[Milsurplus] Five dollar stuff

[Kenneth G. Gordon]

Ray Fantini wrote:

> generation PC or XT, I have a couple old IBM fifty-one hundred series
> 8088 systems and where everyone may consider them useless just think
> about it. That is the first of the series of modern desktop systems;
> almost everything after was influenced by it, and was produced in the
> thousands.

Sorry. The first of the modern desktop PCs was, believe it or not, the 
Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1. Even IBM's vaunted 8080 copied it. The 
first IBM PCs had 16K of RAM and a cassette port...just like the TRS-80 
Model 1 did several years before...AND a separate monitor, keyboard, 
and CPU, just like the Model I

Of course Radio Shack couldn't market their way out of a paper bag, 
and didn't know what they had for many months. At one time, they were 
6 months behind on orders for the Model 1.

I used a TRS-80 Model 4P for years after the IBM's came out. Heck, the 
TRS-80 even ran the exact same Basic, and the spreadsheet I used for 
our business used the identical command set as Excel does today. 
Further, the Word Processor I used, Allwrite, was far ahead of Word 
Perfect, let alone MS-Word, and did it all in 64 K of RAM.

I finally graduated to a 486 under duress, and found it only marginally 
faster than the TRS-80 4P.

If I knew where to get a decent packet or amateur radio software for the 
TRS-80, I would be using it today.

I still have two 4Ps.

Ken W7EKB