Dirty TRS-80 Has a Surprise Hack

[Adrian] had a TRS-80 model IV that looks like it was stored in a mulch pile. However, it seemed to have some surprises. The first hint that something was up was that the keyboard looks like a model III and there are two mystery knobs in the back.

So what’s going on? You” have to watch [Adrian’s] video below to find out. At about the six-minute mark, you’ll find that things are not at all what you might think.

Here’s a hint: strapped to the disk drive, there is a VHF and UHF tuner. No kidding. There were also some other odd parts inside, but we’d give away the surprise if we said more. The keyboard hack is — well, impressive might not be the right word. Surprising, maybe?s

Someone who once owned the machine definitely did a hack in the truest sense of the word. It required some surgery to get some activity on the computer. [Adrian] has some more troubleshooting to get the beast working, but we imagine we’ll see the troubleshooting in one or more future videos.

If you already know what the surprise is, it couldn’t help but remind us of this post, but we won’t say why so you can click it after you’ve watched the entire video. We were sort of surprised no bits of this computer showed up.