The friends I had in the late 70s / early 80s who had TRS-80s all referred to them as trash-80s. I was envious of those who had one. I had use of an IMSAI 8080 with a North Star floppy drive and BASIC, and maybe I was at the time a little snotty about "real computers have front panel switches", but this was way before Macs existed, or at least were affordable to students. I spent many years on 8-bit platforms and the TRS-80 was a nice package. I wouldn't be offended by the term "trash-80", unless I heard it from someone who didn't understand just how capable those 8-bit systems were. No one I knew at the time had an IBM PC because they were way too expensive, and being able to use more than 64KB ram isn't very useful if you can't possibly afford that much ram. On Sun, Aug 19, 2018 at 11:31 AM, Gordon 'gsteemso' Steemson via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Hi folks,
Some of us in the TRS-80 community refer to it as the “T” word. When said with an underlying affection and respect, it’s all good. It’s a way of “owning/“ the term. However, when said with derision or out of ignorance, its offensive.
I have almost always said it that way -- not with any value judgement in mind, but simply because it is considerably faster than saying it the "correct" way.
That said, I initially heard that form of the name when I was an immature and easily-amused teenager. Obnoxious-Youth Me found it made for a very vivid mnemonic association, in addition to being more convenient to enunciate.
(For the record, I never actually _used_ a TRS-80 of any type, though I have enjoyed brief interactions with a few specimens set up by our fellow retrocomputing fans.)
It came as something as a shock when, after 25 years or so of using "Trash-80" merely as a streamlined way of saying "TRS-80," I first encountered someone to whom the term was strongly offensive. It took even longer for me to grasp just _how_ strongly it offended, simply because the Platform Holy Wars dispute had degenerated to "Mac vs. IBM" with rare interjections of "Amiga!" by the time I encountered it. The various 8-bit platforms remained in minor use by those disinterested in forking over non-trivial sums of money to get something more current, but had long since ceased to even be referenced in that futile conflict, let alone be actual contenders therein.
My two cents; quote or ignore as preferred.
Gordon "gsteemso" Steemson Instigating Cat-Herder and Agitator-by-Default for the Seattle Retro-Computing Society