Old-school Nerdy Comics

savetz writes "20 years before User Friendly, Doctor Fun, and Dilbert, about the only place a geek could go for a fix of nerdy comic goodness was ... Radio Shack. Tandy Computer Whiz Kids was a comic book series that was distributed for free at Radio Shack stores. It featured overeager kids stopping bad guys with their TRS-80s and acoustic modems, sweetly naive information about computers, and constant shilling of Radio Shack products. They're now on the Web." Update: 04/19 03:44 GMT by J : We're having a bit of DB trouble tonight... bear with us.

Comments

Nerds!

[BusErrorBob]

I remember those things. Those kids were definitely dorky. Unfortunately, I later become equally as dorky. So perhaps I shouldn't point fingers and laugh. I never wanted to be caught with Tandy hardware, though.

Wow!

[frostgiant]

Is there anything the wonderful TRS-80's of Metro City could not do?

As a side note, these things were made by Archie.

If you enjoy these, you sure enough will love the classic Hostess Fruit Pies ads that ran about the same time as these comics. Check 'em out at www.seanbaby.com

Radioshack pc's blew

[Billly Gates]

Me and a friend back in HighSchool broke off a tray to one of their cd-roms on a Tandy sensation when we attemped to play a cd. It made fisher price look like they made high quality and sturdy plastic. Luckily the manager did not see us do it. It was a 486sx back in the mid 1990's when pentium's and 100 mhz 486's were in. And it has a juge 14 inch crt monitor that flickered on anything above standard 640x800.

Where's my 150-in-one?

[YetAnotherName]

Oh, blessed childhood, lost forever. No more 25-in-one, 50-in-one, 75-in-one, or (the holy grail), the 150-in-one Electronic Project Kit. No more being kicked out of Radio Shack after debugging for hours from handwritten and typewritten notes of programs cobbled together on scrap paper. No more studying for hours the TRS-80 BASIC Programming manual, featuring "Karl" in the margins, commenting on things like the odd pronunciation of the word "integer."

You really can never go back home.

Nostalgia

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, the days when my dad was a manager at Radio Shack and would bring these home for me!

You know when you take something back to Radio Shack and if it's too cheap to repair, they give you a new one? Well, I used to get a box-full of junk from there that my dad could either throw away or bring home.

That's how I got into electronics. Walkie-Talkies and walkmen all for the fixing!!!!

Radio Shack and Computers?

[NickisGod.com]

I work part time for a Radio Shack (don't ask). Have you ever tried to buy a computer at Radio Shack?

First, sales associates at the Ratshack know nothing about computers. Honestly, that company has no training whatsoever (ok, so a little tutorial in the back room...right).

Secondly, only the top 2% of stores ever have them in stock.

Third, if the computers are in stock, they're typically display models. When you work at Ratshack, you turn into a display model whore to make your 3 to 7% (depending on what you've sold your soul to push).

Fourth, the only decent deals are refurbished desktops. Ha, good luck finding any.

Maybe Tandy cashed in during early days, but nowadays, the only thing RatShack seems to do right are audio and telephone cables.

P.S. Can you tell I'm scheduled to work tomorrow?

Re:Oh yes. The days of Radio Shack's glory

[Billly Gates]

I remember that magazine. When I followed the link I was trying to remember the name of that old magazine that had basic programs in it. I remember the code on the end of magazines.

I was about 9 or 10 at the time and I played around with basicA from IBM on my 286 pc at home. I also remember the IBM manual on it and programming various sounds from low pitch to high pitch and even ended up creating a simple program that created a police siren.

Only 1 or 2 of the programs worked out from the magazine because I had little patience to type in the code which was sometimes long. I was disappointed that the programs had no graphics or sound like I hoped they would. I lost interest because I was a kid at the time who was only interested in video games. Sound and video were everything for me at that immature age.

Years later I learned basic from computer math at my freshmen year in highschool and relized that I actually was programing when I read the Rainbow magazine. I just did not know it at the time.

My First Computer: TRS-80 Model I

[spun]

Oh, how I loved it! It was a piece of crap, don't get me wrong, but it led me into a lifelong love affair with computers. My dad bought it in 1979, I was 8 years old, going on 9.

At first, all we had was the base unit. We loaded programs off of audio cassette tapes. Within a month or so we got a 300 baud acoustic coupled modem. My dad got an account on CompuServe. By 19080, we were online.

We had an Epson Dot Matrix printer. I used to print out naughty ascii art I downloaded off CompuServe. When it came out, we got the expansion interface, 48k of memory, and the 5.25" floppy disk drives.

I learned to program, first in BASIC, then in Z-80 assembly language. I played games: Temple of Apshai and Scott Adams text adventures were my favorites.

I read Byte magazine religiously back then. I can remember typing in page after page of code. After I got better at programming, I wrote a Dungeons and Dragons character generator, and then a simple text adventure game.

I've had a lot of better computers since then, but I still have a special place in my heart for the old Trash 80.

Gaston Lagaffe, 1957

[BigBlockMopar]

That would have been right around 2 years before my birth...

How about Gaston Lagaffe (sample comic strip included) which premiered in 1957?

Of course, computers only entered the picture around about 1977 when the earliest personal computers started to appear in offices...