"The System 80 was my first computer. At the
time, I was about 12 years old, living in Adelaide, and all set to get
into amateur radio. My Dad and I went into Dick Smiths to buy my first
transceiver, and he managed to convince me to look at a computer instead
– the System 80 was the unit we chose, given the Sorcerer was
too expensive at the time. It had a massive 4K RAM, and a fast cassette
drive with a black and white monitor. I’m glad he convinced me
on the computer, because I found the computer much more interesting
(and probably would not have passed the ham radio exam to get my licence
anyhow!). I had the System 80 for a number of years before donating
it to a local primary school, and replacing it with one of the very
first Apple Mac 128 computers to arrive in Australia in 1984.
The System 80 was a great computer, especially given
that it could run all the TRS-80 software. Of course I used it mainly
for games, but also made a start on learning BASIC programming, which
I think helped later on in University computer science courses, and
remember typing up an essay on an early word processing package that
to me at the time, was a complete relief from using a typewriter or
writing by hand.
This site really takes me back to the early days
of PCs, when it was much more of a ‘hobby’ than the tool
that it is now."
