35 years ago today
The trash-80 was announced. From the
trs-80.com website:
Before The Birth
Remember the CB craze? From nothing in 1970 to over 20% of the corporate business in the early 70's, CB radios not only contributed to Tandy's profits, but brought an entire new group of customers into Radio Shack stores. Indeed, things were so good in electronics that Tandy Corp. sold off all its other subsidiaries including the original, Tandy Leather, in 1975. But the abrupt collapse of the CB craze in 1977 left the company in disarray.
Enter Don French and John Roach. Roach had joined Tandy in 1967 as a data processing manager and, by 1976 had been promoted to vice president of manufacturing. Don French was on the West Coast in the heart of Silicon Valley and had been trying to get Radio Shack involved in computers, even though his boss, Bernie Appel (recently promoted to president) was opposed. In mid-76, Roach and French were traveling together on the West Coast and stopped in to see National Semiconductor's new SC/MP microprocessor. While there, they met Steve Leininger who briefed them on the hardware and software. Roach and French were impressed with Leininger and wanted to hire him to do some consulting. However, the National Semi marketing people refused to part with Leininger's address or phone. Next stop on the itinerary of Roach and French was Paul Terrell's Byte Shop on El Camino Real. What a surprise when they found Leininger moonlighting there as the night sales clerk. They asked him about consulting, but four weeks later asked him to come down to Ft. Worth to see the facilities.
At the end of the day, Roach offered him a job on the spot. 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. Leininger remembers it well, "It was there that I wire-wrapped the predecessor of the Model 1. I even put Tiny Basic with the graphics extensions in a 2K ROM." (Tiny Basic was written by Dr. Wang at Stanford and placed in the public domain. Leininger had helped implement it for People's Computer Company.
The Birth
The first 'Tandy' computer was the Radio Shack (TRS - Tandy Radio Shack) TRS-80. Called just the TRS-80, it later became known as the "Model I" when the TRS-80 Model II was announced in the summer of 1979.
The Model I was invented by Don French (A buyer for Tandy) & Steve Leininger (The head of the Homebrew Computer Association) and first announced on Wednesday, August 3, 1977, in Radio Shack Press Release 7741-A, at a press conference at the Warwick Hotel in New York City.
Radio Shack said they anticipated deliveries to start in two weeks, but was quite unsure of the product, thinking that they might sell 600 to 1000 the first year. It was also the most expensive single item Radio Shack had ever carried to that date. They required a $100 deposit to place the computer on order. In actuality 10,000 units were sold in the first month! Radio Shack was swamped with orders, and delivery times quickly fell to months after order. By early November of 1977, Radio Shack was delivering 16K RAM units with 5 digit serial numbers that had been ordered in early September. At that time, there were separate serial number sequences for 4K and 16K machines.
Heh -- I was involved with the 6502 (
MOS Technologies KIM-1 and
Ohio Scientific) and then the 6800 (
SWTP) -- did get the first IBM system that came out and also had a large
S-100 Compupro system with dual procs -- it ran the Z-80 as well as the 8080.
It has been a fun time to be alive -- still is for that matter!
Posted by DaveH at August 3, 2012 8:00 PM