TRS-80 Model II Family

A Tandy model II

The Tandy TRS-80 Model II Family was an expensive line of Tandy computers. The were used almost exclusively as business machines. The base Model II and its Double-Sided floppy and more expandable brother, the Model 12 had a Zilog Z-80A running at 4 Mhz with DMA. They ran both TRSDOS and CPM/M. The original follow-up to the Model II was the Model 16 which was a dual processor machine with the Model II's Z-80A for I/O processing and backwards compatibility with a 68000 CPU for 16-bit operation and up to 1MB of ram. Unfortunately, the Model 16 was a flop due to lack of 16-bit software, so then the improved Model 16B was released and it was show stopper due to the fact that it was one of the most affordable [Unix] machines on the market running Microsoft XENIX. It was the best selling Unix-based machine in 1984 and could support 3 (or more?) users. The final incarnation in the series was the Tandy 6000 which came with more RAM, a built-in hard drive and a detachable keyboard. These machines, much like the Sun-1 had a custom MMU to run Unix, and also, there is an excellent emulator available for the whole family called trs80gp

Some information can be found:

• http://home.iae.nl/users/pb0aia/cm/modelii.html
• https://www.trs-80.com/wordpress/models/model-2

A huge collection of software and documentation can be found at:

• https://github.com/pski/model2archive.git

It is recommended that you clone the archive instead of downloading the zip file because it tends to fail otherwise.

The trs80gp emulator is available at: http://48k.ca/trs80gp.html

Tutorial to follow.