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Radio Shack's TRS-80 Model III (media.piefed.social)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/vintageads@sh.itjust.works
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I received one of these from parents when I finished the 8th grade in 1980. I think they got the base model though with 4KB of ram, it was "only" $999. I recorded programs onto a cassette tape. Fun!

An advertisement showing a computer from 1980 with a black and white screen and a keyboard built into the case.
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[–] 3 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I already had a computer when I started computer science in the ninth grade. These bad boys were fun to play with. The teacher who was a very smart guy quickly gave up trying to keep me from typing away. I spent most of my time porting basic games from magazines to these. There were a lot of copies of my floppy making the rounds if you know what I mean.

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    porting basic games from magazines to these.

    Same! Lunar Lander, a maze generator, so many. And I even started to learn about Assembly language but that turned out to be too hard for me at that age.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    On the trash 80 I had to do a lot of work to find the memory region for the display. It didn't take that long but many of the games I ported used peek and poke statement to write the screen. Doing it was fun in a way nothing today can be. Its either too simple or way too complex these days.

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