I Loved That Trash-80
Remembering Radio Shack’s Iconic Computers
The TRS-80 Model 1 was the first computer I owned.
On March 21 of this year, John Roach died.
In 1981 [Roach] became CEO of Tandy Corp., parent company of RadioShack. Founded in Fort Worth in 1919 as a leather goods company, Tandy acquired the Boston-based chain named Radio Shack in 1963 and rebranded as RadioShack Corp. in 2000. Roach put together a small engineering group within RadioShack’s manufacturing unit and charged it with discovering if it could build a commercially viable personal microcomputer. — Lisa Martin, TCU Magazine
That computer, the TRS-80, would not have existed but for him, and I feel I owe him my thanks for making it happen. In fact, John Roach was responsible for the release of two of my favorite computers of all time.
In 1977, I was a freelance programmer, picking up jobs around the Indiana University campus, living as frugally as I had a year earlier as a grad student. It was my parents who surprised me with a computer for my birthday. They were feeling sorry for me and thought this $599 device they’d read about could help me make some money in what looked to them like a questionable career choice.
The TRS-80 first hit RadioShack stores in 1977, and by 1981 became the largest-selling computer of all time, beating out Apple’s early offerings. — A. Khalid, Engadget
I didn’t point out to Mom and Dad that this toy had nothing to do with the work that I was doing, running jobs for professors on the university mainframe. But I became fascinated with the cute little black-and-gray device.
RadioShack purchased black-and-white TVs with a gray cabinet from RCA and manufactured a coordinating gray plastic keyboard case. That initial computer, microprocessor included, was all in the keyboard. — Lisa Martin, TCU Magazine
Sparse Matrices in Skinny Memory
While TRS stood for Tandy Radio Shack, the 80 signified the processor, an 8-bit chip introduced by startup Zilog the year before: the Zilog Z80. The Z80 was a step up from the processors from Intel and Motorola that hobbyists has pressed into duty as CPUs of those early microcomputers. The machine had a full-travel keyboard and had Basic built in. It also displayed only in uppercase, had a pathetic 4K of user memory, and used cassette tape for storage.
I’d recently had to refactor some matrix math a client was using because it was generating intermediate matrices that exceeded her memory allocation on the University mainframe. Wondering what I could do with this Model I with that 4K of user memory, I hit on the idea of writing some sparse matrix routines. Playing around with those got me obsessed with the machine.
I gave up on it only when I got a job in a computer store, still in the late 70s, where I had access to pretty much all of the emerging microcomputers. The Apple ][. Various machines running CP/M. The Alpha Micro, a multiuser system that I had the job of maintaining in several bleeding-edge installations around the Midwest. But nothing matched the sheer fun of that TRS-80. I followed everybody else in calling it the Trash-80, but lovingly.
A Computer for Journalists
Years later, as a working journalist covering the computer industry in 1983, I bought and became obsessed with another Radio Shack computer: the Model 100. It was an inch-and-a-half-thick keyboard with an 8-line display.
I wasn’t the only one hooked on the Model 100. As Roach said, “Every journalist had to have one.” Soon after its release you could hear the clicking of keys in the audiences at tech conferences as journalists keyed in their stories on the spot on their Model 100s.
But it wasn’t just a word processor. It was wide open for programmers. I was a heavy user of the Basic command PEEK, using it to explore Bill Gates’s source code for the machine. I still get a bit of a thrill thinking about the power of PEEK and POKE.
Gates called it his favorite machine. “Part of my nostalgia about this machine is this was the last machine where I wrote a very high percentage of the code.” What he wrote was a custom implementation of Microsoft Basic, specific to this hardware. But it was a Basic interpreter tricked out to the extent that it was effectively the operating system for the machine. “[W]e did this little file system where you never had to think about saving anything. You just had this menu where you pointed to things. It was a great little editor and scheduler. We crammed it all into a 32K ROM.”
This Operating System was the last project that Bill Gates played a major role in programming… and it’s actually pretty amazing. — Bryan Lunduke
TRS-80: the Back Story
We write about how Don French and Steve Leininger invented the TRS-80 in Fire in the Valley:
Don French was a buyer for Radio Shack in 1975 when the Altair was released. He bought one as soon as he could and thoroughly studied it. Concluding that microcomputing had potential, French began to concoct his own machine. Although forbidden to develop his computer on company time, French eventually managed to convince John Roach to take a look at his project. This resulted in Radio Shack offering Steve Leininger of National Semiconductor payment to examine French’s design. Leininger needed no arm-twisting, and by June 1976 he and French were working together on the project, using equipment and software of their own design.
French and Leininger received the official go-ahead to develop a Radio Shack computer in December 1976. Within a month they had a working model. They demonstrated their new machine for Charles Tandy in the Radio Shack conference room. The keyboard and display sat on the table, but the computer itself lay hidden beneath it. The two engineers had devised a simple tax-accounting program, H&R Shack, and asked the magnate to try it out. Tandy typed in a salary of $150,000 for himself and promptly crashed the program. After French and Leininger explained the limits of integer arithmetic in BASIC, Tandy gracefully entered a much smaller figure, but French made a mental note that the machine needed better math capabilities. I’m glad he did.
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