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It's the 40th Anniversary of Radio Shack's TRS-80 (smithsonianmag.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Smithsonsian:
It was with minimal expectations that, on August 3, 1977, Tandy Corporation teamed up with Radio Shack to release the TRS-80, one of the first personal computers available to consumer markets. While Don French -- a buyer for the Tandy Radio Shack consumer electronic chain -- had convinced some Tandy executives of the need to release a personal computer, most felt it was unlikely to gross substantial profits. This bulky item with complex operating procedures would never sell, they thought, more than 1,000 units in its first month... As it turned out, the TRS-80 surpassed even the most cautious sales estimates by tenfold within its first month on the market; the burgeoning prospects of a new era in personal electronics and computing could no longer be denied.
It had no hard drive and four kilobytes of memory, according to the article. Radio Shack's $600 PC was preceded by the MITS Altair, as well as PCs from both Apple and IBM, but "the TRS-80 was one of the first products that came fully assembled and ready to use, bridging the gap in accessibility between hobbyists -- who took interest in the actual building of the computer -- and the average American consumer, who wanted to know what this new, cutting-edge technology had in store for them."
Does this bring back any memories for anyone?
It had no hard drive and four kilobytes of memory, according to the article. Radio Shack's $600 PC was preceded by the MITS Altair, as well as PCs from both Apple and IBM, but "the TRS-80 was one of the first products that came fully assembled and ready to use, bridging the gap in accessibility between hobbyists -- who took interest in the actual building of the computer -- and the average American consumer, who wanted to know what this new, cutting-edge technology had in store for them."
Does this bring back any memories for anyone?
20 GOTO 10
"four kilobytes of memory" ... and was running Windows 0.00000010
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I was stuck using "Trash 80's" through middle school; hell, my first computer was a direct descendant (the deliberately crippled and non-standard Tandy 1000EX with proprietary memory, proprietary video and audio and floppy drives that popular disk-copy utilities wouldn't support, etc).
He and a couple of whiz kids saved Metropolis with it!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
What microcomputer had IBM released before August 1977? The Apple II beat the TRS-80 by a few months, but I thought IBM didn't get into the microcomputer market until four years later.
There you are: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
One of these was my first computer. Bought at the Yuma Arizona Radio Shack store sometime in 1977. I was in the Army at the time, stationed at the US Army Yuma Proving Grounds. Paid $795 for one of the Level 1 4K systems. Hard to believe today that you could actually *do* anything on 4K of ram, and an integer BASIC, but I sure did.. Wish I still had it, although I do still have my 8K TRS-80 Model 100, and it still works!!!
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
The TRS-80 wasn't my first computer but a friend had one which I used. It was a good intro to concepts for it's time.
The first 'personal' computer I used was a KIM-1 which was a motherboard with a hex keypad and hex LED output. So the TRS-80 was a huge step up from that.
My second computer was the Apple I at school which was very barebones but again a step up from the KIM-1.
I bought a Z-80 based Exidy Sorcerer which came with minimal memory that I boosted by piggy backing the additional memory chips literally on the backs of the built in memory and doing a little soldered wire wrapping to reroute a few signals.
But the first computer I used was a mainframe at UNH at Keene, NH. That was punch cards. So all of the above were huge steps up from that. Mostly because of time. With the university mainframe one only got a little bit of time to use the system. With a home computer one is able to really work with it, mod it and learn.
So while many people diss the TRS-80, calling it the Trash-80, they are missing the point. For it's time it was a good intro to computing.
You're posting AC because you're ashamed to put your name by obvious rubbish like, "Bought 16k mod 3 with cassette in 79" when EVERYONE knows that the Model III (not "3") wasn't released until late 1980!!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100, that is classified as a "Professional Computer" (probably because the cost was "From $8,975 to $19,975"). And the processor was "an entire circuit board containing 13 square metal-can bipolar gate arrays, 3 conventional DIP transistor-transistor logic (TTL) parts and 1 round metal can part."
Thus, no, it was in no way, shape or form a personal computer.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
... in February of 1978.
It was the first in my area.
I wrote articles in Kilobaud Microcomputing and 80 Microcomputing.
I attached an A-D converter to build a temperature probe and a battery tester.
I also wrote a primitive word processor that inverted the normally all-cap keyboard.
It was a great starter kit.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I had two of them (both "model 2") with floating point BASIC and more memory. I did the popular "lowercase conversion" to both of them - the standard model ONLY HAD UPPERCASE. Amazingly, all you needed to do was add an addtional RAM chip to store the extra bit in the frame buffer and everything else "just worked"! The OS and the character generator ROM were all compatible with that! This strongly suggests that Tandy had originally intended it to have lowercase support - but decided to "cheap out" and save the cost of that extra RAM chip.
I built a wire-wrapped floppy disk controller (5" drive) and adding an external ROM with code to read and write files from disk.
I desperately wanted to port CP/M on to the TRS-80 but the way the boot ROM was placed in the address space made that impossible.
I wrote a couple of machine-code games for it - and sold maybe 100 copies of one of them (a side-scrolling space shooter)...which seemed like a lot at the time! Sadly, mass-producing tapes using a standard audio tape drive was kinda flaky and I ended up sending out replacement tapes to a lot of customers which meant I didn't make as much profit as I hoped.
It wasn't a *great* machine. The Apple ][ was better - but it was what I had, and I loved it.
www.sjbaker.org
The nickname for these was "Trash 80" and it was quickly eclipsed by better offerings from Commodore and Apple. As the personal computer market took off, they were seen as the bottom of the barrel in terms of performance, software offerings and curb appeal. But it was a start. We did have a lot of them in my Jr. HIgh and that's what we played Oregon Trail and some math programs on, before Apple became very aggressive about placing their machines in schools, and Apple IIc's and IIe's started to show up. I was a commodore user at home, starting with the Vic-20, then C-64, 128, then every flavor of Amiga, while PC's were still in a pretty sorry state for graphics and sound. (CGA, EGA, and good sound only if you could afford a Roland sound card, and had games that supported it)
Did not migrate to PC's till the Doom era of the mid-1990s, although I did teach myself basic on a PCjr (286) in the early 80s my dad had access to at his work.
https://archive.org/details/Computer_Programming_in_BASIC_for_Everyone_1973_Houghton_Miflin
Tandy executive: "We don't have time to get a book written on TRS-80 BASIC, so just take this book written for modem teletype time-sharing programmers and slap a TRS-80 on the cover. Done!"
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
"surpassed even the most cautious sales estimates by tenfold"
Easy to surpass a cautious estimate. Harder to surpass a wildly optimistic one.
The Apple had about a half-dozen expansion slots and Apple published the schematics and circuit board diagrams. That openness encouraged people to expand it, and even let Apple expand it with the floppy drive controller, serial cards, parallel cards, and RAM cards.
The Pet and the TRS-80 did not.
In fact, I still have an original Apple ][ "red" book...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Actually Ohio Scientific was the first to license Microsoft floating point BASIC in ROM, written for early (pre-June 1976) 6502s that didn't include working right bit shift instructions ROR
I still have mine in the original box with the original price sticker. I bought it with my babysitting money in 1981 when I was 11 years old. I hung out at Radio Shack often back then and put it on layaway until I paid it off and brought it home in 1982. I hooked it to my small black and white tv and my cassette player and started learning BASIC. Went on to become a software engineer and general geek for about a 30 year career. I have never been able to part with it.
later upgraded it to 48k (the max, 16k was used by the display)
No, it wasn't.
The base Model I supported 16 Kilobytes it the main unit, another 32 Kilobytes could be added to the Expansion Base.
The video display in the TRS-80 was character-based, and displaying 16 lines of 64 characters did not occupy 16 Kilobytes - the base model only had 4 Kilobytes.
Ken
It's a matter of terminology. Technically it was a personal computer since it wasn't a timeshare or batch system. It was certainly NOT a home computer, which is what most people think of when they hear personal computer.
was recently reading about this over at ars
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-1/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-2/
great read
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
If you only experience games, are they not your reality? Is reality not real?
So what did Apple do right (haters need not comment here)? Or What did Commodore and Radio Shack do wrong?
Yes, it's really more of a rhetorical question.
As well as the expandability mentioned by others, Apple had far better graphics than the TRS-80 (huge blocky 2x3 character-based things for pseudo-pixel-based graphics) or the PET (no pixel-based graphics, just the distant ancestors of emoji...) ISTR they also got a boost from being the original platform for Visicalc the first successful spreadsheet (I'm sure it had antecedents) and probably the first truly "new" application of the microcomputer age.
However, Apple may have been the market leader (at least in the US), but Commodore, Radio Shack, the numerous CP/M-based small business systems and many others had a sustained run of success - and Apple can't claim responsibility for their demise.
Commodore did better in Europe/UK (where Apple charged silly prices), SInclair, Acorn, Commodore and Amstrad dominated in the UK. There was a bit of a shake-up in the early 80s which killed off most of the also-rans, but the big 3 got though that. Then the IBM PC Clones arrived at home/small business/hobbyist prices (I don't think IBM alone would have got that far - remember the PCJr?) and squashed everything... and would probably have squashed Apple if that young lady hadn't burst into the auditorium and thrown her hammer at the screen.
The Mac, or maybe even just that ad, is probably the only reason we're not saying "Anybody remember Apple? What happened to them?" today is the Mac, and maybe even more specifically that famous 1984 advert.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I think the effect of the ad faded pretty quickly. It's more likely the 2 reasons we're not saying "remember Apple?" are the LaserWriter and Aldus PageMaker.
Two things allowed Apple to survive while the others withered. The first is that the first microcomputer spreadsheet, VisiCalc, ran on Apple first. Why the Apple II was picked has a lot of conflicting stories behind it, and may just have been happenstance: one story is the PET and TRS in the dev office were being used by others. Some say Steve Jobs gifted them an Apple II to write for it, but that hasn't been confirmed.
VisiCalc's popularity exploded, giving Apple enough money to pursue GUI's...
And then the Macintosh came along, the first affordable GUI microcomputer. Although it didn't sell that well at first, desktop publishing exploded in the mid/late 80's and everyone wanted a Mac. The others were slow to get GUI's and related software. By the time they did, they were competing with both Mac and Microsoft Windows.
While the Apple II was arguably a better machine, it was also more expensive than PET and TRS and thus had no inherent edge.
If VisiCalc were written for either of the other 2, tech history may have been significantly different and you may have had a TRSphone in your pocket right now.
Table-ized A.I.