TRS-80

I don’t remember how I stumbled on the idea of buying a TRS-80, model 100.

 

 

But the idea of having a computer small enough that I could carry it and use it on the airplane was appealing.

 

TRS-80 was actually a general brand name that Radio Shack applied to all its personal computers. The model 100 was made by the Japanese company, Kyocera (short for Kyoto Ceramics).

 

The TRS-80 model 100 used a Z-80 processor. It had several built-in applications including a BASIC interpreter. It was possible to download Z-80 machine language programs but there were no specific software-development tools other than BASIC. As a result I wrote whatever software I used in BASIC.

 

It had a tape-cassette interface to save and store data. It also had a serial port which I used to connect it to my PC. However, it didn’t use xmodem or any other file-transfer protocol, so sending code or data was essentially blindly sending the data from one machine to the other. (I believe I could use X-ON/X-OFF for flow control.)

 

I used this machine extensively when I was in Japan. As soon as I returned to the U.S., however, it fell into disuse, because of its limited screen size, and its limited programming capability.