Comments on: Radio Shack computer catalog from 1983

By: Joshua Tewell

Joshua Tewell — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 05:04:00 +0000

And I reiterate my original point. I’m so sorry that you have to spend a couple minutes per X restarting your computer. There are plenty of instabilities in Windows, but complaining about the most trivial of all is just silly.

By: BillStewart2012

BillStewart2012 — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 04:29:00 +0000

You couldn’t run 1200 bits per second on an acoustic coupler. They were usually 300 baud by the 1980s, though occasionally you’d have a need for 110 or 75 baud. (I think the terminals for deaf people ran 75 baud Baudot code.)

By: BillStewart2012

BillStewart2012 — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 04:20:00 +0000

Another thing you couldn’t assume was being able to find an electrical wall socket close enough to a phone to be able to use the portable terminals. In an office you’d be ok, but in an airport it was often really difficult (and the terminals didn’t run on batteries… :-)

By: BillStewart2012

BillStewart2012 — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 04:17:00 +0000

Around 1990 I was working on a project at another company that didn’t let us connect computers to their network for (fairly legitimate) security reasons, far enough from home that the lack of email access was a real problem.

I was able to negotiate with their security people to let me bring in a TI Silent 700 and connect it through their PBX (after digging it out of the back of the lab closet and finding most of the keys.) It was dumb enough they decided it wasn’t a security threat, and hard-copy output at 300 baud was boring but good enough to read email with.

And it definitely couldn’t run the then-popular application “Jerusalem B” :-)

By: BillStewart2012

BillStewart2012 — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 04:11:00 +0000

Not for me. I first met the Nasty Little Dwarf in the basement of Cory Hall at Berkeley, watching somebody use a CRT to talk to a PDP-11. (On the other hand, I had played too many hours of Star Trek on a Model 33 Teletype on an earlier PDP-11 in high school.)

By: OtherMichael

OtherMichael — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 02:44:00 +0000

The AS400 guys at my last job used to point out that they’d reboot their machines every 4 months “just in case.”

By: Joshua Tewell

Joshua Tewell — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 01:55:00 +0000

lol @ complaining that your computer likes to be restarted weekly. What a taxing chore that must be.

By: OtherMichael

OtherMichael — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Unless it is…. reliable.

you know, doesn’t nag to be rebooted once a week “for optimal system stability” or whatever. Thanks, Windows7!

By: taserian

taserian — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:12:00 +0000

I used to have one of these; a friend of my father’s purchased it for way more than it was worth, believing it to be a full-fledged computer. When we found out that it was just a connector, he gave it to me, knowing that i’d enjoy it.

It had a switch to set the speed for either 110 or 300 baud. The paper was similar to paper rolls used for older fax machines. I rcall that the print head was very thin compared to my Epson dot-matrix.

By: milovoo

milovoo — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:42:00 +0000

I still have the complete rolls of thermal paper from my first learning how to play ADVENTure to finally solving it.

There are times when I’m staring at this massive flatpanel with wireless keyboard and mouse that I miss the TI Silent-700 days.

By: smallteam

smallteam — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 14:25:00 +0000

My first word processor was also SCRIPSIT. Even then it seemed less than ideal — the screen on the TRS-80 we had wouldn’t display the entire width of the page, so to proofread a document, I printed it out, then entered any corrections. All in all, it was still better than messing with White-Out or correction tape.

By: Chris Melchers

Chris Melchers — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 12:59:00 +0000

TRSDOS – the first OS I ever used. SCRIPSIT – the first word processor. To an 11-year-old, that felt like the command deck of USS Enterprise at the time.

By: tubacat

tubacat — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 07:20:00 +0000

I remember using an acoustic coupling modulator-demodulator at 300 baud, and watching the l e t t e r s c o m e c r e e p i n g o u t …..

By: Gyrofrog

Gyrofrog — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 06:33:00 +0000

Sheesh, $2495 for a 5MB hard drive.

I had (actually, still have) a Model I, bought it from my cousin 30 years ago for $300. My dad put up $200 and I paid the rest. It had what I liked to call a “cassette drive.” We paid someone another $100 to upgrade it up to Level 2 Basic (and a whopping 16K of RAM) and add lowercase letters. Problem was that after he finished, we had to press “SHIFT” to type in lowercase. Granted, it has no moving parts but it has outlasted a half-dozen or so other computers that I’ve owned in the meantime.

EDIT: I had the “Haunted House” and “Dancing Demon” games on page 20. The latter was, I guess, like a sequencer. By the end of 1983 or early 1984 those games might have cost “only” $2.00.

By: morcheeba

morcheeba — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 01:47:00 +0000

15 pounds of lightness isn’t cheap! :-)

By: Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 01:33:00 +0000

Accoustic modens are seen In the 1999 movie Fight Club and implied in The Matrix. And there is no internet, because the stories were written a couple years earlier

By: SomeGuyNamedMark

SomeGuyNamedMark — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 23:17:00 +0000

Kitch is fun but not if you have to rely on it.

By: SomeGuyNamedMark

SomeGuyNamedMark — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 23:15:00 +0000

I once tried using a teletype with an early chat program at my university for fun. It was going nonstop trying to keep up, especially when I made the mistake of telling people what I was doing and they started bombarding me with messages.

By: B E Pratt

B E Pratt — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 23:02:00 +0000

Ah! Good to see that Radio Shack was practicing obsolescence even then ;)

By: B E Pratt

B E Pratt — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 22:59:00 +0000

Hee. Actually, they are not over. Just wait a couple of years or so ’cause right now I think we are all the living embodiment of Future Shock.

By: Brian Easton

Brian Easton — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 21:54:00 +0000

On the next page over they are advertising a 1200 baud modem.

By: ROSSINDETROIT

ROSSINDETROIT — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 21:22:00 +0000

Yeah, that looks like the acoustic coupler terminals I used in college in the late ’70s. By the time I was studying programming in 1980 they were obsolete for fixed location use. Certainly used only for portable applications. Today I stay in touch with my business network from anywhere in the world with a laptop and a cell modem. And it’s still a pain to haul it around on airplanes.

By: leidentech

leidentech — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 21:15:00 +0000

I’m almost positive the Silent 700 I was using in 1982 was 300 baud.

By: Andrew Singleton

Andrew Singleton — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 20:46:00 +0000

300 baud. I don’t think 150 baud existed in the 80′s.

By: James Penrose

James Penrose — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 20:03:00 +0000

Lots of places didn’t have modular jacks and multi-line/ pbx business phones definitely did not, nor pay phones. This beast would work with almost any phone that could fit into the cups.

You manually dialed in and when the squealing started, you jammed the handset into the coupler.

Could not even assume tone dialing back then.

By: James Penrose

James Penrose — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 20:00:00 +0000

It was, they did.

By: nixiebunny

nixiebunny — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 19:45:00 +0000

You mean the FORTRAN compiler.

By: MonkeyBoy

MonkeyBoy — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 19:32:00 +0000

It may be telling that this Radio Shack offering is from 1983. In 1981, Hays introduced the Smartmodem – FCC certified for direct connection, relatively cheap ($299), and easy to use. This replaced many fixed location modems that previously used acoustic couplers. So there may have been a glut of acoustic couplers on the market. But still there was a need for portable terminals for people on the road.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/Hayes_300_Baud_Smartmodem_02.jpg/300px-Hayes_300_Baud_Smartmodem_02.jpg

By: 100_billion_planets

100_billion_planets — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 19:29:00 +0000

So… This was like a terminal (a la Linux/OS X) on paper? Better not have the Java compiler set to verbose…

By: dr

dr — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 19:10:00 +0000

By 1983 this was already obsolete, though RS didn’t know it. The short time-to-obsolescence cycle that we understand today was just starting to take hold. Inexpensive modems which didn’t require a coupler went back at least to 1981, and relatively portable “appliance” home computers with a serial port that Hayes or Anchor modems could plug into were already common (I could afford one on a graduate TA’s salary, and wrote my dissertation on it in ’82-83.)