Going to lunch today, I passed one of those trendy little furniture stores in the shopping center where the restaurant was. In the display window, they had a very nice, and I presume very expensive, computer desk ensemble. You’ve seen the type – a corner unit complete with printer stand, overhead drawers, rolling chair, under desk storage – The Works.

And what did they have sitting on the computer desk to illustrate the modernity and stylishness of the furniture?  A TRS-80 Model 4.  For those of you under the age of 30, that was one of THE hottest computers on the market back around the first term of the Reagan Administration. But there it was. Integrated keyboard. Dual full height floppy drive – 5 1/4 inch, of course. 24×80 black and white video display. 128K of RAM.

It was actually kind of funny. Here they were trying to show off this elegant computer workstation set and they had sitting on it a computer that was probably older than some of the clerks in the store. The icing on the cake was the fact that they had a modern Hewlett-Packard Deskjet sitting on the printer stand next to it. Kind of like having a set of mag wheels on a horse drawn buggy.

Of course, I could be wrong. They say that everything old is new again. And I cant think of many platforms that are more resistant to spyware and viruses than a TRS-80. Maybe it’s time for businesses to rethink Windows Server 2003 and take another look at TRSDOS.