Hobby World (1979)

This add for Hobby World is from the August 1979 issue of Byte.

For the relative few home computers users of the time, computers truly were a hobby. 1977 was really the first year that complete systems could be easily sourced. That was the year the Commodore PET, Radio Shack TRS-80, and Apple II were all introduced. Before that, you were likely building your own computer from parts, in many cases even to the point of soldering sockets and other parts onto the motherboard. This was fairly common through the early 1980s.

Hobby World apparently catered to the computer hobbyist. In this add are various parts and tools including sections for:

Computer Boards - That vast majority of the items here are for the S100 Bus. This was an early bus standard (like PCI Express today). If you were using an S100 based system you were probably using CP/M as an OS. Boards here include prototyping boards, RAM expansion, parallel and serial ports, video boards, floppy controller boards, and much more. There is also a small section for the "Apple Bus" which I assume refers to the Apple II (or perhaps Apple I?) bus. These are all prototyping boards except for a speech synthesis board.

TRS-80 to S100 bus adapter - This was some kind of adapter board that could plug into the TRS-80 to allow the use of cards designed for the S100 bus.

TRS-80 Level III Basic - There was a good chance that if you were a computer hobbyist that you were doing at least some programming. Chances are you would also have been using BASIC for at least some of it. BASIC was available for every computer type.

IC Sockets - Remember I said as a computer hobbyist there was a good chance you were even doing some soldering? Here's some of the sockets that you might be soldering onto your motherboard for ICs to plug into.

There are also sections in this ad for voltage regulators, a serial printer interface, 16K memory add-ons for the TRS-80 and Apple II, a TRS-80 compatible 12" monitor, a variety of TTSs, and more. You could also send off for a free catalog that no doubt had tons more items.

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