In the heyday of the TRS-80, they looked like this: http://mew3.us/images/vintagecomputer/trs80m3.jpg
Then Radio Shack came out with the later TRS-80 models (as pictured) attempting to move into the business market. Never got traction.
The IBM PC was the serious business computer. I don't think you could say it was superseded by the Mac. The Mac was for artist types and relatively expensive.
Then the PC clones came along and the Mac was marginalized.
The IBM PC was the serious business computer.
I don't think you could say it was superseded
by the Mac. The Mac was for artist types and
relatively expensive.
The IBM PC was the serious business computer.
IBM PC's were stand alone for quite some time. We had many "bake offs" between Model 16's and a couple of IBM PC's with arcnet or other hodge-podge solutions and win most of the time.
When you have an office with 8 people in it and 4 people need to get into A/R and several need access to G/L for financials the TRS-80 Model 16's with Xenix (UNIX) were great solutions.
I don't say this as a FanBoi I say it as someone who was there and sold and supported them for a long time. What Tandy failed to do was understand the shift in the market to networked systems and they died almost over night when IBM PC's became more affordable AND networked with reasonable software allowing multiple people to work on the same stuff.
That's a completely different picture from where I lived. The Mac was a curiosity that you'd come across every now and then but pcs were everywhere.
My first computer was a ColecoVision ADAM, around Christmas 1984, which was really a horrible choice -- never shipped in large quantities, and discontinued a month later (which is why it was cheap). An older or less capable machine with a larger userbase would have been a whole lot better. I hate that I missed out on Apple II, C64, and TRS-80 culture.
Fortunately I went to a crazy gifted/talented pull-out program once a week which had a lab full of Mac 512k (and later, plus and SE) (for a public school in Pennsylvania!), and even better, there was a modem. I went out of my way to be there as much as I could (skipping regular classes to "work on projects" there, etc.). Eventually I got a dumb terminal and modem of my own. Mmm, VAX/VMS and Cyber 205.
We installed a lot of these machines for many years while PC's were just beginning to be "interesting".
My personal favorite of that era is the TRS-80 model 100, of which I own several. I give them to my kids when they turn 10. Best notebook keyboard of that era (and periodically, since then).
It was the ROM asking you how much memory you wanted to allocate for BASIC variables. You could tune this for various programs and/or if you were planning on running machine language programs you wanted to have BASIC get out of the way and leave your program more memory.. :)