Last few months actually I haven’t blogged at all. Mostly because I feel I don’t have readers, but also because I didn’t have much to tell which I though would be worth writing a blog about. But since a few things have changed in the past 3 months, I reckon a new blog post should be made. It will be a short one, because somewhere later this week I’ll have even a bigger update.
To start with end of 2015 when I was busy learning to sing and I found a nice accelerator card for my Amiga 2000 on Amibay giving my A2000 a fast 68030 with coprocessor, a SCSI connection and 4MB additional RAM. I built in this card and it ran, but I didn’t have any SCSI devices (cables rather) so I ordered a SCSI2SD thing plus the necessary cable from amikit which is still not built in today. So, there will be an update on that at some point.
When I was on the bi-monthly Commodore meeting held by ‘Commodore interessegroep‘ I somehow craved to own a Tandy and put Tandy on the map in the Netherlands. I even wrote a Dutch blog about it on Tweakers.net. Especially because Tandy is one of the 3 very first homecomputers back in 1977. Since I already own a Tandy 200 laptop and used to own a Tandy TRS80 Color Computer 2, I figured I wanted to have the latter. So, I started to search for one and actually found one in the Netherlands. After a very long time due Kiala fucking up my package, my brand ‘new’ Tandy arrived (see here). So, my first few months of 2016 is about playing with this beautiful machine and so far I’m filling my Youtube channel with videos of this.
Then, somehow.. I found an elderly person in the Netherlands owning a 1978 Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 complete including ‘Expansion Interface’ and original monitor and loads (and I mean loads) of documentation. So, a 2 hour drive to the other side of the Netherlands and picked up this machine:
As you can see, it’s quite much and the machine isn’t working.
So, after some questioning around I joined the online community Vintage Computer Forum and, more importantly, a Dutch mailinglist with retro computing enthusiast. Up till then, I didn’t know mailing lists were still used but I guess I learn every day.
I asked why the Tandy didn’t boot on this mailing list and I learned that this screen is quite normal, but should disappear when the BREAK-key is pressed (and it doesn’t). Luckily for me, one of the people over there knows that there’s a bi-monthly meeting of TRS80 enthusiasts nearby Amsterdam and he got me in contact with one of the people doing that, also happens to be the creator of one of the many mods done on this Tandy. Upcoming Thurday I’ll attend this meeting and hopefully make a nice blog from this machine.
Thanks for reading and I’d love to read comments (via Facebook, Twitter or drop me a mail) and I hope everybody will join my Retro Computers channel on Youtube, the more subscribers I have, the more I’m gonna make videos.
