I got one of those (Model I, Level 2, 48K, expansion interface, and a couple of 90K floppy drives), as well as the Olympus camera @nsaspook mentioned above.

This is all completely useless, but I cannot bring myself to throw any of it away.

My daughter will be stuck dealing with it all, someday.

Some of the old devices are still useful even if the memory stick is obsolete.

https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/res/manuals/4153/41536211M.pdf

 

Some of the old devices are still useful even if the memory stick is obsolete.
View attachment 365487View attachment 365488View attachment 365489
https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/res/manuals/4153/41536211M.pdf

Yes. They would be quite useful if my phone didn't do every single thing that those old devices did while not simultaneously fitting in my pocket.

 

And with Grok, even friends are obsolete (or, at least superfluous).

 

Yes. They would be quite useful if my phone didn't do every single thing that those old devices did while not simultaneously fitting in my pocket.

Though one thing that those old devices could do that my phone can't is display things so that I can actually read it! I absolutely hate having to try to read anything of substance on a phone. I'm sure part of it's my aging eyes, but I can't bring myself to read a book or watch a movie on my phone, even though I have one of the larger ones. Every time I contemplate doing so, I imagine how well Star Wars would have gone over if it had debuted on the iPhone.

 

Though one thing that those old devices could do that my phone can't is display things so that I can actually read it! I absolutely hate having to try to read anything of substance on a phone. I'm sure part of it's my aging eyes, but I can't bring myself to read a book or watch a movie on my phone, even though I have one of the larger ones. Every time I contemplate doing so, I imagine how well Star Wars would have gone over if it had debuted on the iPhone.

The e-ink display is superior to most cell phone displays and the battery life, even on this old guy is better.
https://www.popsci.com/health/why-e-ink-is-better-for-reading/

I used mine for access to schematics and tech manuals, I could keep it on the page all day with little use of power. Phones and wireless networking was/is non-existent in many industrial work spaces and is still spotty today unless there are many repeaters from the massive amount of electrical noise generated by semi protection tools.

 

And with Grok, even friends are obsolete (or, at least superfluous).

Sure, Grok has access to sensitive OEM, manufacturing data and technical information.

 

The e-ink display is superior...

OLED at night -- when I do most of my reading -- is perfection.

 

I got one of those (Model I, Level 2, 48K, expansion interface, and a couple of 90K floppy drives), as well as the Olympus camera @nsaspook mentioned above.

This is all completely useless, but I cannot bring myself to throw any of it away.

My daughter will be stuck dealing with it all, someday.

Hi,

Oh you had a TRS80? Wow, I guess it was kind of popular back then.

Mine is a Model 3 from around 1980, yours was probably from just before that. Mine has 180k floppies but still 5.25 inch.
I did so much on that thing over the years before the faster ones started to come out. The CPU is the Z80 and runs at 4MHz. Funny though it was very responsive you'd never know it was that slow. Everything for it was written in assembler. It did have a BASIC interpreter though. Of course in-depth calculations would have taken longer though. I see people offering them for sale now and then on the web.

There was a newer model that came out after mine I think it had 360k floppies, still 5.25 inch though.

There was also a graphics upgrade card you could get that would give you pixel level plots, but I never got it. I used the line printer I got for it to print out dot level plots and then the area was much bigger too. It was never color though until they came out with the TRS80 Color (CoCo). Probably 16 colors but I don't remember now.

 

The first computers I worked with had 4 KB of ram and programs were stored on cassette tapes.

The first computer I owned, in 1984, was a TI Professional. I maxed it out with a whopping 768 KB of RAM. It also had a three-plane color graphics card giving you an amazing eight colors. It had two 360 KB floppy drives. I could replaced one of them with a 10 MB hard drive, but that would have added $1500 to the price tag. As it was, the machine (plus the significant amount of software I got with it, most which never got used) totaled out at just over $5000. It was 95% IBM-compatible, too. Of course, they let you think that this meant that 95% of software written for the IBM-XT would run on the TI-Pro. Wrong! It meant that, in any given program, an average of 95% of the instructions would execute properly. In practice, this meant that it was effectively zero percent compatible -- I never did run across a single IBM program that would run on it, though I didn't try all that many. I used it for writing programs to support my coursework and for writing papers. For that, it was more than adequate and the quality of the machine was incredible. I really wish I had never given it away, though I don't know what I would do with it if I still had it.

Like you, my daughter is going to have to deal with a bunch of crap some day. But at least I'm winnowing it down quite a bit. I'm tired of living in a warehouse where I can't find anything, so I'm aggressively purging stuff. It helps that there's a good chance that we will have to sell this place and downsize in order to use the equity to pay for her college. Oh well, there are far worse things we could (and have) invested in.

Hi there,

The first computer I had I built myself. It used an 8080 CPU and Static ram not dynamic. It was an 8 bit CPU I think it ran at 2MHz but don't remember now. Then I upgraded to a Z80 and I loved that because of the larger instruction set. All that was hand wired, not an etched PCB. Later sometime I went to a full Z80 system with 64k static ram, but I made a nice PCB for that one. It functioned as a computer and controller. CPU speed still 4MHz though.

It wasn't until the Sinclair came out that I got my first commercial computer, it had I think 16k ram. That too used a cassette tape for backups and of course that was slow. It was only sometime after that I got the TRS80 Model 3.

Since then I went through a number of computers probably everyone else here did too. I remember another 4MHz Intel, then a 16MHz Intel, then 100MHz Intel or AMD, then a faster AMD, then a dual core, then a 4 core AMD, then an 8 core AMD but that was in a full case which was really big, then I went to a mini size about 6 inches square which has 4 Intel cores and is faster than all of them except the 8 core but for some things it's still pretty fast. I could fit probably 50 of these computers in the space that 8 core computer case took up, no kidding and no exaggeration. I was hoping for an offer to build a supercomputer out of those mini computers, but never got a decent offer.

 

Though one thing that those old devices could do that my phone can't is display things so that I can actually read it! I absolutely hate having to try to read anything of substance on a phone. I'm sure part of it's my aging eyes, but I can't bring myself to read a book or watch a movie on my phone, even though I have one of the larger ones. Every time I contemplate doing so, I imagine how well Star Wars would have gone over if it had debuted on the iPhone.

Hi,

Yeah that's a shame too. I think it is the area is just too small for the amount of content. We got used to big LCD displays too. It took me a while to get used to doing regular things on the phone like booking flights and even shopping in some cases. It's always scroll, scroll, scroll, until my fingers hurt

 

Though one thing that those old devices could do that my phone can't is display things so that I can actually read it! I absolutely hate having to try to read anything of substance on a phone. I'm sure part of it's my aging eyes

Hmm, that is odd. I have the smallest iPhone. 12 mini, and I find it easier to read books on than any other device or paper. I do practically all my reading on it. The clarity and contrast of the screen and backlighting allow me to read at a font size way smaller than I can read on printed material. I also find that i can read faster with the narrow single column, much like newspaper columns as opposed to wider books. I even got a 13 inch iPad, with a gorgeous screen, and I still prefer the phone for reading.

Different strokes, for different folks.

 

It wasn't until the Sinclair came out...

Ha. I built one of the first Sinclair ZX-80s.

Bought it from one of the dozen electronic mags that I was subscribed to. I bought the kit version, which I think was $99 at the time.

 

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2039354509273846222

 

 

Ha. I built one of the first Sinclair ZX-80s.

Bought it from one of the dozen electronic mags that I was subscribed to. I bought the kit version, which I think was $99 at the time.

View attachment 365514

Oh that's cool, I bought mine already assembled.

Something else cool though, I have a book of the COMPLETE assembly language disassembly listing. It shows the assembly language disassembly for the entire ROM. A lot of lines of assembly language code of course.

I had a lot of fun with that thing, but I hated to use the cassette recorder to record programs, it was so very slow.

 

ADVANTEST gear
https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/...142-bad-keys-replacement.175787/#post-1589246

 

 

 

This thread justappeared to me for the firsttime. At least I do not recall seeing it before. LONG AGO I assembled a "6800D2" single board computer tha I got cheap because the one who bought it had not realised it needed to be assembled AND SOLDERED! So I bought it from him and assebled it WITH IC sockets for ALL the logic. Then I realized I did not have a clue about programming it, so I sold it.

 

Oh that's cool, I bought mine already assembled.

Something else cool though, I have a book of the COMPLETE assembly language disassembly listing. It shows the assembly language disassembly for the entire ROM. A lot of lines of assembly language code of course.

I had a lot of fun with that thing, but I hated to use the cassette recorder to record programs, it was so very slow.

https://nocanvas.zame-dev.org/0004/