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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.
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.
...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.
"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
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.
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
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/
The Sensation II was the last Tandy branded computer to sell in the US. My parents got one when I asked for a computer all those years ago. If it had a cdrom tray rather than caddie, then it was a Sensation II. The first Sensation came with a caddie CDROM.
The WD hard disk had a strange habit of hanging under heavy swapping load, it would freeze for like a full minute, then start working again right where it left off.
Oh, yeah, the hard disk they shipped with was 212 megs, and it was already nearly full with all the crap they put on it. Tons of demo programs, and the stupid desktop replacement that Tandy wrote was default instead of Program Manager, forgot the name. It was huge and bloated for the time and considering the machine shipped with 4 megs ram.
The soundcard and modem were on the same card, and the modem was only 2400 when 9600 was pretty much standard by late 1993 when the system came out. Of course you had three ISA slots to upgrade it with, but the lower slot could only take short cards because the processor interfered with the clearance.
Now that I think about it, I really know way more than I ever wanted to about this subject. That computer was really what got me into computers in the modern sense, the only one I had before that was a C64.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Here's a complete mirror of the comics:
Tandy Computer Whiz Kid Comics
Enjoy!
These things are still out there waiting to be given to budding young nerds (although budding chemistry nerds may be out of luck,) you just have to look a little harder now that Radio Shack makes all their money selling Compaqs and Sprint cell phones.