University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, 1980
Saint Mary’s Academy, 1982. (Photo: Nancy Leigh Williams)
That’s the TRS-80 model I in the first shot, released in 1977. The kids in the second shot are working on a model III, released in 1980.
(First image via UWEC Archives/Flickr)
2 Warps to Neptune 
The best!
I wish I could find at least one picture of myself in my 7th-Grade Basic Computing class, where we all used TRS-80s. Sigh. Maybe I’ll dig up my old yearbook and see if there’s anything in there. I know for sure they’ll have a pic of the Computer Club. lol get ready.
I’ll never forget when they introduced computers to us in school and there was a learning curve. These days, 2 year olds can post a picture on Instagram, Tweet, like a status on Facebook, rip a video from Youtube and blog about it all at the same time without any teaching whatsoever!
That’s the very thing that separated the “nerds” from the “normal” kids back then. Computers were so new, complex and mysterious that only those who were willing to take the challenge paid any real attention to them.
Everything’s become so intuitive now that there’s hardly anything to really teach!
I learned BASIC and COBOL programming on TRS-80’s. I don’t have a picture of myself at one, but I do have one of a friend sitting in front of one in our high school classroom circa 1984. I actually have a TRS-80 Model III sitting in my basement right now. It belonged to a friend’s father-in-law. He gave it to me after his father-in-law passed away. He knows I won’t turn away any old technology.
Dood Tom, you gotta fire that baby up!
10 CLS
20 ? “I LIVE!”;
30 GOTO 10
RUN
I did fire it up a while back and wrote a simple program on it. My daughter actually started reading the BASIC manual that came with it and wrote a few of her own programs which was pretty cool.