like TMNT or Double Dragon to me it was just another PC computer to young to greatly appreciate the various differences. I grey up on a Texas Instrument computer and played with there Speak and Spell. Funny that I also remember but rarely connected Tandy leather to the computer the leather was huge and popular. The channel 3 or 4 debacle was hilarious and a classic. With any retro or old tech or with anything it is glad to see that you push through issues kept trying and learning along the way more people need to do this. Thank you again for the episode.

[@aL3891_]

It should be possible to make a program that generates the audio signal that it was getting from the tape deck 🙂 All this struggle to get anything to work seems like the authentic experience though 😂

[@thekaylors5819]

There are programs that read and write WAV files for most vintage computers, including the Pocket PC and the MC-10\

[@choppergirlfpv]

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.

[@WaybackRewind]

Pretty sure that connecting cable is just an ordinary audio cable.

[@MovieMakingMan]

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.

[@onhandart]

Not only did I have a Casio pocket computer in high school (I got on clearance for $20 or something like that), I still have the kind of game switch you mentioned in the video. It's for my Atari 2600. 😅 Never throw anything away!! Also, oh man, when did I get so old??

[@1daft_]

things i thought while watching this, "i bet there is a 3-4 switch on it" ... "hey would you look at that"... "hmm waiting for him to reference enter magazine." ~2 seconds~ "and there we are." and yes, i borrowed my friends copies of enter. They were great at the time.

[@blurglide]

Those mrecury batteries are hard to come by, and have a nearly unlimited shelf life. I'd sell them to some camera enthusiasts and find a different power supply....either a DC power source, or zinc/air batteries.

[@thekaylors5819]

The Pocket PC uses standard LR44 batteries, either silver oxide or alkaline.

[@squirlmy]

Wein Cell PX675 1.35V are silver oxide batteries that are second best. There's also a UK company called "Analog Specialty Batteries" has them. Hearing aid LR44-sized batteries will work, but they are meant to never turn off, so they die within a couple of days. The mercury batteries in mine didn't last 30 years (they were banned in the US in the early 80s, they might have been even older) You could say it's been a journey, lol!!!

[@squirlmy]

@@thekaylors5819 alkaline battery life can be measured in days, hours even. Good to demonstrate the screen still works, but not for much else.

[@kamel6915]

@@thekaylors5819 Zinc silver oxide batteries can be carefully recharged some times.

[@flapjack9495]

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.

[@StevePetrica]

A girl in my graduate school program in 1981 was the daughter of a Radio Shack manager, and through Dad's connections she had a TRS-80. That put her close to the very cutting edge of high-tech back then!

[@TheGrimStoic]

I remember this one...I'm ancient KILL ME...

[@rainbowrotcod]

I like your max headroom profile picture

[@TheGrimStoic]

@@rainbowrotcod Got me my 15 minutes of fame pre-social networking, is all...

[@TheGrimStoic]

@@rainbowrotcod Grew up to be a grim stoic - the more you learn...

[@KlodFather]

I'm still scarier than you LOL And I still have my grandkids pull my finger. I have tested it and the Radio Shack pocket computer works just as good in a high density fart environment. Glad to have shared this scientific data with all of you. LOL

[@raydall3734]

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.

[@douglasmaass7530]

Well, there was also the "Benton Harbor Lunchbox."

[@squirlmy]

No. Obviously so in this case because their "core business" was making leather boots for the Army!!! They made a second fortune going into electronics, and they only could of survived in that if they foresaw the internet early on -and they were already to big and slow to do that. They probably couldn't compete with Ali-Baba, or Chinese companies generally, today. And aren't cheap Chinese digital "amateur radio: the center of that market today? You are letting nostalgia get in the way of business sense. Ham radio... sheesh!

[@joeconstantini5531]

In 1992 we got a Tandy sensation personal computer with the advanced CD rom. Cost $2000 at the time. Top of the line, now my phone is 20 times better.

[@georgeyreynolds]

More like 2000 times better in memory and cpu capacity

[@joeconstantini5531]

@@georgeyreynolds your right probably right

[@embie5119]

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.

[@martinfenton1275]

Thanks for the history of Tandy. Here in the UK, the shops were all branded Tandy and Radio Shack was their main brand. I miss Tandy.

[@RalphBarbagallo]

lol I wanted one of these SO BAD when I was a kid.

[@icusmilingAZ]

Ditto, but now I'm glad I never got one

[@KlodFather]

I had one that I worked and earned the money for and used it in high school and college. The Pocket Computer 2 was a good unit. Capable of very long complex strings of equations and was able to render answers that took others with a calculator min to do copying and retyping the various functions. Super helpful. I used it for that and had the printer for hard copies of results.

[@thumbtak123]

LOL - Sounded like you wish you had a flipper, at the remote section. Seems like this device is quite useful, even in the retro community. If you do not know, people archive remotes and release it for the flipper. You can find a whole collection of saved IR files you can upload to the flipper.

[@rmccombs66]

Actually a jack is female. The male counterpart is a plug.

[@philroberts7238]

A Jacqueline perhaps?

[@kevinbarnard3502]

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 :P 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.

[@etoineschrdlu9382]

I owned my fair share of Tandy computers. I programmed a robot on my college's TRS-80. But before that I built a Sinclair ZX-80 and then purchased an EPSON HX-20 portable computer. Both the Timex-Sinclair and the Epson were rabbit holes that easily consumed a computer nerd's life exploring just how much these early machines could do. My cousin actually ran book-keeping software for his store on a Sinclair clone. I had fun with mine. I had a Tandy 1000 and replaced that with a Tandy 2000 before I built a series of home built Franken PC's. What killed Tandy was the IBM PC and the Microsoft OS. IBM didn't understand that the day was coming when you did not have to be a huge corporation in order to build a personal computer. Bill Gates understood this, let IBM fund the creation of MS-DOS, and then convinced IBM to allow him to retain the rights to it. IBM's IBM PC DOS only worked on IBM PC's but Bill's MS-DOS would work on a multitude of home built computers to which Microsoft licensed the code to. Tandy computers died when the "Anyone Can Do This" MS-DOS personal computer recipe emerged. A time came when anyone could order a case, a power supply, a Motherboard, a CPU, some memory, storage drives, and hook them up to a monitor and keyboard on their kitchen table. Then all you needed was to install MS-DOS and you had a running PC that was as functional as anything that IBM, Tandy, Gateway, and every other PC manufacturer could make. And it cost less. I built at least three myself and I knew several guys who tried selling these home built PC's as a business side hack. Anyone could do this beginning in the early '90s. You can still do this, but... Today I'm typing this comment in my living room on a touch screen laptop with a terabyte SSD, 16GB of RAM, with incredible sound and graphics capabilities. It weighs less than 2 Kg and I would not attempt to waste my time sourcing the components needed to build a PC half this good for twice the cost. In the next room where I do remote work is the Killer Laptop: a custom built server class graphics workstation for CAD and simulation. It belongs to my employer. IT showed me the invoice for this monster laptop and I investigated building a desktop with similar capabilities: it would cost at least double what my employer paid for that laptop. You would need a very special reason to home build a PC today and you would likely find exactly what need that costs less online.

[@jasonblalock4429]

30:10 Heh, you're running an emulator within an emulator. Ain't technology grand? Just to toss in, Tandy's other big hit in the 80s was their Tandy 1000 line of PC clones, which were basically improved versions of the PC Jr. They were the first company to sell a fully IBM/DOS-compatible PC for under a thousand dollars, which gave the entire PC ecosystem a huge boost. Tons of 80s and 90s kids' first computer was some model of Tandy 1000.

[@mrflamewars]

Running NESticle under DOSBox is about the only way to experience the badness of early NES emulators without actually getting an old machine these days. It was so hilariously broken.

[@volo870]

@@mrflamewars Why do you think it's broken? From time to time I run NESticle on my Pentium 133 laptop for giggles. It is actually awesome. NES games were on par with PC games you could buy back then. It is a miracle it worked as good as it did.

[@mrflamewars]

@@volo870 Is this one of the versions of NESticle that had the broken MMC3 emulation? Super Mario 3 was one of the big games that would catch early emulators out - the status bar at the bottom would be just a bunch of trash. Felix the Cat was another one.

[@volo870]

@@mrflamewars I had to check - blown dust off my DOS PC and uploaded NESticle x.xx into it. SMB3 works fine. Line interrupt must've been hard-coded into it with later versions. The sound is nasty though. Felix indeed fails to update the status bar, but sound is very nice. Still I am quite surprised that NESticle and Genecyst work as good as they do!

[@mrflamewars]

@@volo870 Early versions of ZSNES had super terrible sound too - getting the SNES SPC700 emulation decent took a very long time. Lots of SNES emulators didn't have support for the cartridge coprocessors for years - Starfox would load and appear to run but absolutely none of the Super FX stuff was working - seemed to take until the early 2000s for SFX emulation to be complete enough to work

[@ChristopherPetersonR2d2]

They used to give games away on cereal boxes. Square plastic records you used to have to cut out of the box

[@Robert08010]

"Bits" cereal? I don't remember that. What brand of computer were they for?

[@jend80]

Either I'm googling the wrong things, or somebody's getting confused between pop music cardboard &flexidisc being on cereal boxes, flexidiscs of programs you had to copy to tape that came stuck to computer mags & shaped records.

[@devereuxbirdzell]

I think this could have been a great video with LOT less snark. Ill stick to the 8 bit guy.

[@OGteddlesruss]

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...

[@darnice1125]

Just to let you know, Sharp's pocket computers were actually developed by Olivetti. They were built under license from Olivetti. Thus Tandy was selling a Sharp product that was a copy actually an Olivetti.

[@FluffyPuppyKasey]

Was about to comment that this seems a lot like Vsauce2 but I went to Kevin's channel and it's just straight up him. He's a good presenter so I'm not surprised he's here. Also tapes were NOTORIOUSLY unreliable

[@Z-Ren]

yea hes based

[@volo870]

@@FluffyPuppyKasey Tapes work fine if you set volume properly.

[@FluffyPuppyKasey]

@@volo870 That's true!

[@shadowj5639]

This guy is an awful presenter. How anyone can bear to listen to him get so much wrong and complain about it the whole way is boggling to me.