Things were a lot different for us computer buffs back in the “stone age” of home computing. Back then there were very precious few commercial software programs available, and most of the programs we ran on our trusty TRS-80′s had been “typed in” manually by us users. And where did the lines of code for these primitive programs come from? For most of us, they came from the pages of 80 Microcomputing Magazine.
80 Micro debuted in January 1980, and for the next 8 years we waited month after seemingly-endless month for the next issue to arrive. Compared to today’s slick publications, this wonderful magazine was about as primitive as the TRS-80 itself, but the information contained inside each issue was like meat to a hungry lion, ready to be devoured just as soon as it arrived in the mailbox.
As mentioned above, the pages of 80 Micro contained plenty of interesting and useful code to type in and use, but the thing that interested me even more than the programs were all the ads for third-party expansion items. For example, for just a few hundred bucks one could order a 5.25 inch floppy disk drive that could store a whopping 180K of data on a single floppy disk (yes, that’s 180K, as in kilobytes).
Of course before you could use your new floppy drive you had to also pay a couple of hundred bucks for an “Expansion Interface” unit. But thanks to an ad in 80 Micro, I saved about $100 by building my own Expansion Interface from a kit. Well, it wasn’t really a kit – all that came in the box was the bare circuit board, the parts list and a schematic diagram. I had to scrounge around and buy the components to populate the board from a number of third-party suppliers because no single company stocked all the parts that the board required.
Perhaps the most exciting ad ever to grace the pages of 80 Micro was for the very first hard disk drive to become available for a home computer. For a mere $4,995 one could buy a nifty 5MB “winchester” hard disk drive that plugged into the TRS-80′s Expansion Interface unit. Yes, that’s right, not 5 Terabytes, or even 5 Gigabytes – that’s 5 Megabytes! But oh, how I would have loved to have been able to replace that tiny 180K floppy drive with a 5MB hard drive! But alas, $4,995 was a lot of money, and needless to say this young country boy never got his hands on one. But every time the next issue of 80 Micro came out I would always stop and look at that ad and wonder “What if?”.
Well, the original TRS-80 was eventually replaced by the TRS-80 Models II, III and IV, and 80 Micro Magazine covered each of them in-depth. But by the end of the decade the arrival of the phenomenon known simply as the IBM PC had pretty much shoved the TRS-80 line of computers right into the annals of history. And along with the demise of the TRS-80 came the demise of 80 Micro Magazine.
In all the years that followed, I have never found another computer magazine that’s as thorough in its coverage or as interesting in its writing (including the ads) as 80 Micro. And given the way that computers and the publications that cover them have become commodities, I probably never will.