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My Grandfather bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 4P brand new in 1985. I was recently visiting his house when he mentioned he was going to toss the computer. Long story short, we turned the computer on to see that it still ran. We tried running some of the programs he used to run from the 5-1/4" floppy (yes, he still has those), but was unable. The computer is in mint condition and I would like to know how much it is worth if anything. I would also like to know if it is not worth much, either monetarily or in a 'museum', then what is the proper way of disposing the computer.

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I think it would be great to go into a museum before you toss it. If you really must toss it, places like Best Buy will take old TVs, computers, monitors (including the big honking CRTs), etc for free, they usually recycle them... – studiohack♦ Apr 28 '11 at 16:39
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Could you post a picture of your machine if you can spare the time? I'm just curious to see it because I like old machines. – Randolf Richardson Apr 28 '11 at 16:46
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closed as not constructive by techie007, Moab, Kyle, Nifle, Sathya♦ Apr 29 '11 at 3:48

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It depends on what people are willing to pay for it. There are collectors, but you'd have to find them and ask. A good place to look might be eBay or something similar to see what people are currently selling their equpiment for -- the big player is the "Commodore 64" so if you look for that you'll undoubtedly find the relevant categories indirectrly that way.

As far as the diskettes no longer working, that's no surprise, but do take a look for downloadable versions of the same software. Very often you'll also find information on how to convert 5.25" floppy drives to read/write to the diskettes, or hook up your PC to emulate a floppy drive for such a machine, and then there are emulators that let you run all the stuff natively on your PC.

Although I didn't have a TRS-80, I do know of it as being a great machine as there are many fond followers (I'm in the Commodore 64 crowd, which seems to have a few rivals in the Apple ][ crowd which also deserves mentioning). If you have a lot of fond memories, you may find that you wish to just keep the machine and figure out how to get software working on it again by connecting to your PC since finding 5.25" diskettes is pretty difficult nowadays.

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See what they are going for on ebay

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