#80-us

[krjpalmer]

Basic Computing July 1983

With its new name in place, the magazine formerly known as 80-US offered music programs in this issue for the Color Computer, which had some "official" sound hardware, and for the Model I, which had to send sound out its cassette port to an amplifier.

[krjpalmer]

80-US November/December 1981

This issue promised that 80-U.S. would be published on a monthly schedule going forward. The author of "I refuse to be a computer widow!" talked about when her husband had bought a TRS-80 Model I; the article about "microcomputers in the home" described one with a Color Computer in it. Tandy's Ed Juge, who had once provided a column to 80 Microcomputing before things really started souring between Wayne Green's magazine and Radio Shack, began a column where he described the Model II factory in Forth Worth, Texas, then brought up the latest catalogue and mentioned "there is no Model IV or V." One error correction was credited to Lonnie Falk and The Rainbow.

[krjpalmer]

80-US January 1982

In this issue's columns, Captain 80 visited England to take a quick look at its software industry ("fragmented into several noncommunicating factions", which included "those who pirate software") and Ed Juge explained Radio Shack did in fact "sell software written by other people" and argued against judgements TRSDOS was "primitive" compared to everything else. One article gave its own explanation of how to free up a little extra memory space in your Color Computer by disabling high-resolution graphics.

[krjpalmer]

80-US May 1983

80-US fit its own introduction to the TRS-80 Model 100 into this "special peripherals issue," passing along a comment from a Radio Shack Project Director that "It will outsell any other computer that Tandy has ever made." In the "Tandy topics" column, Ed Juge revealed he'd been carrying a Model 100 around "since December," and suggested that people could "guesstimate a ballpark figure" for how many computers Radio Shack was selling by working through the figures in their annual reports.

[krjpalmer]

80-US November 1982

The cover of this issue, according to the table of contents, depicted "what may be just a few months away—phones with built-in computers, or vice versa." In the meantime, you could telecommunicate with the larger TRS-80 computers.

[krjpalmer]

80-US January 1983

A general sort of "getting started with computing" theme stretched through this issue. One article, from someone who worked as a volunteer at the Calico Early Man Site in California, contemplated the years between stone tools and computers and proposed it would be a good thing when not needing "to fully understand all the principles needed to make a tool to be able to effectively use the tool" applied as fully to computers as to cars and packets of tomato seeds. The editorials considered a shakeout in computing might arrive in 1983, and that Tandy would emerge from the year just fine.

[krjpalmer]

80-US July 1982

The "software protection" mentioned on the cover of this issue appeared, according to a dry (but footnoted) article from an attorney, to refer to "programs suspiciously like other programs," not "keeping people from making illegal, or indeed backup, copies of disks."

[krjpalmer]

80-US September 1982

Cameron C. Brown's editorial opened with "It is strange to be devoting an issue to one of the weakest areas of the TRS-80 line of computers. Graphics are lumpy. What we call a line makes other computer owners snicker." The magazine strove to make up for that with a lead piece about the bitmap modes of Epson printers; there was also a program that could have a face sing along to musical input.