Omikron TRS-80 Boards, NEWDOS+ and Sundry Other Matters (1980) | Hacker News Reader

Omikron TRS-80 Boards, NEWDOS+ and Sundry Other Matters (1980)

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What did USR used to sell as well as modems? 300 baud modems mind you, not fancy v.Everything Couriers yet.

Ad for full height floppy drives and 14" hard drives.

Apple III review. X10 home automation project with circuit diagrams. Now, if only X10 had been followed up with a standard into the TCP/IP years... ;)

BASIC Listings at the back. With explanations of the listings.

I miss Byte, oh and Personal Computer World (UK), Amiga Transactor and Dr Dobbs. ...and the terrible ads!

Oh well, feeling old with my morning coffee.

C being just an occasional reference, with the actual highlights being Assembly, BASIC, FORTH, Fortran and Lisp.

And C was considered a high-level programming language...

Remember the "Don Gall" ads? Holy crap, were they awful!

I used to read Byte as a lad. I never had money or knowledge to really do anything since I was alas, just a lad. I had to wait several years to acquire a C-64. From the present article, it occurs to me there was a special kind of hell, if one did have money and time in that era, to fiddle, endlessly, with peripheals and software, never really doing anything. Dr Pournelled wrote some great books (with Niven) so he at least did get some things done despite the distractions.

I miss Byte. I’m a second-gen programmer and in the late 80s and 90s my dad had a subscription to Byte and a few UK computing trade papers. I’d read it cover to cover even if I didn’t really understand most of the contents, but Jerry’s column always stood out against the rest. He seemed to be a natural communicator.

He was, after all, a professional writer. He brought in the perspective of a user who wants to use the computers and, occasionally, needs to program them. He always tried to be a couple years ahead of the market, using stuff that'd be insanely expensive for just about anyone, but that suppliers sent him because being featured in his column was a great sales driver.

Same. I LOVED Byte back in the late 80s and early 90s. I also read PC Magazine, but Byte was so much better.

I love the web, and the broad accessibility of information, but the way it absolutely destroyed the technical periodical is bittersweet.

Byte was the magazine that had things I dreamed about and pointers to learn about new things. I started reading it in the 80's and lost track sometime in the 90's. It with Antic, Dr. Dobbs Journal, and Creative Computing defined what was computing to me in my jr high and high school years. I don't really think any website has given me the same feelings as those magazines.

It is interesting to compare Byte's 1985 Computer Conferencing issues with what we have now: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-12

[edit: page 181 has an ad that is a real piece of history]

Since the 80's I would eagerly wait for monthly releases of Microhobby, Crash, Amiga Format, DDJ, CUJ, Computer Shooper (UK edition), Gamasutra, Linux Journal, MS Systems Journal.

Now we just have blog posts.

I learned so much good stuff from DDJ and CUJ.

Are you referring to Swyft Card or Raskin? How are either significant, for the uninformed?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7544389

I just thought it was cool to see Raskin and Woz in the same ad post-Macintosh.

Ah ok, yes that's cool now that you've highlighted the context.

As a disconnected aside, I'm a bit sad my first exposure to Jerry Pournelle was when he was a guest on This Week in Tech podcasts. By the time I picked them up, he certainly was long in years and I felt he rambled more than made coherent points. In prime, he would have been great to hear from every few weeks on technology news.

Steve Ciarcia was my big reason for reading Byte. He was an incredibly skilled hardware hacker. I subscribed to Circuit Cellar Magazine after he left Byte. He once built a purpose-built board for calculating and generating fractal images, and you could parallel up the boards to generate the image faster.

Pournelle never did much for me. He spent most of his time rambling about esoteric problems he was having and how he worked around them.

> Pournelle never did much for me. He spent most of his time rambling about esoteric problems he was having and how he worked around them.

Exactly why I liked him. His column was unlike anything else, a geeky grampa doddering around chaos manor.

Oh wow! I had to cringe at the "Why Pay $4000 For A Complete Accounting System" ad. That's probably the worst copy I have seen.

First it rambles on about a very boring history of this company took over that company that licensed this thing that ...

Then just incase you haven't fallen asleep and you still want to buy, they put you off by telling you you'll get bad support and a buggy product.

Then finally past that hurdle, and if anyone is left with their wallet open, thinking of spending their hard earned $100, it inflates the price to $450 because there is some technical dependency on some runtime thingy.

I wonder; Did anyone buy?

Followed by a full-page ad for a Forth interpreter! Those were the days. I suspect many companies like this could make money for lack of competition, but I dunno, I was 10 years old then.

Yeah now there are so many free programming languages, you have to pay me (with $ or an awesome language) to use your interpreter!

It's interesting how free software drove huge advancements. In the early 386 days few people used Unix because a seat license would cost more than the computer.

At first I thought we were attaining a critical mass, when enough free software was available for us to build even more, better free software but now I realize it's more like an exponential curve I can't quite see where it ends.

And if feels great.

The side effect of it is that the majority of RAD like tools are only available in enterprise space, because only those companies are willing to pay for developer tools.

Hence why companies like Qt or JetBrains are selective what they allow with their free versions.

Then we get Electron apps, because many devs don't feel like paying for such tools.

I occasionally thumb through these old magazines, and I'm always impressed with how many small technology businesses were making niche products and placing these ads in the 80's. What I find more astonishing is how geographically diverse they were. For example, of the 14 ads in this article with addresses, only 3 were from the Bay Area.

Yeah but all the ads were bad until well into the 90s. You'd be happy to thumb through them all, searching for a highlight that you could afford, or a terrible ad for some tape game (pg214), that eventually became MS Flight Sim, or just on the way to the listings!

I remember buying FS back in the early 80’s. It was using CGA graphics by then.

I think my favorite ad is the Ceco ORIGINAL SMOKE SCREEN, if only for the...

  FULLY     JUSTIFIED    TEXT
  IN   A   MONOSPACE     FONT
  ALL  OF   IT    CAPITALIZED
  LIKE                  THIS.

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1980-07/1980_07_BYT...

I take it back. Industrial Micro Systems outdid them:

Hard and Fast...

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1980-07/1980_07_BYT...

Do any other old-timers remember HARDHAT Software's WHATSIT? (Wow! How'd All That Stuff get In There)?

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1980-07/1980_07_BYT...

Microsoft had two ads with two different logos!

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1980-07/1980_07_BYT...

Who could forget Smoke Signal Broadcasting or Pickles & Trout?

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1980-07/1980_07_BYT...

"And now the news... CompuServe announces the availability of international, national, and regional news through your personal computer or terminal... A 300-baud modem is all your personal computer or terminal needs to access all the services available via local phone calls in more than 175 North American cities from 6 PM to 5 AM weekdays, weekends and most holidays. And the basic charge is only $5.00 an hour, billed in minute increments, to your charge card. Want more information? Write."

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1980-07/1980_07_BYT...

But you'll need this: "Put your computer in touch with the world. AJ [Anderson Jacobson] makes it possible for only $185 with the A 242 acoustic data coupler."

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1980-07/1980_07_BYT...

Or "A Modem Inside a Telephone. A switched-network, 300 bits-per-second (bps) full-duplex Bell 103/113-compatible modem, housed inside a standard telephone set, is now being produced by Racal-Vadic."

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1980-07/1980_07_BYT...

JADE Computer Products offered Knockout Prices, certified by Kid Jade herself!

"Bargain prices on magnificent magnetic media. 5¼ double sided, double density, box of 10. $39.95"

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1980-07/1980_07_BYT...

If you weren't into the newfangled "glass teletypes", you could get "The DATA-TRANS 1000. A completely refurbished IBM Selectric Terminal with built-in ASCII Interface. $1495"

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1980-07/1980_07_BYT...

It got me interested in the backstory. InfoWorld covered it in 1981:

https://archive.org/stream/Infoworld-1981-01-19#page/n2/mode...

https://archive.org/stream/Infoworld-1981-06-22#page/n5/mode...

Presumably the Peachtree of today (now "Sage 50") traces its lineage back to the COBOL product mentioned in the second article.

Edit: I also turned-up this fun little gem, too: http://deramp.com/downloads/mfe_archive/040-Software/Retail%...

Omikron's ad for the hardware product reviewed in the column (that let TRS-80s run CP/M software) in 1981 is a lot more colorful.

http://www.trs-80.org/omikron-mapper/

And the obituary for George Gardner, the man who founded Omikron. He led a very interesting life.

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/times-standard/obituary.asp...

Killed by CO poisoning from a faulty heater. Wow-- that sucks!

Back then Peach Tree Software was the package. So getting it for $100 would seem like a steal. The context is lost a bit now so it wasn't as bad as it may first appear. Although still not great.

It was 100 per pkg, or all four for 350. The main point was 90% off a competing product.

I found the candor refreshing.

The amazing thing about Byte was the amount of cash it generated in ad sales. Ad spaces cost hundreds or thousands of dollars depending on size, and the magazine was packed full of them. In the 80s it was a real cash cow, generating millions a year after printing and distribution costs. Ad revenue only declined when the Internet began to take over in the 90s.

The other amazing thing is how expensive computers were in real terms. You can add a zero to early 1980s prices to get a rough RPI equivalent. Business systems advertised for >$10k on paper cost serious money - and usually offered an 8-bit CPU running at a few MHz, and 64K of RAM for those willing to stretch their budget.

Wow, memories. A TRS-80 was my first computer at age 16 and I still remember upgrading from 4K (K!) to 16k and wondering what I would ever do with all that memory!

(nitpicking!) I love Jerry Pournelle but he made a little mistake in his text, it's not "chansons du geste" but "chansons d_e_ geste".

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanson_de_geste

He didn't have WP to double-check, cut him some slack. ;) Looking up things in those days often meant a drive to the library.

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