I spent this summer building a new app, for a machine that hasn't been on the market since 1980 and wasn't built to support graphics, sound, connectivity or even lowercase letters, sold by a company that went bankrupt a decade ago, tailor-made for an audience of one: my dad, who celebrated his 70th birthday this past Friday. Meet the MTS-70:
The MTS-70 is designed for a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1 (c. 1979). It uses the TRS-IO card for internet connectivity, allowing it to do six distinct and very silly things, of interest to nobody but me and (ideally) my father (whose initials are, of course, MTS):
Chat with Dadbot, a fine-tuned instance of gpt-3.5 trained on 15 years' worth of text messages between me and my dad
Play 'Happy birthday' (over the 500-baud cassette data output, a hack given the TRS-80's lack of native audio support)
Preview today's marine forecast, including tide and current predictions
See upcoming concerts and happenings for the East End of Long Island (where my dad resides)
Play an LLM-powered text-based adventure game about surviving a summer on the East End, filled with ridiculous family lore
Play a game of Go (on a 9x9 board, against a decent locally-hosted game engine)