Happy TRS-80 Day. Side Note: I Don't Have Alzheimer's.
- Rich Washburn
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
I had no idea today was TRS-80 Day.
I found out the same way we are apparently required to learn about history now: through one of the only genuinely useful things social media still does, which is randomly placing something in front of you that unlocks a 40-year-old memory.
The post said that on August 3, 1977, Tandy announced the original TRS-80, one of the first mass-produced personal computers. I saw "TRS-80" and immediately thought:
I had one of those. Mine was a TRS-80 Model 4, the big all-in-one beige machine with the keyboard, monitor and disk drives built into the same enclosure. Green screen.
Two full-height 5¼-inch floppy drives. And when I say full-height, I mean these things were roughly the size and weight of masonry products.
There was no internal hard drive. The computer ran on floppy disks, which meant programs, files and the operating system itself all lived on thin magnetic squares that had to be inserted manually. At some point, I decided this arrangement was unacceptable. So I removed both original floppy drives. In the top bay, I installed two half-height drives: one 5¼-inch drive and one 3½-inch drive.
For younger readers, the 3½-inch floppy is the physical object represented by the save icon. Yes, the little square button you still click to save a file was once an actual thing. No, it was not 3D-printed. No, it did not connect through Bluetooth. And no, it did not hold very much. The fact that we still use it as the universal symbol for saving is increasingly like using a butter churn icon for food delivery.
Below those drives, I installed a 10-megabyte hard drive. Ten megabytes. Today, your phone can create a photograph larger than the entire drive. At the time, however, 10 megabytes felt like infinite storage. I could not imagine ever filling it. This was adorable.
I also replaced the green screen with an amber screen because amber was obviously better. There was no technical analysis behind this decision. Amber simply made the computer look more like serious equipment and less like something used to manage inventory at a pharmacy.
Then there was the printer. I believe it was a daisy-wheel printer, although it may have been dot matrix. What I remember with absolute certainty is that printing anything sounded like a machine gun fight occurring inside a filing cabinet. You did not casually print a document. You initiated a mechanical event.
All of this happened sometime around 1983 or 1984. At least, that was my memory. I was born in 1974, which would have made me eight or nine years old. That seemed suspiciously young, so after seeing the post, I copied it into ChatGPT and started telling the story. I remembered the Model 4...I remembered the drives...I remembered the 10-megabyte hard disk...I remembered changing the screen from green to amber...I remembered the printer declaring war on paper.
Then ChatGPT checked the timeline. The TRS-80 Model 4 was introduced in April 1983. My memory was almost exactly right. So that was nice. It was a fun little nostalgic moment, but it was also reassuring confirmation that I apparently do not have Alzheimer's. At least not when it comes to obsolete storage architecture. I may forget why I walked into a room, but apparently the specifications of a computer I dismantled more than 40 years ago remain safely backed up. Priorities.
Looking back, I love that I never really thought of the computer as something finished.
It came with two giant floppy drives, so I replaced them with three drives in two formats.
It came with a green screen, so I made it amber. It came without a hard drive, so I put one inside. That was just what computers were to me. Things you opened. Things you changed. Things you occasionally broke while trying to improve them. Mostly, though, I remember how much I loved that machine. The amber glow. The floppy disks. The enormous 10-megabyte hard drive. The printer violently typing one letter at a time. All of it.
So, happy TRS-80 Day. And congratulations to my brain for preserving the important files, even if the directory structure is becoming a little questionable.
Rich Washburn is a technologist and strategist working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, and capital. He is Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital.