Aug. 3, 1977: The TRS-80 Is Bad, and That Ain’t Trash Talk1977: In a New York City news conference Tandy Corp of Texas announces that it will manufacture the first mass-produced personal computer. The TRS-80 — lovingly called the “Trash 80” — would be an early rock star in the PC era and give the flagging Radio Shack franchise bragging rights as “biggest name in little computers.”
The TRS-80 was a desktop machine, woefully underpowered by today’s standards — 4 KB of RAM, (expandable to 16 KB!), a 12-inch monitor, a built-in cassette-based data recorder and BASIC interpreter. Oh, yes, it came with Blackjack and Backgammon.
But the Model I was a staggering success in its day, a time when your choice was either building your own computer from a kit or buying something for thousands of dollars. The Model I was yours for $600 ($2,160 in today’s coin), and all you had to do was plug it in — although it did require three separate AC outlets to power everything up.
This was the dawn of the personal computing age, and nobody quite knew what the rage would be, or even why. There wasn’t much your average non-techie could do or would want to with a computer. And yet, there was something in the air.
HP, IBM and Wang had personal computers out in the early 1970s. The Apple I and II were on the market. Commodore introduced the first self-contained computer earlier in the year — and would years later introduce the Commodore 64, the best-selling single personal computer model of all time.
All of this set the table for Tandy, a 50-year-old firm which had only two years before it would shed all its non-core holdings to become exclusively an electronics company.
Radio Shack thought it would sell 600 to 1,000 Model I TRS-80’s in the first year. After all, it was the most expensive item Radio Shack stocked. Buyers had to pre-order, and put down a $100 deposit. But they took 10,000 orders in the first month. Instead of the weeks Tandy thought they’d need to start fulfilling orders, it took months to deliver the first machines. The company sold more than 200,000 units in four years.
It would not be long before Tandy made laptops that ran for hours on four “AA” batteries with crisp B&W displays and enough expandable RAM and memory to satisfy caveman-era road warriors. Among the first big buyers of the TRS-100 and the glorious TRS-200 were journalists who, until then, were resigned to finding a phone to shout: “Baby, get me rewrite!” Or, if you worked for well-heeled places like The New York Times, you got to carry around a steamer trunk masquerading as a portable computer called the Portabubble.
The TRS-200 came with acoustic couples, sure. But you could also buy a magic box for $50 that tripled as 1) a charger for your Radio Shack brick-like “mobile” phone, 2) a speakerphone attachment for said “mobile” phone and — the pièce de résistance — a tether to said “mobile” phone which made it possible to file your stories anywhere you had signal.
But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves….
Radio Shack was riding high on the CB craze in the early 1970s. These devices, for short-range over-the-air communication, were and remain a staple of truckers, but for a while they became a hugely popular consumer item, and Radio Shack was a leading retailer for these devices. As quickly as they caught on, the craze ended, leaving Radio Shack with a big problem.
The “abrupt collapse of the CB craze in 1977 left the company in disarray,” writes TRS-80 historian Ira Goldklang on his personal site.
“Enter Don French and John Roach.”
Roach was Tandy’s VP of manufacturing. French was Tandy’s Silicon Valley guy, trying to get his company interested in computers even though his boss wasn’t interested. On a West Coast road trip together in mid-1976 the two would encounter the person who would get their company into the computer business. Heaven forbid it should have been a straight line.
Their travels took French and Roach to National Semiconductor. There they were briefed by one Steve Leininger, a techie who so impressed them that they asked National Semi for his contact info to hire him as a consultant. NS said NFW.
Enter fate.
“Next stop on the itinerary of Roach and French was Paul Terrell’s Byte Shop on El Camino Real,” Goldklang writes. “What a surprise when they found Leininger moonlighting there as the night sales clerk.” They lured Leininger a month later down to company headquarters in Fort Worth, and once the California techie was deep in the heart of Texas, Roach offered him a job on the spot.
Goldklang continues:
Leininger accepted but found that Tandy wasn’t really committed to a computer just yet. For six months he, in his words, “played around with a couple of things — an audio pre-amp, a computer kit and some other minor projects.” But as CB turned more and more sour, there was a growing cry at Tandy for something new. They finally moved Leininger off into a room of his own with instructions to build a computer.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Recent history hasn’t been all good for Radio Shack — now calling itself The Shack and trying to reinvent itself again.
But, they did it before. As Jon Mooallem reported in the May 2010 edition of the Wired magazine article “The Lost Tribes of Radio Shack,” they are doing it now by becoming a destination for mobile phones.
In an age where you are defined by the iPad you own, not the computer you build from scratch, this might just be a winning adaptation.
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