Another repair project that I’ve had sitting around for quite a while is a TRS-80 floppy drive. It was another “untested” item that I got for a reasonable price off eBay. When it arrived I hooked it up and it didn’t work. A little bit of investigation and I found that the spindle motor wasn’t turning on. Again I got distracted with something else and put the project aside for another time. Precariously balancing I didn’t want to have to test the drive by...

With the TRS-80 Model II working one of the first things I did with it was to send the world’s first tweet from a TRS-80 Model II. To do that I used Kermit for CP/M. World's first tweet from a @RadioShack #TRS80 Model II made in 1979! https://t.co/5trIKlhBqW pic.twitter.com/2vJffAAhGb — Chris Osborn (@FozzTexx) June 2, 2016 The TRS-80 Model II support in Kermit is missing hardware flow control support however which means that it’s very prone to dropping...

My TRS-80 Model II Last weekend one of my usual sources of inspiration, @duhproject, received a Commodore 128. A lot of people on Twitter started talking about  their  128s, so I had to get mine out too. I thought it would be interesting to try out a true 80 column terminal program under CP/M since it was something that the 128 could do that that 64 doesn’t. It didn’t take long before I decided that running CP/M from a 5.25” drive wasn’t “CP/M...

A lot of the auctions I win on eBay are for items that are listed as “untested, as-is, for parts or repair.” While the sellers will post lots of pictures, they often won’t do any kind of research or investigation of what they are selling. This is great for me because 9 times out of 10, the thing I bought actually turns out to work just fine and doesn’t need any repair at all. And with computers it’s not unusual to find some nice upgrades have been installed that...

A few months ago I purchased a a TRS-80 Model 1 off of eBay. The seller had listed it with a $400 Buy It Now and $40 shipping. It had been up for a long time, and I figured why not and made him an offer of $60 expecting to be ignored or rejected. A few hours later though I got an email saying the seller had accepted my offer. A TRS-80 with monitor for only $100 shipped! But it didn’t have a power supply. I was hoping I could figure out a workaround. My cobbled power cable I made...