[ale] Need Tractor Feed Dot Matrix printer

tfreeman at intel.digichem.net tfreeman at intel.digichem.net
Fri May 27 11:58:12 EDT 2005


On Fri, 27 May 2005, Sean Kilpatrick wrote:

> On Friday 27 May 2005 06:52 am, aaron wrote:
> | Your list of 1980's era computer contemporaries relying on Basic might 
> have 
> | also included the Texas Instruments Home Computer, the TI-99 (1981), 
> though 
> | those were 16 bit systems as well.
> 
> 
> Weren't the first Trash-80s 8-bit boxes? They came with the same
> cassette tape drives and low-density, single-sided, 5.25 floppy
> drives as the Commodores and the Ataris.

As I recall, TRS-80 was considered an 8-bit system, as it was based upon 
the Z-80 processor. The earliest systems shipped with only cassette tape 
drives, with floppy drives available later. The Z-80 used an 8-bit word, 
but used 16 bit addressing. The processor of the Apple II was truely 
8-bit, but that opens up a whole new can of wormy discussion. 8-).

Floppy drives of the era had a tremendous range of formats, styles, 
desities, etc. Hard sectored, soft sectored, 8 inch, 5.25 inch, what have 
you.


Radio Shack also released a TRS style machine based upon the 69000 which 
ran a very early version of Xenix if I recall correctly.

> 
> Sean
> 
> 

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