#TRS80

[retrocgads]

UK 1987

[obscurevideogames]

13 Ghosts (Software Affair - TRS80 - 1984)

[damonscomputer]

Wip of the 1977 computer brothers.. rough sketch. L-r: Apple 2, TRS-80, PET 2001

[humanoidhistory]

RadioShack’s TRS-80 Micro Computer System in a 1979 educational series called “Adventure of the Mind.”

[boredtechnologist]

Ah, the late 70s and early 80s—a golden era for retro gaming! Back then, the joy of gaming wasn't just in the playing but also in the acquiring of the games themselves. Picture this: you're in your favorite hobby store or local computer shop, and instead of the flashy boxes and plastic cases we see today, you find software packaged in simple Ziploc bags.

These Ziploc bags were a hallmark of early gaming culture. Inside, you’d typically find a 5.25-inch floppy disk or a cassette tape, a photocopied instruction manual, and maybe, if you were lucky, a registration card or a small bonus item like a sticker. The simplicity of the packaging reflected the DIY spirit of the era, where many games were created by small teams or even solo developers working out of their garages or bedrooms.

The joy of these Ziploc-packaged games was multifaceted. Firstly, there was the thrill of discovery. Each bag was a little treasure chest, and the contents were often a mystery until you got home and loaded the game into your computer. The minimalist packaging left much to the imagination, allowing your mind to wander and build up excitement for what lay ahead.

Secondly, the Ziploc bags symbolized accessibility and creativity. Without the need for expensive packaging, more developers could afford to distribute their games. This democratization led to a rich diversity of games, from text-based adventures and early RPGs to quirky puzzle games and experimental simulations. Each new acquisition felt like uncovering a hidden gem, crafted with passion and ingenuity.

Finally, these bags represented a personal connection to the gaming community. In many cases, the developers included handwritten notes or personal signatures on the manuals, creating a sense of camaraderie between creator and player. You weren't just buying a product; you were supporting a fellow enthusiast's dream.

So, in those Ziploc bags, you didn't just find a game—you found a piece of gaming history, a testament to the early days of software development, and a reminder of a time when imagination and passion drove the industry forward. It was a simple, yet profoundly joyful experience that many retro gaming aficionados, like yourself, remember fondly.

[bak3lite]

[retrocompmx]

Un día como hoy (28 de noviembre) en al computación

El 28 de noviembre de 1983, Tandy Corp., lanza al mercado su computador TRS-80 Modelo 2000. Con CPU 80186, 128 Kb en RAM, dos floppy drives, costaba 2750 usd. Un modelo superior con HDD de 10Mb y 256 Kb Ram costaba 4250 usd. Usaban MS-DOS 2.11 y Xenix #retrocomputingmx #tandytrs80

[os2warp]

VCF Southeast was fun! Didn't get any pictures, there wasn't much to see that I didn't see two years ago, in fact it seemed smaller. I went with a friend, so that was definitely More fun than going alone.

That same data general terminal from two years ago was still for sale. Still 600 dollars tho lol.

They did have a fully functional telephone exchange set up. Also lots of trs80 stuff.

[canidaedreams64]

☾ Introduction Time yippee ⋆⁺₊⋆

✩ salutations, im silly bisexual transmasc genderqueer and objectum teenager edgar/eddie. i go by he/she pronouns. im mainly a fandom/oc artist that rarely animates and sometimes talks about stuff. im also irish-korean (white)

✩ i got too many interests but i say my top 5 would be touhou, homestuck, mega man, toontown and silhouette mirage. i have a bunch of other misc interests like model kits, cosplaying and collecting merch. i am critical of all of my interests!!!

✩ id recommend not following me for just one fandom since i frequently switch interests lol

✩ just a disclaimer but my art/blog may contain content such as eyestrain, flashing lights, blood/violence, insects/arachnids, cigarettes/smoking and alcohol/drinking. i'll try my best to properly tag content but feel free to ask me to tag certain things if needed.

pr0shippers, nsfw and other typical dni criteria people will be exploded on sight. i also block certain fandoms (h4rry p0tter and h4zbin/h3lluva) but other than that just be nice

✩ my side blogs are:

@ask-the-netbots - toontown oc askblog (inactive)

@trs80s-usedcars - objectum sideblog (inactive)

@meatpresident - sparklecare sideblog

@zundymon - great god grove oc rp blog

✩ i happen to be on other webbed sites, so here they are:

twitter

deviantart - no longer in use

toyhouse

artfight

newgrounds - inactive

myfigurecollection

bluesky

⋆⁺₊⋆ ok thanks for reading baiiiiiiiiiiiii :^] ⋆⁺₊⋆

[bobwp]

Daily Writing Prompt 2: Your life without a computer: what does it look like?

What would life without a computer be like? Well, can you really stay true by only thinking about what it would be like?

Daily writing promptYour life without a computer: what does it look like?View all responses I remember the first time I used a computer, it was an IBM with a large, massive floppy disk and a close second, a Radio Shack TRS80. My life before the early 80’s was sans computer. If I was to look at what it would be moving from this day on without a computer it would be one of two things. Computers…

[animeengineer]

The Apple II, the one with color, had two modes: one was 1-bit (0 = black, 1 = white) and the other sacrificed half the horizontal resolution to have two bits per pixel, where 00 and 11 were still black and white, and 01 and 10 were two colors, and you could pick one of two hardcoded pairs of colors (red and green or blue and yellow I think). Pretty impressive considering Woz built it out of discrete parts and not a graphic chip like everyone else.

TRS80 Color Computer had a 16-color palette, and I still have the data sheet for the MC6847 video chip I think it had. (I’ve also got the data sheet for the MC6845 that I think was used in the Hercules graphics card used in some early IBM PC clones. The one where you could set video signal timing values in the registers that could damage some monitors.)

Commodore 64 also had a 16-color palette, but it was weird. You could set one color for foreground and one for background for each character on the 40x25 character screen. In graphics mode, that color memory was still in force, so you were limited to those colors (plus black and white, I think) for each 8x8 or 4x8 group of pixels that replaced each character.

PC CGA was the 16 colors that ANSI terminals use, basically two brightnesses of each of RGBCMY, plus black, white, and two grays. I think EGA let you use 16 colors as well but you could choose 12 bit (4R,4G,4B) or so values for each color, and VGA gave us the 256 color table where you could set each one to whatever you wanted, basically how GIF format works except without transparency, and you could do some crazy “animated” art by just changing the colors in the table without redrawing the screen.

Macs I’ll skip because they started at 32-bit (more or less) architecture.

I don’t know what 8-bit consoles actually used, but I’ve seen a lot of variations in the hardware hacker world. You could have 3 red, 3 green, and 2 blue bits. Or 2, 2, 2, dropping the last 2 bits in the byte (or using one bit for “transparency” if you were doing a graphic overlay function like they used for sports or news, maybe then giving the extra bit to green). I’m not sure if anyone tried a YUV 4,2,2 encoding, which was what a TV actually used.

Shit was wild back then.

I love it when retro games are conspicuously much shittier than what they're ostensibly emulating. Like, no, the N64's textures weren't that low-resolution. CRT televisions didn't look like that unless they had a busted timing circuit. The simulated rounding error on those vertices is about an order of magnitude too high if this is supposed to be PS1 style. It's physically impossible for a VHS tape to do that. It's fantastic.

[retrocgads]

UK 1987

[sutrala]

Are you worried about "The AI"? If you are, you shouldn't be. This is AI's second public relation's effort at taking over either simply "the world," or perhaps even "Life, the Universe and Everything." The first effort was during the 1980s, when desktop microcomputers, such as...

[hrani-zdarma]

Pracujeme na implementaci databáze her: **175 306** her s 1 197 722 datovými body.

Hry jsou uspořádány podle platforem, takže se mohou objevit vícekrát.

*******Pro tyto platformy:*********

- 3DS - 32X - Amiga CD 32 - AmstradCPC - Apple II - Arcade - Atari5200 -Atari7800 - Atari Lynx - DOS - Dreamcast - DS - FamicomCD - FMTowns - Gamecube - GameGear -

GBA - GBC - GB - Gizmondo - Intellivision - Itch.io - Magnavox Odyssey - MasterSystem -MSX - N64 - Neo-Geo - Neo-Geo Pocket Color - NES - NGage - PC88 - PC98 - PC-Engine - PCFX -

PS1 - PS2 - PS3 - PS4 - Roblox - SegaGenesis/MegaDrive - Sega Pico - Sega Saturn - SNES -Steam - Switch - TRS80 - Vectrex - VirtualBoy - Wii - WiiU - Windows - Wonderswan - X68000 -

Xbox 360 - Xbox - XboxOne - Zeebo - ZXSpectrum

[boredtechnologist]

TRS-80 300 baud modem (DC MODEM IB)

[oldguydoesstuff]

I actually had the experience of picking a computer in 1977. But it was not much of a choice because I was a young teen with no job and a middle class family who in no way could afford any of these options, so I went for the $99 Netronics ELF II kit shown in my profile banner. It had 256 bytes of memory and didn't do much. But I was definitely the only kid on my block with a computer!

If I could have picked from the list though I would have been tempted to get the TRS80 because I actually had a bunch of programs I wrote on a (generous) friend of the family's Model I.

If you pick "other", specify in the tags which computer you'd prefer to the big 3 from '77