It was accompanied by a white on black display, which was a modified RCA XL-100 Black and White television. Eventually, this was added to a later ROM revision. A Keyboard De-Bounce tape was distributed, which slowed down polling of the keyboard to compensate. Many users complained about the TRS-80 keyboard which were mechanical switches and suffered from "Keyboard Bounce" resulting in multiple letters being typed accidentally. The basic model originally shipped with 4k of RAM, and later 16k. The Model I looked like a very thick keyboard (like the later Commodore VIC-20) and used a Zilog Z80 processor. Before its January 1981 discontinuation, Tandy sold more than 250,000 Model Is. Tandy ended up selling 10,000 the first month and 55,000 its first year. Company management was unsure of the computer's market appeal, and intentionally kept the initial production run to 3,000 units so that, if the computer failed to sell, it could at least be used for accounting purposes within the chain's 3,000 stores. At $599 for a complete package including cassette storage, the computer was the most expensive single product Tandy's Radio Shack chain of electronics stores had ever offered. I should mention, btw, that I did use EXPORT several times successfully, though I wasn't copying any COM files, only text files.Announced at a press conference in August 3, 1977, the Tandy TRS-80 Model I was Tandy's entry into the home computer market, meant to compete head on against the Commodore PET 2001 and the Apple II. If anyone has any clue, please leave a comment. When I then used TRSTools to copy the files to a disk image, this worked, so I have to conclude there's some issue with the IMPORT. (This was after also copying ZORK1.DAT, which you need as well). This works in that you don't get any errors, and somethingĀ is copied, but when I tried to execute ZORK1, it gave me weird, inconsistent results.
So, for example, to make a disk image for Zork I, all you'd have to do is download the ZORK1.COM file, copy a blank disk image, and then type IMPORT ZORK1.COM ZORK1.COM. These are special CP/M programs that take advantage of hooks in the emulator to be able to transfer files to and from the local filesystem. This has a bunch of files on it, but the three COM files are EXPORT, IMPORT, and XTRS. Now, annoyingly, this disk image didn't load for me in MM CP/M, but I used TRSTools to copy the files to a usable blank disk image (you can download the result of this here, if you don't want to do this yourself). In the SDLTRS distribution is a subdirectory called diskimages, with a disk image called cpmutils.dsk. (I'll talk about setting up the hard drive in my next blog post, but at this point, just make sure to grab that disk image.) I put the executables on one DSK and the docs on another.
I had to do this with the Hard Disk Drivers disk, which was larger than a DSK. The DMK may be a larger size than the DSK, so you may have to pick which files you don't need or copy them to multiple DSK images. the DMK will probably work in TRSTools, so you can copy the files to a temporary directory, then open a blank DSK and copy the files to that. It may very well work, so go ahead and try it. If it does come in DMK only, all is not lost. All the DSK's I downloaded worked without an issue, though, so if something comes in multiple formats, always pick the DSK. However, while SDLTRS does support DMK, I noticed that a lot of them were larger than the 166k floppy drives that the emulated machine supported, so it was hit-or-miss as to whether these worked out of the box. DSK and DMK are two virtual disk image formats, so either of these are potentially usable in SDLTRS. There are two ways to do this, which I'll discuss below. COM means that it's actually going to come as a binary program, not a disk image, so you'll need to copy it to a disk image to run it. Second, disks will be labeled as either of type COM, DSK, or DMK. I just got the last of the Montezuma Micro CP/M boot disks, and that's what I used.
First, you don't need every CP/M boot disk that's out there.
Now before you hop out to that site and start downloading everything like I did, you may want to pause a bit to avoid some mistakes I made.