{"id":253,"date":"2006-12-25T07:00:42","date_gmt":"2006-12-25T12:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/253"},"modified":"2007-01-04T19:10:55","modified_gmt":"2007-01-05T00:10:55","slug":"retro-scan-of-the-week-a-very-trs-80-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/253\/retro-scan-of-the-week-a-very-trs-80-christmas","title":{"rendered":"<span id=\"retro_color\">Retro Scan of the Week:<\/span> A Very TRS-80 Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"\/wp-content\/images\/retroscan\/coco_xmas_large.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/wp-content\/images\/retroscan\/coco_xmas_small.jpg\" alt=\"TRS-80 Color Computer Christmas Advertisement\" class=\"centered\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The TRS-80 Color Computer (CoCo), as seen in this 1982 ad, has a special place in my heart because it was one of the first old computers I obtained when I started collecting them thirteen years ago.  A family friend heard about my new hobby and donated the machine to me, complete with a disk drive and some cartridges.  I had lots of fun learning the machine&#8217;s particular brand of BASIC (I still maintain that the BASIC manual for the TRS-80 CoCo 1 is one of the best computer manuals ever created).<\/p>\n<p>I also had a blast playing with the CoCo&#8217;s <em>Audio Spectrum Analyzer<\/em> cartridge, which lets you graphically view an audio frequency spectrum through input from the machine&#8217;s cassette jack.  It had a really neat kaleidescope mode that was a lot like &#8220;visualizers&#8221; on MP3 player software these days.  I spent hours <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/MUSH\" target=\"_blank\">MUSH<\/a>ing (not on the CoCo, of course, but on a PC) while listening to classic rock on the radio, all while the kaleidescope effects from the music played out on a RGB monitor beside me.  Good times.<\/p>\n<p>Strangely enough, the distinctive chiclet keyboard on the CoCo 1 never bothered me at all &#8212; it is probably the most usable and comfortable chiclet keyboard out there.  And knowing chiclet keyboards, that&#8217;s saying a lot.  All in all, the CoCo was a great little machine.  Did anybody else out there have one?<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and Merry Christmas!<\/p>\n<p><small><em>If you use this image on your site, please support &#8220;Retro Scan of the Week&#8221; by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry.  Thanks.<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The TRS-80 Color Computer (CoCo), as seen in this 1982 ad, has a special place in my heart because it was one of the first old computers I obtained when I started collecting them thirteen years ago. A family friend heard about my new hobby and donated the machine to me, complete with a disk [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-collecting","category-computer-info-and-history","category-retro-scan-of-the-week"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}