RE: a bolt of lightning and a puff of smoke.
No, it was a model III. I had a friend in Germany who had the TRS-80 I. He wrote programs to copy Atari and Commodore 64 games, defeating copy protection. He did a lot of hacking with it back in the early 1980s. I also met a guy a few years later who was networking CoCo's, if you remember those from Radio Shack. The games sucked big time, but he networked 4 of them. That was an amazing thing in 1985! A buddy did the memory upgrade to my Atari 800XL to 256K of memory around the same year. We did the mod, but couldn't get anything to recognize the 16K memory banks on the 16K chips. I programmed MYDOS for the chips and it worked the first time I gave it a trial run. That was big stuff back then.