Oh I remember this catalogue well.
My Dad was a computer geek back then and we had a Model 1, then a 3 and a color computer, we even got the Model 100 ‘laptop’. Even after we upgraded to PCs that III kept going, I actually wrote reports on it through high school in the 80s and some in college in the 90s (just 'cause I could 
I finally killed it prototyping a lighting control system and a short sent 120V down its serial cable… literally caught on fire. RIP TRS-80 III
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Everything old is new again. I have the updated version of one of these, and now it makes phone calls!
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I bought the Trash 80 III in Jr. High. Apple II was out and would have been the wiser choice, but was also pricier. Apple was in color and came with a disk drive whereas the default on the TRS-80 (without paying a ton more) was not even a cassette DRIVE, but a cable to connect the computer to your cassette player. There was a text jungle adventure that took 20+ minutes to load. Cartridges would have been better. My classmate got the Apple and mercilessly teased me about my choice. I did learn some BASIC but picked up Apple Basic much faster a few years later when we got a Franklin Ace, which was possibly better built than the Apple itself (blasphemy I know, but whatever).
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You think that’s bad, you should have seen the 5 megabyte hard drive that came a little later. It was $2500, in 1982’s dollars!
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I had one of those – it was my first “computer” (hell, I may still have it in a box somewhere…).
I can still remember creating my first prime factorization code with it.
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A guy at work just gave me a box of TRS-80 stuff…lemme see…here we go. All works too. I wanted to put an RPi in there but I don’t think I can do that.
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It’s weird how much I automatically covet that, given that it’s essentially a useless piece of unattractive garbage and I carry around something that is thousands of times better in every single way.
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I took a computer programming class in high school my freshman year (1984). We had four TRS-80 Model IIIs, three Model IVs, a few Apple ][+ and one ][e, and some weird-ass thing called a Superbrain that looked straight out of The Jetsons.
I liked the Model IVs a lot, but for some reason I preferred to work on the Model IIIs. They had this underdog vibe that meant they weren’t so in demand, and I could use them uninterrupted for longer.
But the BASIC I learned in that class was the last of my formal computer instruction, which was a bummer. My parents bought me an Atari 800XL which I word-processed on for quite a while, but the next brand-new computer I owned was a Lenovo ThinkPad my wife bought me in 2008. For the intervening 20 years, I used secondhand computers that my brother gave me whenever he upgraded.
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When I started typing class, they had just gotten a crap load of model 4s, but they didn’t have any word-processor software yet, so we would just type away at the command line and ignore the error notices… (I think that the software finally came in around mid-semester).
I had saved up and got a printer for my CoCo and asked for word processor software for xmas, but it was back-ordered, so I had to write a basic BASIC program that took input and stored it as a comment-line in the program and then sent it to the printer… I couldn’t quite figure out the printer codes, so everything ended up triple-spaced.
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I haven’t seen it before or since that class. Was almost thinking I dreamed it until I looked it up today. And yeah, looked exactly like I remembered!
My brother in law (a Navy Lt Commander in the Supply Corps at the time) had an Osborne I. Check out that 5" screen:
By Bilby - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11120225
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Hell, it’s what I wishes I was.
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Yes! We had a slot machine game that worked that way. It was both a bug and a feature: IIRC the FCC made them redesign the computer* so as to not give off so much RF interference. (*Or maybe that’s how the Model III came about?)
I had a game called “Dancing Demon” where the sound actually came out thru the cassette player – but not the cassette player’s speaker. I had to plug an earphone into audio-out to hear it; a little later I replaced that with a small amplifier (a Realistic from Radio Shack, natch).[quote=“hhype, post:16, topic:86903”]
I did my homework reports in SCRIPSIT and printed them on the dot matrix printer which the teachers hated.
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We never got the expansion interface, so while we did have SCRIPSIT we had no printer. (I also just remembered that, in addition to the software cassettes, SCRIPSIT had several audio cassettes with tutorials on them.) Instead, I used the Digital computer that my dad brought home from work. However, it had no word processor – all he used it for were spreadsheets, using a program called Multiplan. He figured out a way to format the first column so it was 80 characters wide, and then I could type whatever I was working on, but one row at a time. (Also, no double-quotes, so I had to put them with single quotes ''like this''. (I also wrote my junior theme in Multiplan, but that was a few years later on a Commodore 64. We had a Brother daisy-wheel typewriter and my dad bought some sort of interface cable to go between the two. He found the cable at Toys-R-Us of all places.)
(And to digress even further: that Brother was horrible for hunt-and-peck typists like myself. There was a slight delay between hitting the key and printing the letter and the whole thing would never run above a certain speed. A person who could type well and quickly would always stay ahead of it, which meant not seeing a mistake until later. I typed just barely faster than it would print and that slight out-of-sync always threw me off.)
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Colour?!?!
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Ooooo, a daisy-wheel, look who is all fancy. I miss Multiplan, but my experience with it was on my Mac SE back in school long after the TRS-80 days. Think of all the stuff we did then, that we thought was cool and the future and what we can do now. This singularity thing is on a slow burn, but rising.
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I know right? He told me about it and I was all ready to hack to it pieces and then I saw how good he kept it. Now I don’t think I have the heart. I guess it is a TRS-80 Color Computer I. Never had one back in the day.
