I can leave any time I want. Yep.

She Plucketh the Flower of my Nipple

Pushycat

Canceled cable.

The Dutch Oven Murders

Spaceprom

Van Ideas, June 1977

Van Ideas, 1977

Allied Electronics and the TRS-80 - More information revealed!

Those among you who have been with us from the beginning may recall our hard-hitting investigative report from three years ago, on the back cover of the 1977 Allied Electronics catalog, where we revealed the pricing info for Tandy's computing powerhouse. Well, this morning, someone flipped over that very same back cover and found even more pricing and specifications for the available system configurations for the TRS-80! Put your Mastercharge on lockdown, people. Spoiler alert: This could get expensive.

You could get the $599 Level-1 BASIC, which, despite being perfect for the computer novice, comes with the "professional keyboard". But if you're an ambitious power user, you'll need more RAM - like, 16K of it, muthafuckaaaaa!!! $899, please.

But what if you need to show proof of your l33t haxors skillz? You need to print out your exploits. that's why you probably want the fast 4K/Printer system for just $1198. It comes with a printer that will print a screen grab on 4" of paper, so you can show everyone in the chess club that horizontal line you made flash on and off.

No, wait. That one's a downgrade to 4K of RAM. Don't waste your time, man. Deliver a few more newspapers and score yourself the Level-II 16K/Printer/Disk system or be a loser. For $2385. You can do all your engineering and clinical laboratorying on it. Save whatever you program onto cassette and listen to it while you're fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der autobahn to class in your Gremlin.

Wait, what's this? There are 32 K's? How is this possible? You need that many K's, plus a second mini-disk unit. No question. It doesn't matter if it's an additional fifteen hundred dollars. A war machine like that will pay for itself once you start organizing your recipes on it, or controlling your inventory. You even get a better printer. Whatever a "line printer" is.

Hey, wait a sec. Why does it have an "expansion interface"? How could you ever use more power than this? It must be for something else. Maybe a special port for the very interested power user.

Click for big.

Radio Shack TRS-80 - A "powerful", "expandable" "microcomputer".

 Aaah, the simple pleasure of laughing at computers of the past. Here's a wonderful page from Allied Electronics' (Yep! Still around.) catalog of 1977, the first year that Tandy's TRS-80 microcomputer was available. Who can resist the lure of a computer rendered as a woodcut in vivid black, white, and brown?

There it is, in all it's liney glory. The TRS-80 actually was pretty "micro" for the time. Remember that computers tended to be sofa-sized or larger back then. Read the impressive specs! Read them again because you're not used to seeing numbers that small! Then marvel at the bargain price of $600. For me, the most shocking number in the price breakdown is the monitor. $200 for a twelve inch monochrome CRT seems criminal to my spoiled eyes.

For those of you too young to recall, computers of this vintage stored their info on tape. For consumer units like the TRS-80, that meant cassettes. Yes, you'd put in a cassette and press "play" to run a program. This was cutting edge, people, believe it or not.

There's some nicely weird art in this ad. The Blandishment and Photoshop Squad has separated the dorky clip art guys and the TRS-80 "product shot" from the catalog for solo performances in whatever document, email, or ransom note you choose. Send your letters of gratitude to them here at GO! Tower. I'll be sure the recycle bin reads every word. get your rude fingers ready to right click some clunky computing onto your hard drive in three, two, one...

1000 px wide.

1000 px wide.

200 px wide.

 

200 px wide

Click for big microcomputer.

Tony Cardena's Short Van - Back to front.

I'm pretty sure the name on the front of this van is "Tony Cardena". I can't find any trace of such a man on the web, but there is a Tony Cardenas in L.A., involved in local government. I don't think that's him. In any case, I want this van. It's called "Spaced Out" by the terribly clever creator.

This is what they call a "section" job. The vehicle is cut vertically in two places, and a section of the body is just removed, like sliced bread. It looks like they took out about twenty inches of wheelbase in this case. If you put enough power to the rear wheels, a van like this will wheelie pretty easily. Note the wheelie bars just aft of the rear wheels. By the looks of the chubby tires and side pipes, "Spaced Out" probably spent some time pointed skyward.

It makes the car almost always harder to drive. The steering gets sensitive and very twitchy, making it tricky to drive at low speeds and crazy at high speeds. This is all theory, though. I've only heard about sectioned hot rods - never driven one. Maybe you could do some tricks to slow down the steering, bringing the car back to sanity?

But that's not the point. This mechanic took a van, already a tall and kind of goofy looking thing, and made it shorter, which has the net effect of making it look even taller and goofier. Hooray for crazy mechanics with a sense of humor! I want a goofy van like this one.

"Spaced Out" is very much a 60's / 70's kind of hot rod. Hot rod designers like Tom Daniel made funny or weird looking cars, like this van. If you watch any of the gearhead shows now, you'll see that hot rod builders these days are obsessed with making scary or "badass" cars that reassure the owner of his masculinity. What are they afraid of? Why do their cars need to convey menace? I prefer ridiculous rods.

When I lived in Orange, California, I used to occasionally take a drive to Art Supply Warehouse, in Long Beach. Right near the store was a brake shop that had a sectioned van like this one, all in black, sitting by the street... sort of on display. I heard it had no motor, making it less of an object of lust for me because I definitely would want to drive my pudgy, nearly undriveable amputee van. I didn't have any money at the time anyway. I could barely afford my imported Japanese drawing pencils.

Quickie Post - Van on the run.

Time is short today, and as we say around the office, any post is better than no post! Enjoy these culturally humiliating pictures of a custom van called Van on the Run, which must have seemed wildly clever to the van's builder. See, he realized, with the help of the popular Paul McCartney song "Band on the Run", that "man and "van" rhyme, resulting in the devilish play on words "van on the run". Whee.

I'd love to have one of these mid-sixties era snub-nosed cabover style vans, but in a stock, unmolested state. This is not that by a long way.

I promise you that, by the time "Van one the Run" met it's ultimate fate, (whatever that was), the shag carpet had been hardened into countless pointy little stalagmites by all the encrusted spermatozoa of it's owner, diluted with up to 6% concentration of other fluids secreted from his many conquests. Let's say it once for the ages, "bleah".

Normal big post tomorrow.