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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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For the USA, the TRS-80 PC-1 was the “The Trash Computer That Became Your Phone”; the rest of the world could enjoy the hardware identical Sharp PC-1210/1211/1212 years earlier

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/11/25

Earlier this year, I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] The Trash Computer That Became Your Phone – YouTube which discusses the Tandy  TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-1, . The video includes a lot of history about Tandy Corporation, Charles Tandy and Radio Shack including quite a few bits I didn’t know yet.

It was part of the Tandy Pocket Computer, and succeeded by the Z80 powered TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-2 (which was actually a rebadged Sharp PC-1500).

The TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-1 itself was also a rebadged Pocket Computer, this time a Sharp PC-1211 powered by a duo of 4-bit CPUs so totally incompatible with the PC-2. Actually none of the Tandy Pocket Computer line were compatible with each other (nor with the desktop TRS-80 which itself was incompatible TRS-80 Color Computer). With the PC-4 and on Tandy even switched to Casio as manufacturer, then back to Sharp for the final PC-8.

Anyway: this video was a trip down memory lane and reliving my 2012 blog post The calculators that got me into programming (via: calculators : Algorithms for the masses – julian m bucknall), and I was glad that by now there are more videos covering the calculator I started with, for instance via [Wayback/Archive] sharp pc-1211 – YouTube:

Plus this overview video [Wayback/Archive] Pocket Computers from the 1980s – YouTube (via [Wayback/Archive] A Computer In Your Pocket, 1980s Style | Hackaday)

They even are to be found on auction sites in working of untested order, like:

The Internet Archive has quite a few books on them (all of them have been OCR-ed):

These are the most relevant collections some of these books are in:

  • [Archive] Manuals: Sharp : Free Texts: Sharp Corporation (シャープ株式会社, Shāpu Kabushiki-gaisha) is a Japanese multinational corporation that is a partially-owned subsidiary of Taiwan-based Foxconn Group. The company was founded in September 1912 in Tokyo and takes its name from the Ever-Sharp mechanical pencil, which was invented by company founder Tokuji Hayakawa in 1915.
  • [Archive] Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 Manuals: A collection of manuals, pamphlets, information leaflets and other materials regarding the Tandy TRS-80.

Repair related:

--jeroen

This entry was posted on 2024/11/25 at 18:00 and is filed under Conference Topics, Conferences, Event, History, Z80. Tagged: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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