The official home of the only original Commodore. Copyright ©1958-2026 Commodore International Corporation.
Commodore just announced the Callback 8020. It’s a privacy-first, Sailfish OS flip phone designed to fill the niche between dumbphones and modern smartphones: Callback 8020: The Future of Flip-Phones
Also see their computer:
What a BLAST from the PAST!
There’s a guy I know who has written some very cool scripts; he still does it! But once upon a time in the past he had a buddy who had the handle Trash80 - does that mean anything to any of you?
I’ll write for a while, then tell you what that actually stands for.
As we can see here, the original Commodore has some truly classic roots! I don’t know what they were doing in 1958; there was a musical group calld the Commodores; not sure if they were directly or indirectly related but that’s my digression so I can RETURN to “Trash80”, that’s what some computer geeks would call the early Radio Shack Personal Computer - the TRS80, based on the early Intel 8080 chip, was sold in Radio Shack stores as the Tandy TRS 80!
Yep, remember the “Trash 80” very well! I was a Commodore user – VIC20 & SX-64.
I can only think you’re referring to the Tandy TRS80 model 1. The black/silver somewhat affordable “homecomputer”.
There were several of them in the electronics lab of my technical college. It attracted me like a magnet. Anyway, never had an opportunity to even touch the things.
Luckily I could go completely bezerk on the singleboard Intel 8008 and the Motorola 6800 developement kits with respectively 128 and 256 bytes(!) SRAM instead (which you had to program in hex directly and came with a binder with opcodes).
More or less this type of kit ( actually a tad bigger because of an extensive I/O area):
I certainly remember that! My uncle owned one when I was younger but then switched to the VIC20 and stayed Commodore all the way to the 128 before he passed. It’s what got me into computers and when I was a young airman in the USAF I bought my first PC (Tandy1000EX) at the local Radio Shack off base because another guy in the barracks had one and playing Kings Quest on it so I had to have my own of course and when I found there was an AD&D PC game I was hooked.
Thanks for that report @Norm24 ! I never owned either a Commodore or a Radio Shack computer but for MANY years I was a “battery of the month” club member and I frequently visited a nearby Radio Shack near my childhood home.
The very first computers that had microprocessors that I actually got a hold of (but did not personally own) were Heathkit computers. I saw an H8 at the university I attended as an undergraduate but I did not use or touch it. On the other hand, we had a real time computer lab at the university and I did some coursework on both an analog and a digital real time computer; the digital one was, I believe, the Heathkit H11.
After graduation and I was in the working world, my company had a “College of Lifetime Learning” and I attended a course using the H8 where we’d connect various pieces and write simple binary programs. Nothing life changing occurred there, except these classes did help me to get a few jobs doing real time testing.
