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Intro / Mission

This is Tandy Tech, or Tandy Wiki, or TRS-80 Tech, or something. I haven't figured out the cool name yet. Maybe "The Missing Tandy WIKI"?. No, too long. But hmm, that brings up an idea...

It's just a place for documenting, disseminating, and collaborating to improve over time, info about TRS-80 and Tandy computers and related peripherals and subjects, in a wiki fashion.

There is a LOT of info out there already, in the form of several web sites and forums and mail lists, but they are all either static archives of old info, or ephemeral conversations. No ongoing living documentation. People struggle to learn things, and then that knowledge is largely lost again, because web site authors lose interest or lose the battle with time, and the info goes out of date or goes lost entirely. Sometimes you can find old info in archives of mail lists, but then when what you find is incomplete or partially incorrect or obsolete, you can't go back and correct it or update it for the next guy.

So, wiki.

For instance, this crappy front page itself should probably be improved over time. And if I don't do it, YOU can! Like cut all this uninteresting verbiage out, create a new page named something like Mission, dump it in there, and just leave a little link to it here.

The initial intended scope of this wiki is pretty much any computer from Radio Shack. Life and reality does not have many clean lines however, so of course I expect non-Radio Shack info to appear as well. Many Radio Shack products were also manufactured, or sold, or rebranded, or cloned, or shared a common ancestry, with many non Radio Shack products. The Model 1 was a minimalist circuit wrapped around a Z80. Well lots of other machines were also minimalist circuits wrapped around a Z80. A lot of Z80 assembly programming knowledge from a ZX Spectrum would be valuable knowledge to a TRS-80 developer. A thorough article explaining how to clean and calibrate a Commodor or Atari floppy drive, is 99 44/100ths applicable to a TRS-80 floppy drive. Not to mention the many 3rd party products that were not made by Radio Shack, but which were made to work specifically with Radio Shack products.

Initially I'm just going to dump wiki versions of some various notes and recipes that I have been keeping in Google Drive and Google Photos, and even Facebook posts. And just start building a plain disorganized list of them here as an index. Over time, the organization can be improved, just as the content itself can. Hell, at first the "content" will just be links to the the Google Drive folders!

This info is wildly incomplete. It is intended to be filled-in over time, rather than be compiled and presented as a finished product. Those are called books, and they take years to write, and you hopefully get paid for it. I threw this Digital Ocean droplet up and dropped Centos 7 and MediaWiki 1.28 on it and registered a couple domain names all in a few hours one night, and had to pay for the hosting and the domain. It is a place where anyone can place anything Tandy related, but does NOT claim to be a place that already has everything Tandy related. At first it will just have a few small things I personally have figured out and wish to document. What happens after that I don't really care that much. If no one else ever adds anything, that's fine. I'm still getting what I want, which is a better way to host things I want to document myself, than Google Drive folders!

But ideally, I hope to create a shared resource that outlives myself, and not just as a static copy. In 20 years, Half of the details I document today will be obsolete. In 20 years, an article that documents how to build a gadget today, with links to OSHPark and DigiKey, will be obsolete. A reader from that time should be able to hop in and update it with the current equivalent info, whatever that is at the time. An original article today might say "you can buy this gear here...", but tomorrow it should be able to be updated to "you can print this gear from this file...". It may, should even, still contain the original historical info for reference, but also updated versions of same.

Computers

Model_I
Model_III
Model_4

Model_100/102
Model_200
Model_600

Model_II
Model_16
Model_6000

Color Computer
Pocket

Accessories

This is a disorganized list. Some items like a DMP-100 are generic and could be used with any computer. Some others like a PDD-2 are not generic, and are really only used with a Model 100, 102, or 200, or their non-RS equivalents (Kyocera, NEC, etc). I have no idea how best to organize these things into classes and yet still have a complete list in one place, so for now, it's just a list pretty much at random.
DMP-100
CGP-115
PDD-2
X-PAD
Disk/Video_Interface
Expansion Interface

3rd Party

MISE
MIRE
LNW_System_Expansion_II
LN-Doubler5/8
BASF-6108
PGDesigns_224K
REX
JLS-96K

Other Resources

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bys6eLbSbYyhSkhUZ1h2Y0hLRk0
https://archive.org/details/trs80manuals
http://www.classiccmp.org
http://www.trs-80.com
http://www.club100.org
http://www.bitchin100.com
http://oldcomputers.net
http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com