>>>Can't wait for monochrome, light grey on black, and ASCII graphics and "pick-a-number menus" to become trendy again...
>
>Ha. My first machine was a TRS-80 Level II. Monochrome upper case text only (Tandy saved a few pennies that way) and graphics 128*48, actually contrived via ascii characters with 6 blocks per character on the 64*16 screen. Still have it. That thing had a ROM OS and booted in about a second. Even the floppy disk OS loaded off disk in about 4 seconds.

Ah yes, the good 'ol TRS-80 model 1 (as many folks called it, the "trash-eighty") -- the same platform that got me started too. Was able to obtain an old model I from one of the college professors that I knew (the unit is an early Model I -- which came with the Level I BASIC and no numeric keypad).

One behavior of the TRS-80 (and a number of older of the 8-bit era) that would surely confuse people today is that when you entered text, you would normally get upper case, and you would press SHIFT key to get the lower case. Some computers of the same era had ability to display lower case and some (like the TRS-80) didn't. One bit that could confuse you is that on the screen would be upper case, but when you printed something you could get both upper and lower case.

I do remember the infamous problem that the model I's had with the ribbon cable that connected the various components -- so unless you remember to anchor them to the desk, any time someone tried to shift the keyboard (which was where the CPU was contained) you often knocked loose the cable connecting it to the expansion interface. Though not as touchy as the "wobby Memopak" problem with the Sinclair ZX-81, it was indeed a problem.