I wonder if he wants to buy mine for a backup. It’s been packed away in its original box for nearly 30 years.I also have the same floppy drive as in the photo.
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Speaking of retro nostalgia; what kind of chip they got in there, a Dorito?
(edit: that was a mistake; my age hit me like a ton of bricks after I posted that. COMDEX has been dead for 13 years; HP hasn’t been the sort of company the song requires in god knows how long, neither 100GB of RAM nor a flatscreen monitor 40 inches wide are terribly extravagant now, your Commodore 64 is really neato thanks to retrogaming; ‘pentium’ is now one of Intel’s punitive cheapie brands; ‘newsgroups’ are even deader than chatrooms… Fuck.)
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it’s soooooo cute. Just like a tiny 1541
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Very good point. For work like this its pretty crazy to think that someone would have to upgrade the brain every 5 years or so, when all the brain is doing is reading values from sensors. I wonder if in another 30 years someone will be guffawing about how some auto shop somewhere is still using Arduinos.
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I know I guy (well, knew 20 years ago) that make a controller for large low-res or text-only signs (think score board at sports arenas, race track, etc) from a Radio Shack TRS-80.
First one he did was for a local harness racing track. He made a custom circuit board for interfacing to a relay board to drive the high-power lights, and RS-232 for another TRS-80 to send commands to update fields on the board. He would take the case off the TRS-80, mount everything in a large weatherproof cabinet that was affixed near the board.
He was always looking for used/broken/discarded TRS-80 hardware. I passed at least 5 on to him.
I once asked him what his customers thought about using such old, consumer-grade equipment for an important part of his business. Essentially, his reply was “I don’t tell them, they don’t ask, and as long as it works, they don’t care.”
I think he still has systems out there…
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5.25" disks aren’t enormous! They are the normal size as opposed to those tiny shelled things that metastasized from Macs in the second half of the 1980s. 8" disks were the enormous ones.
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We clearly need to donate some money to the Poles.
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I’m pretty sure that this is a summary of how a truly chilling percentage of the Very Important Things that we assume will Just Work actually do work in practice.
It’s a rare system indeed that becomes more confidence inspiring upon closer inspection.
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Maybe they are 8" disk drives, but I wouldn’t want to lift that luggable if they are.
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That would make the keyboard rather uncomfortable as well.
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I could take a picture on my flip phone without having to go through a menu.
It was only about 0.3 megapixels, but quick to shoot and had a funky crappy-lens aesthetic.
It usually takes my current phone at least 30 seconds to get to shooting-ready.
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8"? That’s not a disk, that’s a chad. This is a disc:
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What’s a disk doing in the laundry room? 
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How many bits of storage does that thing have?
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Still works?
Talk about “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Suck that, intended obsolescence.
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We weren’t as sophisticated about building it in back in 1982.
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Old stuff was built to last.
Stuff now is built to break; and that’s fucked up on many levels.
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There are two ways to make people buy new stuff when they don’t really need it. You either make the new thing a cultural “must have” or you limit the old things lifespan. The math behind the latter has become frighteningly precise.
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And was also really expensive. You might be still able to buy stuff that lasts, if you’re willing to pay.
But cheaper and replaceable. And that’s yet another level of fucked-uppery.
“Vimes Boots” strikes again.
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It’s another aspect of the exact same problem. Consumer culture and disposable everything. It keeps the engine of capitalism running.
