More new toys

On a whim, I picked up a Commodore Plus/4.

This was Commodore's attempt at breaking into the business/productivity market, but it was too little, too late.

Only 64K max - when the IBM compatibles could go to 640K

40 column screen - when the standard was 80 in this market.

But they did correct some of the glaring issues that the Commodore 64 had: Mainly BASIC 4.0 that the Commodore PET had before discontinued (The C-64 had BASIC 2.0).  BASIC 4.0 had disk commands (like DIRECTORY and DLOAD).  But they enhanced it even further to allow you do to graphics and sounds from BASIC - as opposed to programming the SID and VIC yourself with POKEs.

Unfortunately, there was no SID or VID.  Meaning lower quality sound and no sprites.  So the Plus/4 wasn't a gaming machine.

And the market was moving to desiring IBM compatibility.  So the Plus/4 wasn't around long.

And I finally found my Holy Grail: A TRS-80 Model I.

I was able to pick one up locally at a reasonable price with working monitor!

No power supply, so I have those parts on order.  I hope I can get it working again.

But the hatch over the reset button was intact!  Usually these were lost over time.

New Toy - DevTerm

My latest toy arrived this week:  A DevTerm A04 from ClockworkPi.

Quick description (if you don't want to follow the link and read for yourself):

This is a small computer with a TRS-80 Model 100 form factor.  It runs Linux (Armbian) and uses a Raspberry PI compute module.

It comes as a kit (pretty much all snap together) that you have to assemble, but it's simple.

Even before it arrived, I was a little disappointed.  When I purchased it, I thought I would be buying something about the size of my Tandy 102.  The reality is that it's about 1/2 of that - meaning mostly that the keyboard is very cumbersome for my adult-size hands.  No touch typing.  All hunt-and-peck.  So much for using it as a little laptop.

When it actually arrived, I was impressed by the ease of assembly and it worked right away.

So I copied over a bunch of stuff that I use on my other Pi's and found that many of the programs just don't work.  "No problem," I thought.  "I'll just recompile them."  But no.  I got some really strange compile errors (like duplicate definitions of objects).  I didn't want to deal with those right now, so I just deleted them.

Unfortunately, some of them were the programs that I use to call BBSs and read BBS messages off line.  So another thing that I can't use this toy for.

One cool thing it came with was a little thermal printer (think store receipt printer) and the paper that I bought for it came yesterday.  So I gave it a shot.  I didn't expect too much from it and it met my expectations.  You won't want to use this for program listings, that's for sure.  But it works and prints clearly.

It's a little frustrating.  On one hand, I can't find any fault with what I purchased.  It does exactly what it promised it would do.

On the other hand, I'm really struggling to find a place for this in my normal computer use.