Always liked the look of the MC-10 over the later CoCo models. A bit more like those really early British micros. Fantastic video! Still hoping to get some of these machines someday.
The interesting thing about CoCo sound is that it is 6-bit PCM. There's one register where you set a voltage level (0..63) on the speaker (and another register to select the TV speaker or cassette port for output). Using this, you could play digital audio, although with only 16K of RAM and an 800kHz clock, it won't be terribly high resolution. Not great compared to the audio in a first-generation Mac, but a whole lot better than the built-in speaker on a IBM PC or Apple II (both of which were 1-bit - only capable of fixed-amplitude square waves, relying on pulse-width modulation software tricks to produce anything more elaborate than beep sounds).
I salivated over one of these after seeing it in a shop back in the early 80s. In fact as an 11 year old I got excited by the thought of owning any system, even owning a ZX81 would have been great at the time. We ended up with a Commodore 64 family pack in Christmas 84. I think my father made the right choice.
The MC-10 was one of the greatest gifts I received as a child, to learn logical systematic problem solving and thinking. The monthly subscription magazines maintained interest and kept the skillset growing building on the example code available. Later a TRS-80 Model III kept me entertained until a Coco 2 was acquired mostly with my own paper-route money and then later replaced by a Coco 3. In 1985 I was near the top of junior elementary and was able to key and save my own programs in Qbasic myself on school computers. The teacher was intrigued and had to go somewhere to get a disk, amazed that a student would know something about something that the teacher had no idea of. Probably they kept the disk for a long time. By the time Bigpond was available I had an 80286 with Windows 3.1 and use Netscape Navigator even before Internet Explorer existed publicly. Go MC-10, my fond childhood memories of exploring logical thinking.
I had a CoCo2 but the family down the street had an MC-10. I liked fiddling around with it and was rooting for it; felt bad that the RadioShack catalogs almost immediately seemed to abandon it and the CoCo magazines I devoured gave it very little coverage. Looking back, my entire TRS-80 experience was low-key dreading inevitable doom because I came on board right after Tandy had already started selling MS-DOS machines.
I worked for Radio Shack back then and like playing around with the MC-10. I was big into the CoCo back then and they used the 6803 instead of the 6809 for cost reasons in the MC10, but it was within the same family, and it used the identical 6847 VDG (video display generator) as the CoCo, So if you were a CoCo expert (like I was back then), you could do quite a bit. The "later" versions of the MC6847 VDG had true lowercase (with descenders), and the CoCo had a couple of pokes you could do to activate the true lower case mode. All basic statements though had to be typed in uppercase to be recognized though like the CoCo. You're dead on that it was a direct response to, and quite an improvement over the ZX81/Timex Sinclair 1000 device. The ROMs were quite different between CoCo and MC10. They were functionally equivalent to Color Computers with Level I basic. Level II mainly added high resolution support and high resolution functions for graphics and sound that the MC-10 didn't have, but the MC-10 did have the same VDG, so via machine code, or basic pokes, so you could get the same high resolution graphics from the MC-10 as you could from the CoCo 1 and 2. You can get a peek at the high resolution mode by typing this in: POKE 49151,127 That will put it in a 2 color b&w mode, but you can get red and blue through artifacting for a total of 4 colors. the resolution is 256x192. Not particularly useful because max memory was 16k, so you couldn't really support the higher modes because the memory just wasn't there, but home brew hacks have been made to extend the memory to the full 64k the CPU can address It was a excellent attempt at making a $99 dollar version of the Color Computer, but with 16k Standard CoCo 2 priced at $159,and the MC-10 at $99 and $49 for the additional ram, that, for an additional $10 they could get the equivalent to the MC-10 with the option down the road to upgrade the ROM to 32k Extended, and the RAM to 64k vs the 16k limit on the MC-10, not to mention exponentially more software and support. The MC10 was awesome for the price, but as you pointed out, prices were still dropping on other systems like the CoCo, C64, etc. The industry was pretty young back then, and didn't have a full grasp on what consumers were willing to pay for various competing systems. It's also well emulated, so it's easy to get your hands on even without buying the hardware.
I got my first computer for Christmas. It was a Timex Sinclair 1000. After playing with it on Christmas day, I packed it up we took it back to the store the following day. We walked over to Radio Shack and picked this up in its place. That was a good decision as this was a great first computer. With the magazine Family Computing, I learned to program in basic as each month they offered fun programs for the family to enter this and similar other machines that had Basic.
Thanks for the demo! It brought back memories! I had one of these back in the day. I found $100 in a parking lot and after waiting 10 minutes to see if anyone came looking for it, I used it to buy a TRS-80 MC-10! The only thing I did with it was write some basic programs. I wish I had kept it...
My first computer as well. I begged my parents for a Commodore 64, but they got me this for my birthday in November... then got me the 16k pack for Christmas after that. Mind blown!
This is a great video, thanks for making it. Something about the part where you go through the sounds, and then list the individual colours is just fantastic.
Good to see reviews of old computers like this, some familiar, some not. I don't recall seeing this model in the UK, but I'll have to do some research on it. Thanks again.
I bought one of these at clearance price from an associate store in 1984 and eventually added he thermal, printer and memory expansion module. I later move up to a CoCo II and discovered some interesting differences between the two systems. The cassette tape format was compatible between the two - but only for binary programs. The BASIC language tape format on both systems stored programs in a tokenized form, but used different token codes, and the M
Radio Shack did sell some dot-matrix printers for the CoCo series, but the one they intended for use with the MC-10 was a thermal receipt printer (the TP-10), so it was pretty much silent. They also did have a real Breakout game for it too, which I'll show as part of a video about games for the MC-10.
The sound is through the TV. I'm sure it will run fine on 9 volts DC, as the power input goes straight into a bridge rectifier (which DC will pass through just fine) and then a 7805 voltage regulator. There are a few web sites which let you download the service manual, and it includes full schematics.
Being a huge Coco fan and collector, the MC-10 has always intrigued me. Very interesting little system. Dave4shmups sent me and I"ll sub to your channel :)
Great video!. I still have the MC-10 I bought back in 1985 as it was being discontinued by Radio Shack, lil' bugger took me through some college courses no sweat. Recent developments for the MC-10 are a BASIC/RAM expansion (MX128) which greatly enhances the built in system and a Disk Drive/Joystick Interface board. The later can be seen on my YT channel. The MC-10 is alive and well :-)
@vwestlife What kind of RF connector it uses? Couldn't see it when you plugged all the cables, and the connector didn't seem like a standard RF one (you know, the one used with coaxial cable)...
The full-size Color Computer only had a 0.89 MHz CPU as well, but the Motorola 680x series were more efficient than a 6502 or Z80, so the actual speed was comparable to other 8-bit computers of the time. But yes, having only 4K RAM really was very limited by 1983 standards. Maybe if Tandy had given the MC-10 at least 16K as standard, it would've done better.
What I like about these early computers is that you usually got a half way decent manual that would actually teach you about how computers work. Also, thee were magazines that you could learn from as well. In some ways, these machines are better than the crap we get today!!
Hello. I have the same model TRS-80 Radio Shack, just that I have not one recording cassettes unit to can record one basic program. So, I just keep that mini computer to my personal old computers museum. I like it. I got one Toshiba Satellite 100CS but have one Intel Pentium 75, no one Intel 386 or 486 processor. Ah, I like the old computers to remember that 80´s! Greetings from Mexico city. :D
I have an MC10 in my drawer, along with a CTR81 cassette recorder that still works. I did have to clean the jacks due to crackles and squeaks. I got the MC10 from a friend who got it at a garage sale. My box is as beat up as yours. I also have a CCR82 cassette but it has a broken gear so I use the CTR82. A nice bit of fun and takes me back to the 80s when I had a CoCo 1 and later got the CoCo3. I had a lot of stuff too, shame I parted with it all when I went over to PC.
Yes, in the 1980s there were several different floppy disk formats between 2 and 3 inches that were used on some computers, before the industry eventually standardized on the Sony 3.5 inch disk format.
I still have mine, and the 16k module, from back then. It is stored in the original box. Probably used it for less than a year before moving up to a CoCo 2 and then a CoCo III (which I also still have). After watching the video I want to get them all out. Didn't know about those wav files.
The American version of the ZX Spectrum was the Timex-Sinclair 2068 (although it was incompatible with most Spectrum software unless a rare Spectrum ROM cartridge was used), which was released in November 1983, a few months after the MC-10, and was more expensive. The TS2068 did not sell well and very little software was made for it before Timex Computer Corporation went out of business in early 1984.
My friend had one w/ the 16K expansion and the cassette player/recorder. He got little use out of it. A little while after he got it, he upgraded to the atari 64K computer.
The Commodore VIC-20 was sold first in Europe in 1980 then in the US in early 1981, for less than $100 - - and it was the first personal computer to sell over 1,000,000 units in its first 12 months of release.
I'm American. We say Z as Zee. The ZX81 was well known in America (everyone called it the Sinclair ZX81 anyway even though it was officially the Timex 1000 here) so I say it the say everyone said it here. Same thing with the Z80 CPU chip; we say "zee-80", while Brits say "zed-80", even though the Z80 was designed and manufactured in the USA.
Very nice. It's quite simple, but there's lots of interesting things you can do with it. I like this style of computer too; a keyboard with all the hardware built into it, like a laptop but without the screen. I wish they would bring that back. You can just hook it up to a monitor or a regular TV.
I just bought one of these! Found it nearly CiB except for the RF modulator... hoping to get it working as a terminal for BBS stuff, though that might take some doing.
Brilliant but there was a ZILOG Z80A based machine made in the UK by a company called MEMOTECH called the MEMOTECH MTX512 which had 32KB 32768 BYTES of RAM and you could write basic programs with machine code which ran a lot faster than BASIC programs you also had add on RAM module which took the RAM up to 64KB 65536 BYTES and a a floppy drive the MTX FDX which allowed you to have two floppy discs inserted at the same time and run programs written for use with CP/M and would allow you to store larger programs on DISC, it also had the ability to connect to a dot matrix printer from MEMOTECH and could connect to the internet via a modem connected to it's serial port.
Thats a very nice collctors item you have there. I would like to check out this online library of cassette software for my COCOs. Where is it? Maybe Ill even tape record it
American ham radio operators say Z as Zed when announcing their call signs, because that reduces confusion between Z (zee) and C (cee). But otherwise you are correct.
I have heard that, but never seen one. The BBC Micro was also briefly available in the USA, but they were so unsuccessful that they took the unsold American machines, converted them back to European standards (240V mains and PAL video), and resold them in the UK.
the MC-10 was my first computer as a kid in the 80s. I pretty much had to write everything I wanted to do with it myself. That and copy programs out of magazines. We DID have the 16K expansion module as well. ... Now my dad won't even let me hook it up to play with it again. LOL
Do you have a dot matrix printer to use with that? I love the sound of those things! That game is a little more like breakout only you catch the things instead of breaking blocks
Have you encountered the Dragon 32 or 64? I think they were briefly marketed in the US, but like most British micro companies, Dragon Data didn't have much success. The Dragon was practically identical to the CoCo in hardware terms.
Still have my original & in the box. The box is in great condition as is the computer. Pulled it out as soon as I saw this video. I used to do the color bars program all the time. ;)
We often hear comparisons between the huge 50s mainframes and current computers. How would the Univac 1 compare to this computer? Would this computer still trump the Univac?
It was made in Korea. And I suppose they wanted to make it clear that the listed amount of memory (as small as it was!) was all RAM, unlike some other new computers in 1983 who were cheating by advertising their total memory as RAM + ROM combined, such as the "72K Onboard Memory" Timex-Sinclair 2068, which actually was 48K RAM + 24K ROM.
oh my god. how in the wold programmers could design something during that time XD thank of those guys that spend the time to optimize the computer to those things we have on this time
I was just going to say that the 'engine' sound was like the tank sound in Atari VCS Combat. :) Aside from the issue of timing when it entered the market, the MC-10 looks to be a well-designed nice little machine, that fixes the shortcomings of the ZX81: reasonable keyboard, sound, and colour graphics, plus more RAM and an on-off switch. If Radio Shack had launched it 2 years earlier, I can imagine it selling well.
At $120 it seemed like a lot of bang for the buck back in the day but I never did buy one even when they were on clearance for around $10.00. It did bug me that this thing had a built in serial port while the RS232 board for my Model III set me back $100!
GeoNeilUK Those computers were not sold here in the USA, and importing one from the UK and adapting it to American voltage and TV signal standards is expensive and complicated.
Wow.. I used to have one of those.. Ahh the memories... Going to the library and photo coping the games that were in the magazines.. Getting home and spending 2 - 3 hours programming the game into it.. Just to play it for an hour or two.. Only to lose all that work when I turned it off.. But that was ok.. I just redid it all again the next day :) lol
I just got my MC-10 Computer a couple of days ago ... sadly it's 110V @ 60hz, and i live in Europe, so im waiting for a frequency converter to arrive before i can play with it :D
The MC-10 runs on 8 to 9 volts AC at 1.5 amps, so any power supply which puts out that kind of voltage can be used -- you don't necessarily need to use the original one it came with.
Not only that, they had internal competition, as by 1984, the Tandy CoCo2 16K could be had for as little as $150, ($190 for the 16K Extended) and for $259, you could get the new, 64K Extended CoCo 2. If I was Tandy, I would have lauched these in the UK, where they could have easily competed with the ZX Spectrum .
These disks were mostly used for Smith Corona's computer word procesors. You can look them up online as they begin with the PWP name. The drives were VERY unreliable overtime. If you buy them now thw drives are broken making saving things useless. The PWPs with 3.5 disks last until today and are far more durable and reliable. The radio SHACK mc-10 can be emmulated using VMC program. Search online for it. You can play with it on your home pc for free!
Yea. I bought a trs-80 color in its original box for $80 off some hippie at a flea market. I later sold it on ebay for $120. Had a great time using it though (i would buy another sometime) .
Man, those specs are pretty sad, even by early 80s standards, but I guess you get what you pay for :) Nice overview though. I like the retro blocky graphics too!
But the Motorola 6800 series is more efficient than the 6502 and similar CPUs used in other home computers of the time, so it wasn't as slow as the clock speed suggests.
It actually worked pretty well. In this day and age when all hardware is basically derived for IBM's intel PC, most people fail to understand that the cpu clock is only one of many design factors affecting overall performance of the computer. First the MC10, Color Computers 1 through 3 and their competitors were called "Home" computers in a time where commercially available processors clock under 4 MHz. RaM memory was very expensive at the time and was available in two types: static ram that used digital logic states to represent 1 or 0, and dynamic ram, which maintained the data as charges on microscopic capacitors. Dynamic memory requires a "refresh" signal to prevent data loss and early dynamic ram chip expected this signal from an external source. Home computers in the US used a 3.58 MHz crystal for the system clock.This was divided into a two phase 1.79 Mhz clock, with one phase used to refresh the ram and the second phase used as the cpu clock. The Color Computer and MC10, divided one of the 1.79 Mhz into a 0.89 MHz two phase clock, with one phase timing the CPU and the other timing the video display chip. The setup alloed th cpu and video chip to share memory wiout interference. Offerings from Commodore and Atari on the other habdclock the cpu and io vhip at 1.79 Mhz, butpause the CPU while the video chip accessed the memory effectiverly running the 650w vpu one eigth of the time.
Always liked the look of the MC-10 over the later CoCo models. A bit more like those really early British micros. Fantastic video! Still hoping to get some of these machines someday.
This how I know LGR is a real one. VWestlife Appreciator.
Nice to see my Sound Demonstration program in use, which I wrote mid 80's in machine language!
Gary Furr
The interesting thing about CoCo sound is that it is 6-bit PCM. There's one register where you set a voltage level (0..63) on the speaker (and another register to select the TV speaker or cassette port for output).
Using this, you could play digital audio, although with only 16K of RAM and an 800kHz clock, it won't be terribly high resolution. Not great compared to the audio in a first-generation Mac, but a whole lot better than the built-in speaker on a IBM PC or Apple II (both of which were 1-bit - only capable of fixed-amplitude square waves, relying on pulse-width modulation software tricks to produce anything more elaborate than beep sounds).
I salivated over one of these after seeing it in a shop back in the early 80s. In fact as an 11 year old I got excited by the thought of owning any system, even owning a ZX81 would have been great at the time. We ended up with a Commodore 64 family pack in Christmas 84. I think my father made the right choice.
The MC-10 was one of the greatest gifts I received as a child, to learn logical systematic problem solving and thinking. The monthly subscription magazines maintained interest and kept the skillset growing building on the example code available. Later a TRS-80 Model III kept me entertained until a Coco 2 was acquired mostly with my own paper-route money and then later replaced by a Coco 3. In 1985 I was near the top of junior elementary and was able to key and save my own programs in Qbasic myself on school computers. The teacher was intrigued and had to go somewhere to get a disk, amazed that a student would know something about something that the teacher had no idea of. Probably they kept the disk for a long time. By the time Bigpond was available I had an 80286 with Windows 3.1 and use Netscape Navigator even before Internet Explorer existed publicly. Go MC-10, my fond childhood memories of exploring logical thinking.
I had a CoCo2 but the family down the street had an MC-10. I liked fiddling around with it and was rooting for it; felt bad that the RadioShack catalogs almost immediately seemed to abandon it and the CoCo magazines I devoured gave it very little coverage. Looking back, my entire TRS-80 experience was low-key dreading inevitable doom because I came on board right after Tandy had already started selling MS-DOS machines.
My first computer, thanks for the memories. :)
My first computer back in 6th grade! Thanks for the memories!
I worked for Radio Shack back then and like playing around with the MC-10. I was big into the CoCo back then and they used the 6803 instead of the 6809 for cost reasons in the MC10, but it was within the same family, and it used the identical 6847 VDG (video display generator) as the CoCo, So if you were a CoCo expert (like I was back then), you could do quite a bit. The "later" versions of the MC6847 VDG had true lowercase (with descenders), and the CoCo had a couple of pokes you could do to activate the true lower case mode. All basic statements though had to be typed in uppercase to be recognized though like the CoCo. You're dead on that it was a direct response to, and quite an improvement over the ZX81/Timex Sinclair 1000 device.
The ROMs were quite different between CoCo and MC10. They were functionally equivalent to Color Computers with Level I basic. Level II mainly added high resolution support and high resolution functions for graphics and sound that the MC-10 didn't have, but the MC-10 did have the same VDG, so via machine code, or basic pokes, so you could get the same high resolution graphics from the MC-10 as you could from the CoCo 1 and 2.
You can get a peek at the high resolution mode by typing this in:
POKE 49151,127
That will put it in a 2 color b&w mode, but you can get red and blue through artifacting for a total of 4 colors. the resolution is 256x192.
Not particularly useful because max memory was 16k, so you couldn't really support the higher modes because the memory just wasn't there, but home brew hacks have been made to extend the memory to the full 64k the CPU can address
It was a excellent attempt at making a $99 dollar version of the Color Computer, but with 16k Standard CoCo 2 priced at $159,and the MC-10 at $99 and $49 for the additional ram, that, for an additional $10 they could get the equivalent to the MC-10 with the option down the road to upgrade the ROM to 32k Extended, and the RAM to 64k vs the 16k limit on the MC-10, not to mention exponentially more software and support. The MC10 was awesome for the price, but as you pointed out, prices were still dropping on other systems like the CoCo, C64, etc. The industry was pretty young back then, and didn't have a full grasp on what consumers were willing to pay for various competing systems. It's also well emulated, so it's easy to get your hands on even without buying the hardware.
I got my first computer for Christmas. It was a Timex Sinclair 1000. After playing with it on Christmas day, I packed it up we took it back to the store the following day. We walked over to Radio Shack and picked this up in its place. That was a good decision as this was a great first computer. With the magazine Family Computing, I learned to program in basic as each month they offered fun programs for the family to enter this and similar other machines that had Basic.
Thanks for the demo! It brought back memories! I had one of these back in the day. I found $100 in a parking lot and after waiting 10 minutes to see if anyone came looking for it, I used it to buy a TRS-80 MC-10! The only thing I did with it was write some basic programs. I wish I had kept it...
This was my first computer back in 83-84
I had the 16k expanded memory aswell
I had a lot of fun on this machine back in the day.
How cool was that! Love to see the old technology that led us to todays tech
Same here. I also owned the Timex Sinclair. My mom got it for free when opening up a savings account.
My first computer as well. I begged my parents for a Commodore 64, but they got me this for my birthday in November... then got me the 16k pack for Christmas after that. Mind blown!
This is a great video, thanks for making it. Something about the part where you go through the sounds, and then list the individual colours is just fantastic.
Good to see reviews of old computers like this, some familiar, some not. I don't recall seeing this model in the UK, but I'll have to do some research on it. Thanks again.
I enjoy your reviews of the older consoles and personal computers ! Keep it up!
I learned a ton about computers by playing around with an MC 10 when I was a kid. Such fun!
Also, the last program in the book "Kaleidoscope" had an error.
I bought one of these at clearance price from an associate store in 1984 and eventually added he thermal, printer and memory expansion module. I later move up to a CoCo II and discovered some interesting differences between the two systems.
The cassette tape format was compatible between the two - but only for binary programs. The BASIC language tape format on both systems stored programs in a tokenized form, but used different token codes, and the M
Your videos are just amazing..I could and do watch them all night..
Same here! It is impossible to hate on vwestlife!
Any kind of tape recorder with microphone, earphone, and remote jacks.
Radio Shack did sell some dot-matrix printers for the CoCo series, but the one they intended for use with the MC-10 was a thermal receipt printer (the TP-10), so it was pretty much silent. They also did have a real Breakout game for it too, which I'll show as part of a video about games for the MC-10.
The sound is through the TV. I'm sure it will run fine on 9 volts DC, as the power input goes straight into a bridge rectifier (which DC will pass through just fine) and then a 7805 voltage regulator. There are a few web sites which let you download the service manual, and it includes full schematics.
Thanks for this look into the first computer I ever used! Nostalgia!!
That was my first computer !
Being a huge Coco fan and collector, the MC-10 has always intrigued me. Very interesting little system. Dave4shmups sent me and I"ll sub to your channel :)
Great video!. I still have the MC-10 I bought back in 1985 as it was being discontinued by Radio Shack, lil' bugger took me through some college courses no sweat. Recent developments for the MC-10 are a BASIC/RAM expansion (MX128) which greatly enhances the built in system and a Disk Drive/Joystick Interface board. The later can be seen on my YT channel. The MC-10 is alive and well :-)
@vwestlife What kind of RF connector it uses? Couldn't see it when you plugged all the cables, and the connector didn't seem like a standard RF one (you know, the one used with coaxial cable)...
Nice review. I've never seen one of these things in action before. I didn't realise they gave the same black on green text as the CoCo.
The full-size Color Computer only had a 0.89 MHz CPU as well, but the Motorola 680x series were more efficient than a 6502 or Z80, so the actual speed was comparable to other 8-bit computers of the time. But yes, having only 4K RAM really was very limited by 1983 standards. Maybe if Tandy had given the MC-10 at least 16K as standard, it would've done better.
What I like about these early computers is that you usually got a half way decent manual that would actually teach you about how computers work. Also, thee were magazines that you could learn from as well. In some ways, these machines are better than the crap we get today!!
Hello.
I have the same model TRS-80 Radio Shack, just that I have not one recording cassettes unit to can record one basic program.
So, I just keep that mini computer to my personal old computers museum. I like it.
I got one Toshiba Satellite 100CS but have one Intel Pentium 75, no one Intel 386 or 486 processor.
Ah, I like the old computers to remember that 80´s! Greetings from Mexico city. :D
I have an MC10 in my drawer, along with a CTR81 cassette recorder that still works. I did have to clean the jacks due to crackles and squeaks. I got the MC10 from a friend who got it at a garage sale. My box is as beat up as yours. I also have a CCR82 cassette but it has a broken gear so I use the CTR82. A nice bit of fun and takes me back to the 80s when I had a CoCo 1 and later got the CoCo3. I had a lot of stuff too, shame I parted with it all when I went over to PC.
was my first pc, in the very early 80's, still have it!
Yes, in the 1980s there were several different floppy disk formats between 2 and 3 inches that were used on some computers, before the industry eventually standardized on the Sony 3.5 inch disk format.
I still have mine, and the 16k module, from back then. It is stored in the original box. Probably used it for less than a year before moving up to a CoCo 2 and then a CoCo III (which I also still have). After watching the video I want to get them all out. Didn't know about those wav files.
This brings back memories!
The American version of the ZX Spectrum was the Timex-Sinclair 2068 (although it was incompatible with most Spectrum software unless a rare Spectrum ROM cartridge was used), which was released in November 1983, a few months after the MC-10, and was more expensive. The TS2068 did not sell well and very little software was made for it before Timex Computer Corporation went out of business in early 1984.
Thanks for the video. This was my first computer when I was 14 years old. Wish I would have kept it.
My friend had one w/ the 16K expansion and the cassette player/recorder. He got little use out of it. A little while after he got it, he upgraded to the atari 64K computer.
The Commodore VIC-20 was sold first in Europe in 1980 then in the US in early 1981, for less than $100 - - and it was the first personal computer to sell over 1,000,000 units in its first 12 months of release.
I'm American. We say Z as Zee. The ZX81 was well known in America (everyone called it the Sinclair ZX81 anyway even though it was officially the Timex 1000 here) so I say it the say everyone said it here. Same thing with the Z80 CPU chip; we say "zee-80", while Brits say "zed-80", even though the Z80 was designed and manufactured in the USA.
Do you have anything that uses that Smith Carona diskette?
my first computer!
Very nice. It's quite simple, but there's lots of interesting things you can do with it. I like this style of computer too; a keyboard with all the hardware built into it, like a laptop but without the screen. I wish they would bring that back. You can just hook it up to a monitor or a regular TV.
I just bought one of these! Found it nearly CiB except for the RF modulator... hoping to get it working as a terminal for BBS stuff, though that might take some doing.
Brilliant but there was a ZILOG Z80A based machine made in the UK by a company called MEMOTECH called the MEMOTECH MTX512 which had 32KB 32768 BYTES of RAM and you could write basic programs with machine code which ran a lot faster than BASIC programs you also had add on RAM module which took the RAM up to 64KB 65536 BYTES and a a floppy drive the MTX FDX which allowed you to have two floppy discs inserted at the same time and run programs written for use with CP/M and would allow you to store larger programs on DISC, it also had the ability to connect to a dot matrix printer from MEMOTECH and could connect to the internet via a modem connected to it's serial port.
why didn't they do green text on a black background? would look 10x better
Thats a very nice collctors item you have there. I would like to check out this online library of cassette software for my COCOs. Where is it? Maybe Ill even tape record it
Ohh... So, by any chance, is the computer connected to the TV with an RF adapter, like those used with the Atari 2600 console?
American ham radio operators say Z as Zed when announcing their call signs, because that reduces confusion between Z (zee) and C (cee). But otherwise you are correct.
I have heard that, but never seen one. The BBC Micro was also briefly available in the USA, but they were so unsuccessful that they took the unsold American machines, converted them back to European standards (240V mains and PAL video), and resold them in the UK.
I find it hilarious that a C “hello world” program uses about 32K and 80s computers had an entire interpreter in 8K!
There were many different TRS-80 models.
the MC-10 was my first computer as a kid in the 80s. I pretty much had to write everything I wanted to do with it myself. That and copy programs out of magazines. We DID have the 16K expansion module as well. ... Now my dad won't even let me hook it up to play with it again. LOL
Do you have a dot matrix printer to use with that? I love the sound of those things! That game is a little more like breakout only you catch the things instead of breaking blocks
That's pretty awesome. I used to have one of the coco's that Radio Shack re released back in 1993.
Have you encountered the Dragon 32 or 64? I think they were briefly marketed in the US, but like most British micro companies, Dragon Data didn't have much success. The Dragon was practically identical to the CoCo in hardware terms.
Not always, but I guess back in the '80s, people were more likely to save the original box than they are now.
Cool. I never even knew this model existed! I just thought it was the "big ones" and then the CoCos.
Excellent video! What type of physical cassette tape recorder would be compatible with this computer?
I have one too with a good box , i love the old radio shacks !!
Still have my original & in the box. The box is in great condition as is the computer. Pulled it out as soon as I saw this video. I used to do the color bars program all the time. ;)
We often hear comparisons between the huge 50s mainframes and current computers. How would the Univac 1 compare to this computer? Would this computer still trump the Univac?
i had this computer when i was a kid i love it
And this was state of the art at the time!
You really do live in the Aladins Cave of Retro.
It's an RCA jack.
Where do you find all of your cool retro items? I like retro items/electronics but the prices on ebay can be kind of a rip off sometimes.
are you sure this is a trs 80, my trs 80 is all black, isnt hooked up to a tv screen and looks nothing like this
There are several different web sites, some dedicated to the MC-10, others to the main CoCo family. A Google search will reveal them.
My 1st computer. It's where earned how to program.
It was made in Korea. And I suppose they wanted to make it clear that the listed amount of memory (as small as it was!) was all RAM, unlike some other new computers in 1983 who were cheating by advertising their total memory as RAM + ROM combined, such as the "72K Onboard Memory" Timex-Sinclair 2068, which actually was 48K RAM + 24K ROM.
You can use it with a TV tuner card in your PC, but of course just using a real television set is much easier.
Oldie but goodie... :).
oh my god. how in the wold programmers could design something during that time XD thank of those guys that spend the time to optimize the computer to those things we have on this time
where do you get your wavs?
I remember selling those to students learning to use a pc.
Aah! The old Trash-80.
I have one of those the thing is I don't know how to set it up.(what to plug in what)Anyone can help me?
DreamCast Entertainment TM Please watch the video, I explain the jacks and what they go to.
vwestlife I have an RF modulator the question is what do i plug in it.
DreamCast Entertainment TM
The antenna jack of your TV.
vwestlife nothing displays on the image when i connect the "to tv" cable directly to the tv. So i use the rf modulator, but how?
Yes i already did but what about the mc-10 (sorry for asking too many questions, im just confused and excited)
I was just going to say that the 'engine' sound was like the tank sound in Atari VCS Combat. :) Aside from the issue of timing when it entered the market, the MC-10 looks to be a well-designed nice little machine, that fixes the shortcomings of the ZX81: reasonable keyboard, sound, and colour graphics, plus more RAM and an on-off switch. If Radio Shack had launched it 2 years earlier, I can imagine it selling well.
Nice review, not really seen one before :)
At $120 it seemed like a lot of bang for the buck back in the day but I never did buy one even when they were on clearance for around $10.00.
It did bug me that this thing had a built in serial port while the RS232 board for my Model III set me back $100!
This makes me wonder if you have an Acorn Electron or Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
GeoNeilUK Those computers were not sold here in the USA, and importing one from the UK and adapting it to American voltage and TV signal standards is expensive and complicated.
vwestlife they were sold in Canada as i was with my grandfather when he got his then a couple years later passed it down to me :) the MC 10 that is.
Donald Holben What about the Electron and the Spectrum?
There is an emulator of MC-10 called Virtual MC-10. I downloaded it years ago.
Wow.. I used to have one of those.. Ahh the memories... Going to the library and photo coping the games that were in the magazines.. Getting home and spending 2 - 3 hours programming the game into it.. Just to play it for an hour or two.. Only to lose all that work when I turned it off.. But that was ok.. I just redid it all again the next day :) lol
Not all Canadians do; mostly older generations say "zed". Younger Canadians grow up watching U.S. TV shows and thus are more likely to say "zee".
The Telephone sound would make a great ringtone :)
I just got my MC-10 Computer a couple of days ago ... sadly it's 110V @ 60hz, and i live in Europe, so im waiting for a frequency converter to arrive before i can play with it :D
The MC-10 runs on 8 to 9 volts AC at 1.5 amps, so any power supply which puts out that kind of voltage can be used -- you don't necessarily need to use the original one it came with.
@@vwestlife But the AC Frequency still needs to be correct, which it wont be without a frequency converter :)
No it doesn't, because it's all being converted to DC inside the computer anyway. So it doesn't matter whether it's 60 Hz or 50 Hz.
@@vwestlife Are you sure? I thought the AC signal was used for the NTSC modulation?
No. NTSC actually runs at 59.94 Hz, and has not been synched to the power line frequency since at least the 1940s.
i got the eu version of this one . is sell in a red suit case and called alice 32. and the computer is red of course and look adorable.
Not only that, they had internal competition, as by 1984, the Tandy CoCo2 16K could be had for as little as $150, ($190 for the 16K Extended) and for $259, you could get the new, 64K Extended CoCo 2. If I was Tandy, I would have lauched these in the UK, where they could have easily competed with the ZX Spectrum .
A composite mod is in order.
Yes.
These disks were mostly used for Smith Corona's computer word procesors. You can look them up online as they begin with the PWP name. The drives were VERY unreliable overtime. If you buy them now thw drives are broken making saving things useless. The PWPs with 3.5 disks last until today and are far more durable and reliable. The radio SHACK mc-10 can be emmulated using VMC program. Search online for it. You can play with it on your home pc for free!
Great review.
Yea. I bought a trs-80 color in its original box for $80 off some hippie at a flea market. I later sold it on ebay for $120. Had a great time using it though (i would buy another sometime) .
Man, those specs are pretty sad, even by early 80s standards, but I guess you get what you pay for :) Nice overview though. I like the retro blocky graphics too!
MicroCoCo! Has a nice ring to it.
That was pretty funny at the end. "It lives up to its name for being a 'micro color computer.' Anyone need a 2.8 inch floppy disk?"
woo this was my first machine
Yeah, it's pretty garish. There is a way to switch it to black text on an orange background, but that's even worse!
got one of orth Radio Shack surplus store in 1987thoe at the Ft W
890kHz? It must have been very hard to make anything useful on that machine, especially in interpreted basic.
But the Motorola 6800 series is more efficient than the 6502 and similar CPUs used in other home computers of the time, so it wasn't as slow as the clock speed suggests.
You just tricked me into reading about old processors.
It actually worked pretty well. In this day and age when all hardware is basically derived for IBM's intel PC, most people fail to understand that the cpu clock is only one of many design factors affecting overall performance of the computer.
First the MC10, Color Computers 1 through 3 and their competitors were called "Home" computers in a time where commercially available processors clock under 4 MHz. RaM memory was very expensive at the time and was available in two types: static ram that used digital logic states to represent 1 or 0, and dynamic ram, which maintained the data as charges on microscopic capacitors. Dynamic memory requires a "refresh" signal to prevent data loss and early dynamic ram chip expected this signal from an external source.
Home computers in the US used a 3.58 MHz crystal for the system clock.This was divided into a two phase 1.79 Mhz clock, with one phase used to refresh the ram and the second phase used as the cpu clock. The Color Computer and MC10, divided one of the 1.79 Mhz into a 0.89 MHz two phase clock, with one phase timing the CPU and the other timing the video display chip. The setup alloed th cpu and video chip to share memory wiout interference.
Offerings from Commodore and Atari on the other habdclock the cpu and io vhip at 1.79 Mhz, butpause the CPU while the video chip accessed the memory effectiverly running the 650w vpu one eigth of the time.