The Alpha Technology Supermem

The Supermem was one of the most popular memory expansion options for the TRS-80. It was created and sold by Alpha Technology (not to be confused with the similarly named Alpha Products). The Supermem was introduced in 1985 for the Model I, Model III, and Model 4 in four memory sizes:

• 256K
• 512K
• 768K
• 1024K

There were also two memory sizes unique to the Model III:

• 1280K
• 1536K

Those memory sizes were quite competitive with other computers available at the time.

The prices for the populated Supermem boards varied depending on memory prices, which tended to fluctuate greatly. When introduced, the 256K version had a price of $279 and the 1536K version had a price of $479. Alpha Technology also sold a RAM disk program named RAMDrive for $49.95.

The Supermem itself was a small circuit board that plugged into the Z80 socket. Installation required some soldering and clipping of resistors, although the whole process was estimated to take less than an hour.

TRSDOS 6, the Model 4 operating system, was always designed to support extra memory beyond the 128K possible with a stock Model 4. Roy Soltoff, the designer of Model 4 TRSDOS, developed patches to extend the memory selection scheme to work with the Alpha Technology Supermem. These patches became known as the “AT” patches. Any properly designed Model 4 program, such as DoubleDuty, PRO-WAM, or Scripsit Pro, would automatically use the extra memory after applying the “AT” patches.

There was no provision for extra memory in the Model I and III operating systems. Any Model I and III programs needed to be modified before they could take advantage of the Supermem memory. The most notable example was the word processor LeScript, sold by Anitek Software Products. LeScript provided full support for the Supermem and allowed creating documents as large as available memory.

Around 1988, Anitek Software Products took over distribution of the Supermem. Anitek later introduced their own memory expansion options, the Hypermem and the Megamem. The Megamem provided memory expansion as high as 16MB without soldering.

Written by Matthew Reed | Filed Under Hardware · Alpha Technology · Anitek