TRS 80 Model 12 Picked up

[devin davison]

Greetings. It has been an interesting day. Rather late in the day, a buddy
notified me of a local thrift store that went under, and mentioned there
may be some computers on site up for grabs. Upon arrival, the place was a
mess, but the folks there were friendly and gave me the tour, everything
had to go, the shopkeeper skipped town and left the place full of junk for
the Building owner to clean out.

I found a TRS 80 Model 12, a vga commodore branded monitor, commodore
cassette drive, among some misc 5.25 floppy disks. There may be more, I
need to go back for another sweep in the morning.

The computer is extremely big, taking up an entire kitchen table,rivaling
the space that is taken up on my desk for a pdp 11. I am looking to clear a
space to work on it without dropping parts.

The machine looks to be clean, However i am missing the keyboard.
The machine does not power on or show anything on the screen. I do hear a
high pitched hiss, so there may be some kind of power supply issue. I was
not aware of this model of machine, I am curious if anyone has a spare
keyboard for sale.

I am not familiar with this model, it has 2, 8 inch floppy drives on the
front. I am curious about the format of the disks, would it be possible to
use another computer with an 8 inch drive to make a floppy to start the
machine, or do the drives use an odd difficult format that would be
impossible to write?

http://devindamico.com/Uploads/TRS80M12.jpg

--Devin D.