Ryan's SepTandy Spectacular! 4: Peripheral Vision Part #1 - The TRS-80's early peripherals

Well it's blogging time again, and It's September again! and it means another SepTandy Spectacular! This year, I'm taking a look at the many peripherals and add on hardware available for each computer.

The TRS-80 connected to the Expansion Interface with various peripherals.

These day's we dont tend to think much about expandability on modern computers, but in the early days of personal computers, many first time user's often got the bare minimum for operation. But when they wanted to expand the machine to more useful things, suddenly there were needs for devices like Printers, Modems, Hard drives, Graphics Tablets and more. I think its important to take a look at peripherals like these because they were important for getting personal computers to evolve from novelty hobbyist devices to mainstream useful appliances.

And this is what the focus is this year, and we begin by taking a look at the TRS 80 Model I, as previously said, it was released August 3, 1977 at a price of US$399 for just the base computer itself, or US$599 with a 12" monitor and a Radio Shack tape recorder. these were really the ONLY peripherals the Model I had at first. However, despite being sold with the option of forgoing the monitor and the tape deck for $399, You needed the monitor as the Model I was not capable of hooking into a standard tv set.

You see, in order to keep the price down Tandy decided to use a proprietary composite video out and bundle it with the monitor. Supposedly there was a special RF Modulator that could convert the signal to work on a standard tv set, but I've never seen one. The TRS-80 had the optional 12 inch Video Display monitor, it launched in 1977 alongside the computer and retailed for $199 Dollars.

The TRS-80 12 inch Video Display Monitor (1977)

The monitor was actually a rebadged RCA  AA121W tv set (Or at least as far as I can tell, as its difficult verify due to little resources for CRT TV models). RCA agreed to supply the sets with the tuner and speakers removed due to others refusing the offer because of Tandy's low initial volume of production.

The RCA AA121W TV Set

On the front you have the screen itself, a small red power button, contrast control knob, brightness control knob, and of course the video cable that plugs into the computer itself

The front of TRS-80 12 inch Video Display Monitor 

On the back you have the model information stickers, Vertical and Horizontal hold knobs, and the power cord.

The back of TRS-80 12 inch Video Display Monitor 

The monitor displayed text in Black and white, with the standard P4 phosphor used in black-and white televisions at the time, which gave the white a faint blue color. Many people complained about the video quality, so Third Party green and amber filters and replacement tubes to reduce eye fatigue were popular aftermarket items, and later monitors came with a green-on-black display.

A TRS-80 monitor with a green screen filter

The other peripheral was of course the CTR-41. While UNLIKE THE MONITOR, if you had the cassette cable you could just use any tape recorder, The CTR-41 is a nicely constructed recorder. It's what you would expect from a late 1970's shoebox style tape recorder, It has a fair bit of weight even if your not running it on batteries, it features a built in microphone for you to use it as a dictation or voice recorder, and it has a built in speaker allowing you to play music from it without hooking up headphones or an external speaker. It may not be a HiFi and missing noise reduction and other tape types, but it works.

The CTR-41 Cassette Recorder (1977)

On the top you have the speaker, tape counter, cassette door, the condenser microphone, and the controls: Rewind, Record, Play, Fast Forward, Stop and Eject.

The top of CTR-41 Cassette Recorder

On the front you have the carry handle, volume knob and a tone switch, more on that later.

The front of CTR-41 Cassette Recorder

On the left side you have the AC input, a 6V DC Power Jack, Earphone in, Auxiliary In, Remote In and Microphone In.

The left side of CTR-41 Cassette Recorder

And on the bottom you have the model info markings and the battery compartment.

The Bottom of CTR-41 Cassette Recorder

The weird thing about the CTR-41 as well as all Radio Shack tape drives is that it doesnt have a proper tone control. Most tape recorders from this era had a knob to control tone levels, but the CTR-41 just has a switch for low and high. I dont know why its like that but maybe because of the remote plug option it's not as much as a problem. Its also missing ALC (OR Automatic Level Control) circuitry making recording for digital-data purposes inconsistent. It also needed to have a dummy plug to cleanly erase tapes.

The CTR-41 wasn't the only tape recorder available for the TRS-80, as there were many other tape recorders and interfaces that followed. In 1980, the CTR-41 was replaced by the CTR-80 and CTR-80A which added ALC and were better suited for use with the TRS-80. The CTR-80 and CTR-80A are identical only the 80A has better voltage spike protection, and the CTR-80 was branded under the Realistic, whereas the 80A had the Radio Shack Brand.

Left to right: the CTR-80 and CTR-80A Cassette Recorders (1980)

One big problem that tape storage had was speed. Early Level I units loaded and saved onto tape at a rate of 250 Baud and the later Level II units loaded and saved onto tape at a rate of 500 Baud making load and save times taking around 2 to 6 minutes depending on size. as a result there were a few third party products that increased the baud rate the first was The TC-8 Cassette System by JPC Products, introduced in 1980,  at a retail price of $69.95 for a kit or a $99.95 fully assembled.

An ad for The TC-8 Cassette System (1981)

This plugged into  the Model I expansion bus and by plugging in a cassette recorder, you could store up to 300K on just 30 minute cassette tape! It increased the baud rate from 500 to nearly 3000 baud, making it incredibly fast and reliable.

There was also The FASTLOAD Cassette Interface by PMC, also released in 1980, at a retail price of $188.00.

An ad for The FASTLOAD Cassette Interface (1980)

It was essentally a modified CTR-41 cassette recorder with the fast forward always on. by plugging it into the expansion interface and typing in a SYSTEM command, the FASTLOAD would add a new loading routine mapped to the LOAD command. While saving had no advanytage, the load comand  could load programs at around 1K per second, a speed which was competitive with disk for small programs. The FASTLOAD interface was also unique in that it used the exact same cassette format as Level II BASIC, so there was nothing to convert.

The Last tape interface we'll look at is The BETA-80 By MECA, released around 1979 at a price of $499.00 for the first drive and $270.00 for additional drives.

An ad for BETA-80 (1982)

Unfourtionatly no pictures of a unit survive so We dont know what it looked like, but from descriptions, it was a fairly small unit, measuring around 8″ by 4″ and weighing about six pounds. The cassette tape was inserted at the top and there was an on/off switch on the back. The BETA-80 didn’t require an Expansion Interface but plugged directly into the Model I I/O bus. Up to four BETA-80 drives could be installed at one time. It worked similarly to a disk drive and stored data digitally, much like Commodore and Atari did.

However all of these systems came out much later, as for the original 3 months on the market most people were fine with the monitor and tape drive. But it didnt take long before more options came along with the introduction of the expansion interface, and will talk about that next time. This concludes Part 1 of the fourth Septandy Spectacular, join me next time as we move forward to 1978, and take a closer look at the Expansion Interface, its add ons and alternatives and disk drives.