The Trash Computer That Became Your Phone

Stop all that hating - Radio Shack was the stuff of dreams during the time this was available.

You could have just run down to Radio Shack for that 3.5mm adapter.

Had to laugh at the idea of Tandy being a "fly-by-night electronics company". Tandy computers were EVERYWHERE in the 80s.

Having owned, and still own, Sinclair computers with tape loading I can tell you that many systems required the volume of the tape deck to be around the 70-80% range. This prevents the tape deck from possibly making the audio clip. You said yourself that you turned up the volume to the max, this is likely why your games failed to load correctly.

One of Tandy's computers was an Apple ][ clone. My grandfather gave me an apple ][ and the Apple-compatable Tandy (I still have all the floppies) and told me "Learn this, sluggo. this is the future". 40 years later, I am a senior software developer with over a 20 year career in computers and technology.

I guess this is what happens when you put Jesse Pinkman into making a video of retro computers...

So this is how it looks like you have a small interest in retro computing, no clue but money

You don't have 3.5 and 2.5 milimeter jacks... ?😂

"Never ever throw anything away', because you may need it later! Always. My wife hates that I do this...

My boss (an architect) STILL uses one of these, he says he has dozens of new-in-box ones as insurance, he loves it that much. He is super old school. He designed our campus in 1980 and I'm sure he used it then.

I was 17 years old when the TRS-80 Pocket Computer came out. I bought one as soon as I could afford one, at which time I probably made around $2.50/hour so 100+ hours of part-time work. Since I had already been writing BASIC programs on a PDP for a few years before that, all I wanted to do was write code (just like today! 🙂). My high school math class was doing conic sections (Ax^2 + Bxy + Cy^2 + Dx + Ey + F), so to do my homework I just wrote a program that took the six coefficients and would tell you what type of section that it was (circle, ellipse, hyperbola, etc) and its coordinates. I was so happy to do my homework in just few minutes (after hours of coding, of course). The only bad part was that I got a note on my homework that said "show your work!". I didn't care. And even though that was 44 years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday. Did I mention that I love to write code? 🤣

Kids these days. Back in the 80s we did not even have the cables or the docking station and had to type all of the code by hand. And we were grateful!

I have the PC-4, and it works. It was my first computer as a child that nobody else in the family cared about. I learned BASIC on it. Thank you Radio Shack.

Welcome to the wonderful and relaxing world of vintage computing, where everything just magically falls into place. LOL

I got a TRS-80 Model I for Christmas as a young child. It was a defining moment in my life and led to an extremely rewarding 30+ year career in software. Thank you Mom & Dad… and Charles Tandy!

As I was watching you struggle with channel 4 I was thinking to myself, "those devices always had a switch to change the channel, I wonder why that one doesn't have one?" Glad you found it, I'm really old.

I used to have 1 of those pocket computers with all the accessories! I'm a locksmith and wrote some BASIC programs to decode key codes, tell me how to set up locks given master keys and change keys, and some other useful info I needed. I never was interested in the sample games, but often used the BASIC functions when I needed a calculator for long math problems. When I moved up to a 80286 desktop computer, I ported my BASIC programs to it and kept adding features and moving to newer software and hardware. I retired a couple years ago, and the new locksmith had no idea how to get my old programs to work on 64-bit machines.

If you want a better look at 80's pocket computers, I suggest looking up The 8 Bit Guy's video about them, it's much better and from the perspective of someone who was actually around when these pocket computers were widespread.

Well. I'm here to tell you that you absolutely did go back and experience these computers exactly as we did. I remember spending 6 hours trying to get a program to load from cassette tape, the volume had to be just right...too loud or too soft, and the load would fail, of course you wouldn't know it failed until it hit the end block of the program. And I cannot tell you the countless hours of typing in programs from a magazine, only to be rewarded with a program that was far from impressive.... But here's the thing....back then, if it did anything, we were impressed, because computers were brand new...so a computer asking What is your name? And me responding "John" and then the computer replying "Hello, John" was positively mind blowing... It lit a spark, and from there I wanted to learn more, I even learned how to program rudimentary animations on my Sinclair ZX-81 in a whopping 1k of RAM on its horrific membrane style keyboard. It was sheer hell...but I loved it. I still have that ZX-81... I don't know if it still works, but I keep it, because it was my first ever computer.

In case you haven't figured it out, back in those days, cassettes stored sound. So in theory, you should just be able to download sound files and play those from your big computer into any of those other computers, and that should work just fine. All you need is the right audio cable. Typically there were three cables: one for audio out, one for audio in, and one control to start and stop the cassette motor. To load, all you need is one cable.