Welcome back to part 3 of my fourth SepTandy Spectacular. In the last post we took a closer look at the TRS-80's Expansion Interface, clones, and disk drves along with disk drive add ons. In this post we'll have a look at the two other types peripherals of perifereals that could be used with the Expansion Interface: Printers and Modems, starting with printers.
A listing of all availible printers in the 1981 Radio Shack Computer Catalog
Now sure, today printers aren't the most well liked pieces of computer hardware, but at the time, getting data from a computer screen to paper was actually vital for some applications, especially for business use, and for programmers to get a better view of the program they were working on to correct mistakes and troubleshoot errors.
Radio Shack sold a wide variety of printers for the TRS-80 for every budget from $499 dollars to up to $2,960 dollars, with each using vairious different printing methods with each having its advantages and disadvantages.
The first printer Radio Shack sold for the TRS-80 Model I was The TRS-80 Screen Printer. It was released in March 1978, about 6 months after the TRS-80 was introduced, for $599.00. The printer itself was actually an OEM version of the Rotary Printer manufactured by SCI Systems, Inc. of Huntsville, Alabama.
A listing for the The TRS-80 Screen Printer in the 1979 Radio Shack Catalog
Now while it technically is a printer, it doesnt work exactly how you would expect. As you could guess from the name, the Screen Printer could print the contents of the TRS-80 screen and nothing else. It was fairly small, being not much larger than the paper it printed on, and to me it somewhat looks like an electric pencil sharpener. Theres not much to the device on the front, thereses just a curved slit fdor the paper, a power light and a "PRINT" switch.
The front of The TRS-80 Screen Printer
And on the back you have the model information sticker the power cord, the edge connector, and the fuse.
The back of The TRS-80 Screen Printer
It was unique in that it connected directly to the TRS-80 Model I itself without the Expansion Interface. Because of that, it could work on any Model I, from the early 4K cassette-only Level I models to fully speced 48K Level II unit with floppy drives. In fact, the Screen Printer is the only printer that Radio Shack sold that works with the Level I based TRS-80 Model I's.
As for how it printed, The TRS-80 Screen Printer was an Electrostatic printer. It worked by using a special 4 inch wide roll of paper coated in aluminum. When the printer is engaged, the print head printed the contents of the screen onto the paper by burning the aluminum coating revealing a black backing underneath.
The Screen Printer had many advantages, for one thing, it could print very fast for its time at 2,200 characters per second. It was so fast that SCI Systems claimed the Rotary Printer could print Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 3/4 of a second and the entire Constitution in 12 seconds! It also didnt fade under light and heat, and photocopied easily.
The downside was that the papers aluminum coating tended to wear off with handling, and the printer accessed the Model I hardware at a low level, which lead to compatibility issues with later versions of the Radio Shack Expansion Interface. The solution was a special buffered cable (item number AW-2340) that connected the Screen Printer to the Model I, which Radio shack provided free when users exchanged their older Screen Printer cables. The Screen Printer was not available for long as it only sold from 1978 to 1980 due to high price.
Soon the Screen Printer was replaced with The TRS-80 Quick Printer, also released in 1978, for $499.00. The printer was also an OEM version of an existing printer, in this case, the Centronics Microprinter P1.
A listing for the The TRS-80 Quick Printer in the 1980 Radio Shack Catalog
On the front, there's the power switch, power light, paper empty light, select button, paper feed button, and the actual paper troff itself.
The front of The TRS-80 Quick Printer
On the back you have the Centronics Parallel Printer port and the power cord.
The back of The TRS-80 Quick Printer
And on the bottom is the model information stickers and rubber feet.
The bottom of The TRS-80 Quick Printer
Much Like the Screen Printer, the Quick Printer was also an Electrostatic printer, and worked the same way by burning away aluminum coating. Only with the quick printer, in addition to the uniqe smell of the aluminum coating burning on the paper, it was also possible to see the sprarks from the coating burns in a dark room. However while the paper it used was similar to the Screen Printer, it was incompatible with it.
But also like the Screen Printer, it suffered from the same drawbacks with the paper's coating being susceptible to flaking. So most users tended to hadle printouts by the edges to avoid this. The Quick Printer ended up being a little more popular than the Screen Printer, but soon it was replaced.
In 1979, Radio Shack introduced the Quick Printer II (catalog number 26-1155) for a price of $219. Despite the similar name and also being an Electrostatic printer, this one was designed and and built by Radio Shack, rather than being an OEM'd device. The paper was narrower at 2 3/8 inches wide and was cheaper than the Original Quick Printer paper at $3.95 for a package of two rolls as opposed to $16.95 for 3 rolls.
A listing for the The TRS-80 Quick Printer II in the 1980 Radio Shack Catalog
On the front, there's a paper feed wheel, the paper troff and a power LED.
The front of The TRS-80 Quick Printer II
On the right side you have 2 switches, the first is for selecting the print mode (Choosing between ON LINE or Ready, OFF LINE or Not Ready, and reset), and the other for selecting the type of printer connection between the Expansion Interface bus, Centronics Parralell, or RS232 Serial.
The right side of The TRS-80 Quick Printer II
On the back is the card edge connectors, the power switch and the serial port.
The front of The TRS-80 Quick Printer II
And on the bottom is the model information stickers, the rubber feet, and the power cord.
The bottom of The TRS-80 Quick Printer II
The Quick Printer II was unusual in that there were 3 ways to hook it up to the Model I: The Model I bus card-edge connector (Just like the TRS-80 Screen Printer did), the parallel printer port on the Radio Shack Expansion Interface, oran RS-232 serial port. The only cable that came with the Quick Printer II was the card-edge connection cable. The parallel printer cable (catalog number 26-1406) was sold separately, and retailed for $19.95 dollars.
While radio shack continued to sell the Quick Printer II until 1982, they continued to sell paper fro both the Quick Printer and Quick Printer II until 1990! Not a bad run for an Electrostatic printer!
However one big problem that all these 3 printers had is that the required special paper, it couldn't print onto regular copy paper. Not only was the quailty of the paper not sutable for business use, but it was too small for working with documents.
Enter the Dot Matrix Printer, Probably the most common type of printing technology used in home computer printers during the 80's. It worked by using a series of pins that push an ink-soaked ribbon against the paper. The pins are tiny metal rods driven by an electromagnet or a solenoid held in with a guide plate called a ribbon mask holder, with the computer sending signals to the head to shape the pins into each character to be printed on the page.
An Illustration of how a dot matrix printer works
Radio Shack offered a Dot Matrix Printer along side the Screen Printer as well, That printer was the TRS-80 Line printer, released in 1978, for $1299 dollars with either a friction feed or a tractor feed.
A listing for the The TRS-80 Line Printer in the 1979 Radio Shack Catalog
Both versions work the same way, you inserted a sheet of fanfold paper into the back, feed it trough the sprocket holes with the knob on the side, and started printing. It used a 7 pin dot matrix print head and could print at a rate of 10 to 16.5 characters per inch, with a maximum print density of 132-character lines at 21 lines per minute.
And if you were an owner of a cassette based Model I and couldn't afford an Expansion Interface, Radio Shack also introduced the Model I Printer Interface Cable in 1979, for $59 dollars, which would allow you to connect a Quick Printer I or Line Printer I directly to the Model I via the Expansion Bus.
A listing for the The TRS-80 Model I Printer Interface Cable in the 1979 Radio Shack Computer Catalog
One advantage that Dot Matrix had was that due to its a mechanical nature, it was possible to use it to create both carbon and carbonless copies of a document, it also had pretty inexpensive print output costs, making it appealing to business users.
The biggest disadvantage of the Line Printer was that it couldn't print the TRS-80s Block Character Set, it could only produce text making its usage for printing graphics limited. Luckily there was a third alternative, The MX-80 By Epson, released in October of 1980, retailing for $650 dollars.
An ad for the Epson MX-80 (1980)
Of course today Epson is still well known as a computer printer manufacturer, but back in 1980, The MX-80 was their first printer to have any success.
Epson themselves have a pretty long history as they weren't always a printer company, they were founded in 1961 as Shinshu Seiki Co., and got their start making precision watch parts as a subsidiary of Daini Seikosha Co., better known as Seiko. In 1964, Seiko was selected to be the official time keeper for the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, but since a printing timer was required to time events, Shinshu Seiki started developing an electronic printer to do so.
Eventually they decided to take the development work they did and make into a commercial product. The result was the The EP-101, launched in September of 1968, and was the first electronic miniprinter for printing figures and symbols.
The success lead them to develop more printers, and by 1975, they started to market them under the name Epson. The name came from the EP in the EP-101, and SON to signify they were the next generation versions of he EP-101.
In 1977, they got into manufacturing Dot Matrix Printers for Personal computers, starting with the Model 10. but at $2,260 dollars, it had limited appeal. They later made the TX-80 (Also known as the TP-80 in Japan), which was released in 1978, and was a 7-pin dot-matrix printer that was designed to be used primarily with Commodore PET, and was also OEMed to Commodore as the Commodore 4022. While it was a little less expensive than the Model 10 at $799 dollars, it still did not sell well in the US.
The Commodore 4022, the Commodore OEM version of the TX-80 (1978)
But the MX-80 was different, Not only because it was even cheaper and was a higher quality 9 pin head instead of a 7 pin head, but also because it was easy to replace the print head after it broke down and could print in 40, 80, 66 or 132 columns in multiple type fonts. It was also designed to work out of the box with the TRS-80 as the TRS-80s Block Character Set was built into ROM and could be enabled or disabled with the flip of DIP switch.
Now the MX-80 wasn't designed to be used ONLY with the TRS-80, being that it had a standard Centronics Parallel connector, it could be used on a wide variety of computers. In fact the MX-80 was really the first computer printer as we would consider it today, being that it was the first consumer dot-matrix printers that had mass critical success, and was a popular printer of choice for the Apple II, The Commodore PET, various CP/M machines like the Osborne 1 and Kaypro II, and was even OEMed to other manufactures to sell it with their own computers like Texas Instruments (Who sold their version as the PHP 2500 TI Impact Printer) and most notably IBM, who sold their own version as the IBM 5152, with the 5152 being the first official printer available for the IBM PC.
Left to right: The Epson MX-80, The TI PHP 2500 TI Impact Printer, and the IBM 5152
But the MX-80 was very popular with the TRS-80 and it was very common for programs to have MX-80 support. Later on in 1981, Epson introduced a ROM upgrade called Graftrax-80,which added new features like bitmapped graphics, a new italic font, and the ability to redefine escape characters. This was followed up by Graftrax-Plus in 1982, which kept the bitmapped graphics and italic font of the Graftrax-80, but added superscript and subscripts, underlining, and faster bitmapped graphics. However, it removed several features of the Graftrax-80 that Epson deemed unimportant, which included escape code redefinition and also the TRS-80 graphics characters that many TRS-80 programs used.
Despite droping TRS-80 support Epson continued to introduce new models in the MX-80 Family. In 1983, Epson introduced two new dot matrix printers: the RX-80 and the FX-80. The FX-80 was a more advanced printer than the MX-80, offering faster printing speeds and programmable character sets, among other features, and the RX-80 was a lower cost replacement for the MX-80. Epson actually still sells dot matrix printers today for niche applications like printing on multi-part forms, and those modern dot matrix printers remain compatible with the Epson MX-80 control codes.
As for official Radio Shack Dot Matrix Printers, The Line Printer was followed up by the Line Printer II (Also released in 1979) which was smaller and far cheaper at $999 dollars, and the Line Printer III, which was a high end printer printing at 120 charaters per second, and retailing at $1999 dollars.
One problem these dot matrix printers had was that the print quality was very low and for buisnessess and consumer that needed high quality printer output for tasks like writting letters and forms, they needed something that could match the quality of a traditional typewriter.
That's were the other popular printing technology of the 80's came in: Daisywheel printers. The Daisywheel mechanism was created by Andrew Gabor at Diablo Data Systems in 1970, and was put into commercial printers in 1972. It worked similarly to the IBM Selectric typewriters in that in involved a spining typing element containing each character that would rotate to the desired character when needed. But unlike the selectric it used a far simpliar spining plater than the complex "golf ball" design IBM used with the Selectric, and could print characters far faster.
Radio Shacks's First line printer was the Daisy Wheel Printer I (catalog number 26-1157), which launched in 1979, and sold for $2,960 dollars. However it suffered from production issues, and was soon replaced by the Daisy Wheel Printer II (catalog number 26-1158), released in 1980, and sold for $2,960 dollars..
A listing for the The TRS-80 Daisy Wheel Printer II in the 1981 Radio Shack Catalog
It had far better production and had build quality to match weighing in at 28 pounds and was constructed almost entirely out of heavy-gauge aluminum. The Daisy Wheel II could print at 43 characters per second (Or 500 words per minute) on paper that was up to 15 inches wide, with up to five carbons. The Ribbon life was estimated at 270,000 characters for a carbon ribbon or 1,600,000 characters for a fabric ribbon.
The big advantage it had was the wide variety of fonts available. You could have Courier, Italics, Letter Gothic and much more.
A listing for the available daisy wheels in the 1982 Radio Shack Computer Catalog
It had far better production and had build quality to match weighing in at 28 pounds and was constructed almost entirely out of heavy-gauge aluminum. The Daisy Wheel II could print at 43 characters per second (Or 500 words per minute) on paper that was up to 15 inches wide, with up to five carbons. The Ribbon life was estimated at 270,000 characters for a carbon ribbon or 1,600,000 characters for a fabric ribbon.
The big advantage it had was the wide variety of fonts available. You could have Courier, Italics, Letter Gothic and much more. The downside is that you can only print in one font at a time unless you can somehow stop the printer during a print and swap the wheel for a different font. Luckily it was easy to change out wheels compared to other daisywheels as the Daisywheel Printer II used a "One Touch" system which made the wheels easy to swap.
The Daisywheel Printer II was fairly popular with business and home users mainly working with text based programs like word processors and the Daisy Wheel II was often paired with the TRS-80 Model II for a word processing workstation. Radio Shack even sold the two bundled with Scripsit as the Model II Word Processing System for $6,197 dollars.
A listing for the Model II Word Processing System in the 1981 Radio Shack Computer Catalog
One problem with both Dot Matrix and Daisywheel printers were that they still couldent produce sharp graphics. The Dot matrix produced Low Resolusiton graphics output, and Daisywheels could only print text. If you needed High Resolution graphics, you would get ahold of a ploter, which used a pen guided by a pully system to plot out graphics on paper.
Radio Shack provided a plotter for use with the TR-80 in the form of the TRS-80 Printer Plotter, which was introduced in 1980, at a retail price of $1460 dollars.
A listing for the The TRS-80 Printer Plotter in the 1981 Radio Shack Catalog
The Printer Plotter could plot graphics onto a sheet of fanfold paper as wide as 7 1/2 inches, and was perfect for printing graphs and charts for business aplications.
But Floppy Disks and Printers weren't the only peripherals available for the TRS-80 through the Expansion unit, With the Addition of the RS232 Serial card, Modems also became an option.
Again, while we may not think about connecting computers to networks and going online today, at the time, It was a unique concept that very few were able to do.
The first modem for the TRS-80 was the The TRS-80 Telephone Interface, introduced in November of 1978, for $149 dollars.
A listing for the TRS-80 Telephone Interface in the 1978 Radio Shack Computer Catalog
The Telephone Interface was a basic acoustic coupler modem. To use it, you just placed your telephone handset into the rubber coupler cushions and the speaker and microphone underneath the cushion allowed the Telephone Interface I to communicate at speeds of up to 300 baud. Although less efficient than a direct connection to a phone line, it was more practical considering that many homes at the time had their telephones wired directly to the phone line.
The problem with the Telephone Interface I was that it was an “originate-only” modem, so it could only initiate a telephone call to a remote system, not receive a call. This was soon rectified with its successor: The Telephone Interface II, launched in 1979, for $199 dollars.
A listing for the TRS-80 Telephone Interface II in the 1980 Radio Shack Catalog
It was Identical to the The Telephone Interface only it had a switch on the back that changed between originate (able to place calls) and answer (able to receive calls) modes.
Also in 1979 Radio Shack introduced 2 products to take advantage of the switch on the Telephone Interface II. The first of these was the Communications Software Package (catalog number 26-1146), Or COMPAC, a $29.95 communications program which allowed the Telephone Interface II to communicate with another TRS-80 as a host terminal combination.
A listing for the TRS-80 COMPAC software in the 1979 Radio Shack Computer Catalog
The other product was an online service called MicroNET, one of the earliest online services for home computers. While it launched as MicroNET, it soon became better known by the name it used as its network: Compuserve.
An ad for Compuserve's MicroNET (1981)
Compuserve made history as one of the first online services for micro computers. The company was founded in 1969 as Compu-Serv Network, Inc, and initially began life as a timesharing service while a division of the Golden United Life Insurance company of Columbus, Ohio. At first it began by providing timeshared rent access to their PDP-10 computers to other businesses. In 1975, it was spun off into a separate company with the goal to expand into the timesharing industy, and in 1977, they changed their name to CompuServe Incorporated.
Initally the MicroNET was slow to start with only around 1,000 subscribers by May of 1980, but that all changed when H&R Block acquired the company for $25 million and put more marketing into the service. H&R Block completely overhauled the service changing its name from MicroNET to CompuServe Information Service or CIS, introducing an easier to use menu system, and making Radio Shack became the exclusive retailer for the CompuServe starter kits, which included the necessary software and one free hour on CompuServe. This ended up succeeding well, and by 1984, Compuserve had 110,000 subscribers.
For $5.00 dollars an hour during non-peak hours (6PM to 5AM weekdays and all days weekends and holidays) or $22.50 dollars an hour during peak hours (5AM to 6PM weekdays), users could acess a variaty of services including electronic mail (Or Email), online games, access to informational databases like stock quotes, an online chatroom called the CB simulator, COMP-U-Star (Latter Comp-U-Store), an electronic shop-at-home service, weather reports, news reports, Special Interest Groups, also known as SIGs (Or user forums), and programming languages like APL, BASIC, BLIS10, FOCAL, PASCAL, SNOBOL, XF4 (FORTRAN), and MACRO (PDP-10 assembly language), as well as a variety of cross-assemblers.
An mockup of the Compuserve main menu
Many of these mirror services available on Modern websites today, and Compuserve was one of the first to offer these to consumers. It was also possible to bypass this menu by typing in a destination directly using a “Go” command. For example to go to the the Radio Shack newsletter, you would type Go TRS.
However, as the TRS-80's market shrunk, many of the SIG's went offline, with CompuServe closing its longest running SIG MNET80 in 1985. Compuserve did continue to be available and offer SIG's for other computers and continue to evolve and be popular until the introduction of AOL in the 1990s, which ate up the CIS's market and caused Compuserve to suffer financial troubles and eventually H&R Block sold Compuserve to AOL in 1998. Products under the CompuServe sub-brand ceased in 2002, and the original CompuServe Information Service, later rebranded as CompuServe Classic, was eventually shut down in 2009.
Either way, the Telephone Interface marks the last of the official practical add ons by Radio Shack. But many more unique add ons that porvided all sorts of features from High Resolution and color graphics, to sound and joystick interfaces, to even Speech synthesis and voice recognition. This concludes Part 3 of the fourth Septandy Spectacular, join me next time as we take a closer look at the many miscellaneous add ons and peripherals for the TRS-80.
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