TRS-80 Model II

From: Ward Donald Griffiths III <gram_at_cnct.com>
Date: Thu Feb 19 19:51:44 1998

Lawrence Walker wrote:
>
> I've searched the world web over ,but never did I find......
> There seems to be a lot of info on Mods. 1,3,100,Coco etc. but nada
> on this beast. Any sites I might have missed ? Merch , Cord ?

Well, I guess I'll have to do something about now that I've bitten
the bullet and put up a web page. Since the Model II and its sundry
successors number among my favorite machines of all time, especially
once Xenix comes into the picture. (Don't worry about the page for a
while, though -- the only thing on it so far is my resume).

> What I have is a TRS Model II with 1 internal 8' fdd and 1 external
> fdd , 3 humungous 5Meg hdd ( about the size of a large XT) , K-B ,
> TRS model 7 modem , and a box of 8" disks with CP/M 2.2 , TRSOS,
> Scripsit and a bunch of other prgms.

If the machine is truly dead, I'll be very happy to take the software
off your hands, especially if the manuals are there.

Are you sure that those HDs are 5Meg? While Tandy did market a 5 Meg
HD for the Model 1/3/4 series, the Model II series started with 8.4
Meg then went to 12/15/35/70 Meg boxes that were the same package as
the 5 Meg. All of them were compatible with each other except the 8.4
Meg Shugart system.

> When I boot up with or without an OS disk I get a "boot error ht'
> msg. The dd spins up and sounds like its loading. Could it have been
> set up to boot off one of the hard drives ? I'm really a novice with
> TRS-80s but have Coco 1 and 2 in my collection and a Scriptsit cart.
> Is there something I'm not doing ?

If you power up the beast with a HD interface installed but no HD
available, that's what you'll get. Power up the HDs, the external
floppy, then the CPU. Depending on the age of the machine (how long are
the levers on the power and reset switches?), trying to boot a floppy
with the external floppy box off will eat the boot track five times
out of seven. Oh, the label on the floppy faces AWAY from the screen --
this may seem a trivial caveat, but the opposite orientation applies to
the double-sided drives in the 16/12/6000 boxes.
-- 
Ward Griffiths
Dylan:  How many years must some people exist, 
			before they're allowed to be free?
WDG3rd:  If they "must" exist until they're "allowed",
			they'll never be free.
Received on Thu Feb 19 1998 - 19:51:44 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:30:53 BST