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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.
Go calculate something.
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.
The Computers That Said No To Drugs. How 80's.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
I remember as a kid, my dad would take me to Radio Shack, and it was awesome. Now, it's just sad... really really sad. If I had kids, I wouldn't take them, because I'm sure they'd find it boring.
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
http://saveie6.com/
...remembering these and doing a "first post" on a Friday Nite totally qualify me for "Nerd of the Month" championships?
The computer that said no to drugs. Oh my fucking god.
They're now on the Web
Not for long!
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
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.
"Not only does the 128K Color Computer 3 offer twice the memory, twice the speed, and even better graphics than our popular Color Computer 2, it's also compatible with the Tandy hardware accessories and software designed for the popular Color Computer 2 -- you may never outgrow it!
Heheheh
Seems like every 80s comic book had a similar plot...just say no..
I'm glad my athlon doesnt use illicit substances...although my 680x0 machines have had substance abuse problems
Its a JOKE people
I just started to read the frist episode, and I found 2 points to be interesting.
1) The include girls. The co-heroes are a boy and a girl.
2) The girl seems to know more about computers than the boy. I guess this comes from secretaries being mostly women at the time.
The pages are a bit slow to load, but it is an interesting read, a flash back to an almost forgotten past.
Cheers.
Okay, so this comic came out 19 years ago, in 1984?
*Now* I understand why I keep hearing people complain about Slashdot being slow to post news stories!
Well, they were until we slashdotted their TRS-80s.
Your computer can say no to drugs too! 10 INPUT A$;IF A$="Do you want some smack, ludes, coke, weed, acid, X, cough syrup, morphine, cocaine, oxycodone (Percodan®), methylphenidate (Ritalin®), and dextroamphetamine (Dexedrine®), heroin, marijuana, LSD, PCP, cocaine, acetaminophen with codeine (Tylenol® No.3), paregoric, hydrocodone with acetaminophen (Vicodin®), diazepam (Valium®), alprazolam (Xanax®), propoxyphene (Darvon®), and pentazocine (Talwin®)?" THEN PRINT "NO!"
20 PRINT "GOOD WORK, KIDS! REMEMBER, DRUGS ONLY *DRAG YOU DOWN*! HAHA! HAHA!"
30 END : REM BUY A GODDAMN TANDY!
What about the old issues of The Incredible Hulk when Rick Jones used his Ham radio to gather "The Teen Brigade" assist the Hulk in times of need? You might want to check out Incredible Hulk #6 for quite possibly the first truly geek comic reference. (Google yielded this as a place to read about it -- check out the bottom of the page.)
- Senor Cliffy
My letter writing campaign has paid off!
Thanks to the Tandy Corporation, Alec attended Stanford University, all expenses paid, where he earned his degree in Computer Science. After graduation, he was hired by Pets.com as Chief Techology Officer.
However, his life took a turn for the worse, when one of the network administrators discovered his secret cache of kitty porn, thousands of images of underage cats in compromising positions. He was hanging on to his job by a thread when the technology sector crashed, and he was the first to go. Currently, Alec works the midnight-to-8AM shift at Kinko's, where he can indulge his predilection for feline pornography between customers.
Shanna was not nearly as lucky as Alec, having been seduced by an assistant manager at the local Radio Shack, where she bartered sexual favors for boxes of floppy disks and packs of resistors and capacitors (she liked the pretty color codes). When she found out she was pregnant at age 16, the manager tried to induce a miscarriage using a battery-operated remote control monster truck toy. Shanna nearly bled to death in the mall's food court.
Fortunately, she received medical attention just in time, and went on to live a long, happy life as a camgirl, living off of gifts from her Amazon.com wish list sent by middle-aged male admirers. She was recently hired by the National Beef Council as a consultant, aiding them in their quest to feed cheeseburgers to anorexic teenage girls.
And now you know the rest of the story.
This is Paul Harvey...good day!
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
This is really amazing to me. The one comic "The Computers that said No to Drugs (1985)" I had as a small child. My grandmother gave it to me when she bought me my first TRS-80. It is really amazing, I was evidently 7 years old when I first started writing endless variations of
"What is your name?"
? Sean
"Hi Sean"
God she cursed me to nerddom when I was that young. Damn you Grandma.
I think I'll have to go write that in perl now and see how far my skills have not progressed.
I used to go to Radio Shack all the time as a child and play "Pitfall" and "Duke Nukem" on the tandy's lined up. And now all they do there is try to sell me a cell phone. *sigh*
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?
here. Go easy on me, please!
You fucking zygote! Stop making me feel so damned old. Jesus, I'm only about 3 decades old and you youngsters are making me feel simply ancient!
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.
http://saveie6.com/
Here's a complete mirror of the comics:
Tandy Computer Whiz Kid Comics
Enjoy!
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Shanna : If we study hard now, we'll be able to get better jobs later.
ROTFLMAO!!!
The Dirty Work Group
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...
Fire and Meat. Yummy.