This is FRED in its original incarnation. The monitor was really an RCA television set with no tuner. The channel selector would have been where the Radio Shack nameplate is. It was black and white and could display 64 columns of text in 16 rows. Wow.

The CPU is part of the keyboard case. That makes the keyboard awfully tall, so when I made the computer table I built a "well" for the CPU to put the keys at a more comfortable level. Just to the right of the keyboard is the mass storage drive. That red spot is really the record button of the audio cassette recorder. It recorded data at 250 bits per second in a sort-of-like Kansas City format.

Later on I added more memory - first going from 4kb to 16kb (and Level II BASIC - see the manual to the left of the screen?) and finally to 64kb. I bought some of the early double density drives for the TRS-80 - the big ones with 180kb storage space.

Eventually I added a modem and opened up the first free, public access BBS in Onslow County, NC. The BBS was Mr Wizard's Software Works which featured a gaggle of local interest message areas and a ton of public domain software. (Shareware hadn't been invented yet.)