What is the best Senior computer?

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

My vote goes for the TRS-80 Color Computer aka the CoCo.

What's yours?

[Deja Q]

1. This one!

[goclark]

2. How much and why

Looks great!

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

6. No idea of price. As to the Why, here's it:

It's SO delightfully hackable it isn't even funny. The entire source of it's ROM OS + BASIC interpreter were published. Not to mention all the schematics. I worked at a company that made a clone of it here in Brazil. Ahhhh, good memories.

[mike_c]

10. when I was in grad school, in the early nineties...

...the TRS-80 was the computer of choice for building remote weather and crop condition monitors for a pest/disease modeling system deployed out of the lab I worked in. They could still be found new in warehouses occasionally, but were mostly purchased used. They were cheap and easy to build custom dedicated systems around.

[Kelvin Mace]

3. I cut my teeth on its brother

The RS Model III

[no name no slogan]

4. ooooo yeah! love the trash-80!

that keyboard was the shizzle!

my senior moment computer was the Timex/Sinclair 1000


shown here with 4k of additional RAM (on the back)

More computer than you'll ever need

[BiggJawn]

11. Yeah, that's the one...Membrane keyboard and all...

Wish I still had it. I could team it with my 5" TFT display and go mobile...

Wait a minute...I got a Crackberry for mobile computing...

[billyskank]

13. That looks very similar to the mighty ZX-81:

[no name no slogan]

14. I think the T/S 1000 was the US version

basically the same machine. i remember mine was very sensitive, and if i bumped it the wrong way the whole damned thing would reboot. since the only 'backup' available was on cassette tape (and it took forever to load), i could never get more than a 50-line BASIC program into memory.

Let's just say when the school got an Apple II, i was in heaven!

[billyskank]

15. Yes the power cords on Sinclair computers were notoriously unreliable

My first computer was the 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Bigger than the ZX-81, and with rubber keys! It also had a shit power cord.



Did you ever see a printer for one of these things? It printed on heat-sensitive toilet roll.

[no name no slogan]

18. never seen a printer before

just pictures. heat-sensitive toilet roll, huh? wow, i would have loved to hand in a term paper printed on that.... :P

[billyskank]

5. The legendary BBC Model B

Those things are fucking indestructible.

[mike_c]

7. my first computer was an original TRS-80....

No keyboard shift (all caps), and a cassette tape player for storage.

on edit-- here's a pic of that model:

[ET Awful]

8. Well, first I had one of these:

Yup, a Commodore Vic-20 witha whopping 5k of RAM and ROM combined :).

Then I had one of these:



Looks about the same doesn't it? That's my beloved Commodore 64.

[billyskank]

9. Now THAT thing had awesome bass!

That SID chip pumped out phat bass like it was going out of fashion. I have a SID chip emulator plugin for Xmms. The tunes to Cybernoid and Cybernoid II (by Maniacs of Noise I believe) were my favourites.

[salvorhardin]

12. Osborne 1

While I had a Timex-Sinclair and a Vic 20 and a Commodore 64, the Osborne 1 has to be one of two of my all time favorite classic micros.

Why yes, that is a 5", 52 column display. Size doesn't matter, right? :-)

My other all time favorite is something I have not been able to find pictures for. I will regret forever that I allowed myself to be talked into selling it. The Digiac. Another CP/M S-100 bus machine. 8" floppie drives and the whole kit weighed about 100 pounds (they don't make power supplies like that anymore).

[no name no slogan]

16. ah yes, the first "luggable" DOS-compatable computer!

I remember the print ads for the Osborne 1 which showed a man stowing it underneath his seat on a plane. amazing for its time....

[salvorhardin]

21. Actually

The Osborne 1 was a CP/M machine. A successor of the Osborne 1, the Vixen, ran MS-DOS.



You might be thinking of Compaq's first computer which was IBM PC/DOS compatible from the start and had a similar form factor to the Osborne 1. In order to create it, Compaq had to reverse engineer IBM's BIOS and this is largely responsible for the PC revolution's exponential growth. After that any company that could reverse engineer IBM's BIOS or license a BIOS from a company that did could build PCs and compete against IBM for price.

[no name no slogan]

22. that's right. The 1 was a cp/m machine

my prehistoric caveman brain is garbling the recent past. :P

[mike_c]

20. I wrote much of my dissertation on one of those....

Cast off by my then-GF's father, IIRC. Replaced it midway through with a REALLY CHEESEY Tandy laptop that someone promptly stole.

[Mizmoon]

17. That brings back the memories - hours of "Bedlam" & "Sands of Eqypt"

I loved those text games!

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

19. And Black Sanctum, Trekboer, Vortex...

(And they weren't QUITE "text"... thay had scenery.)

INVOCARE EPISCOPUS!

[Spock_is_Skeptical]

23. I give the TRS-80 my vote...

[SoCalDem]

24. Here's a site you might like

http://www.theoldcomputer.com/MainMenu.htm