Micro: The magazine for TRS-80 owners
dfarq.homeip.net
dfarq.homeip.net
I don't know if the readers of Byte or 80 Micro had similar reactions to Wayne's editorials. Computer hobbyists and radio amateurs have two different levels of passion. At the time (1980) amateur radio had over seven decades of tradition behind it while personal computing was less than a decade old. Wayne saw that the landscape of amateur radio was changing dramatically in the early '70s, something many of his contemporaries wished to deny. He advocated for FCC rules changes, many of which came too little too late, and changes to ARRL (American Radio Relay League--the US national amateur radio operators association) that to this day have been ignored. In retrospect his perspectives have mostly been proven correct, at least in regard to those two entities and the amateur radio hobby as a whole.
Wayne enjoyed writing and enjoyed learning something new and sharing that with others while trying to make a living at it. The titles of magazines that he started are a testament to that drive.
Edited to add: I have January 1988 - February 1991 of Computer News 80. I have not checked if all the issues are there, but it looks pretty complete.
It was replaced for me when I received a C64 for Christmas 1983 and 80 Micro by Compute! Gazette and The Transactor. The TRS-80 was finally relegated to a closet when my father bought an IBM PC XT in 1984.
It's also interesting to imagine an alternate universe where other early microcomputer companies (Radio Shack, Commodore, etc.) survived as long as Apple has.
It's well known that the Apple II was one of the first three prepackaged, preassembled personal computers on the market. It, the TRS-80 Model I, and the Commodore PET all appeared in late 1977.
It's not well known that the Apple was not the obvious winner of the three; the TRS-80 was. Every small town in America had Tandy's Radio Shack stores, and even if Radio Shack had a reputation for selling toys and gizmos as opposed to computers, it had a reputation. As a startup, Apple didn't. Commodore wasn't as well known as Tandy but was an established calculator and office-equipment company, with its own semiconductor fab that produced the 6502 CPU that Apple and other rivals used.
And, in fact, until about 1980, the TRS-80 dominated the market. What happened?
* The disk drive. All three computers only used tape storage in 1977, but their makers soon provided disk drives. Tandy's drive is a horrible, unreliable kludge. Commodore's PET disk drives are gigantic monstrosities that are fast and reliable[1] but far too expensive. Steve Wozniak's Disk II is a combination of a brilliantly simple and reliable disk controller, and inexpensive-to-make (and thus highly profitable) drive mechanism, that still runs well today, five decades later.
* Third-party products. The TRS-80 came with a superb BASIC tutorial, but Tandy otherwise kept all software technical information secret,[2] hoping to monopolize third-party development.[3] Radio Shack stores were not allowed to sell non-Tandy products, and couldn't carry third-party publications like 80 Micro that by default became the major way companies sold TRS-80 products (since other retailers didn't want to compete with Radio Shack stores). Since corporate policy prevented Radio Shack clerks from admitting that third-party magazines or products existed (even while a Tandy executive wrote a regular column for 80 Micro, and the company regularly advertised in its pages), the only way a TRS-80 or Color Computer customer knew of this gigantic ecosystem's existence is if a friend told him, or he happened to walk by a newsstand with 80 Micro or Rainbow magazine.
Commodore's Jack Tramiel never ever understood the importance of software development, and the PET fell far behind Tandy and Apple in the US; until the VIC-20 in 1980 most of Commodore's computer sales were in Europe and Canada, where Apple and Tandy didn't compete.
Compare this to Apple, which published everything needed to create software and hardware for the II. Its slots invite engineers to design cards. A very important factor in the II's early popularity was school districts buying it to run educational software from MECC like Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand. But this was not inevitable. A teacher or administrator in a rural school district in 1979 looking to purchase computers would naturally look to the Radio Shack in town, but would only have found incredibly crude Tandy-published software. Even with such handicaps Radio Shack had a substantial portion of the educational market, which after 1980 quickly eroded until 1985, when Tandy had an unexpected second computer boom driven by the PC-compatible Tandy 1000.
* VisiCalc. Because of the above, VisiCalc was written for the Apple when market share should have caused it to be written for TRS-80 (Dan Fylstra of Personal Software, VisiCalc's publisher, was one of the first owners of the TRS-80. <https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1978-04/1978_04_BYT...>). Being only available for Apple massively drove sales of the II; for the first time, people bought a computer to run a specific killer app, as opposed to the other way around. In turn, others chose the II to develop for.
Even after 1980, when Apple had clearly gained sales momentum, Tandy still had the bulk of the installed base. 80 Micro's December 1982 issue <https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1982-...> has 484 pages. I'm pretty sure no Apple magazine ever came close to that thickness; the only other computer magazines in history to be that thick are 1) PC Magazine before it went bimonthly in 1984 after the December 1983 issue hit 800 pages, and 2) BYTE. Wayne Green, the publisher of 80 Micro, had by that time written editorials in almost every single issue pleading with Tandy to encourage third-party developers. Tandy didn't relent until the Model 16, introduced that year, had zero third-party software after six months. But by then it was too late.
As fat as they are, reading Tandy magazines like 80 Micro and Rainbow <https://archive.org/details/rainbowmagazine-1983-12/> from the early 1980s is like visiting a sad and barren alternate world; instead of Origin, Sierra, MicroProse, and SSI, there are much cruder-looking ads from tiny companies offering bad clones of popular arcade games.
... And yet, despite its many, many mistakes, Tandy got a second chance with the Tandy 1000! It was the best-selling low-cost PC compatible from 1985 onward. It was so popular that software boxes routinely stated that they were compatible with "IBM/Tandy". So popular that game developers routinely made sure that their products were "Tandy compatible"; that is, support Tandy's special graphics and sound features.[4] In the second half of the 1980s Tandy was arguably #2 in PC compatibles after Compaq, and clearly #1 among everyone, including IBM and Apple, in the home market. There was no reason whatsoever for Tandy and its gigantic distribution and retail network to lose out to Gateway and fellow Texan Dell ... But, of course, it did. So, yes, Tandy blew not one but two separate leads in the computer industry within a decade. That takes talent.
[1] Two virtues Commodore's later drives did not retain
[2] Read this BYTE article from two years after the TRS-80's release <https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1979-08/1979_08_BYT...>, which a) discusses how to implement machine language graphics and b) complains about the complete lack of Tandy documentation that motivated the author to write the article in the first place.
[3] It's clear in retrospect that TRS-80 was intentionally designed to not be compatible with the existing 8080/Z80 standards. ROM's location in the memory map broke CP/M compatibility, and the expansion bus is not S-100 compatible.
[4] Actually PCjr-compatible, which the original Tandy 1000 was designed to clone
I had friends with TRS-80s and visited Radio Shack monthly for their free batteries. I had a VIC-20 though, and a few years later the Apple //e. The Apple docs, including the internals of their disk drive and its encoding/alignment scheme, were fascinating to me as a 16yo just getting started in electronics and microprocessors.
It's flabbergasting how good Woz's designs were. Almost on a whim, he with the Disk II did something no one anywhere in Silicon Valley—anywhere in the world—was doing. Forget about IBM, HP, Shugart, Tandon. Just within Commodore and Tandy, Apple's direct 1977 competitors, there were abundant human and engineering resources to come up with a fast, inexpensive, and reliable floppy drive and controller; Chuck Peddle at Commodore was certainly no average engineer. And yet, as I mentioned, Commodore was still unable to do this *in 1984*.
Whether one believes in the reality of the existence of the "10X developer", it's hard not to see what Woz did between 1976 and 1978—Integer BASIC, Apple II color graphics, and Disk II—as proof that such a being can exist, even if (as I have written elsewhere) that brilliance straddled the line between optimized and overoptimized. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41685888>
Sadly, he wrote it for the wrong machine.
DEC really dropped the ball.
There are several reasons why I failed to become a billionaire, despite the obvious opportunities!
Yeah, I was a moron to not port it to the Apple II. It was suggested to me more than once. I have no excuse.
It was, however, 1987's game of the year, selected by Computer Gaming World.
As successful as Interplay's PC version was in our timeline, its effect was diluted in the sense that by 1985 there was far more competition for attention and the videogame dollar. Empire in 1980 is ... well, I can only compare the effect to throwing chum into a pool filled with sharks. I do not hesitate in stating that you and your creation (Promoting war!!!) might very well have been the target of a significant moral panic.
Despite there being an RS store in the county seat town of this county and in every adjoining county, most of my Coco support came from other amateur radio operators as that was my primary interest. I did buy a genuine RS disk drive and printer for the Coco along the way. While it came with 16k of RAM, a contact via amateur radio led me to purchase the chips to upgrade it 64k which worked!
There was a lot of chatter about the Model 4 but the price and an awareness from amateur radio publications of the rise of "IBM PC compatibles" kept me from going that route. Even if I had known of 80 Micro at the time, I doubt I would have subscribed.
Ironically, the first PC clone--a collection of disparate parts, really--I bought was from another amateur radio operator who worked at the local Radio Shack at the time in 1989.
No. They always could and did sell third-party computer products, while Tandy-owned stores only began doing so alongside the Tandy 1000, since it would be ridiculous to not sell the PC software that the computer exists to run.
They did sell 3rd party software for the Coco (at minimum). The distributor I sold games through had a Tandy contact and sent one of my games to see if they wanted to sell it in stores like some other ones they were selling.
They did not, which was a bummer. One funny thing, the opening screen, prior to title and credits etc. was a matrix like display with the screen full of random characters (numbers and letters, not 1's and 0's) shifting characters and colors, etc., the Tandy guy said he thought the game was broken at first.
The profs all had TRS-80 machines, in addition to terminals connected to the school's mainframe. The secretaries had TRS-80s as well. Given the times, I strongly suspect that the profs had paid for these computers out of their own pockets. Their arguments for why they chose TRS-80 were knowledgeable and solid. They also ran their own cabling around the department so they could transmit documents to the secretary for editing and printing.
> Tandy blew not one but two separate leads in the computer industry within a decade. That takes talent.
;-(
Looking at archive.org, it appears that Tandy/Radio Shack published extensive user-facing technical documentation (not just the service manuals) from 1978 onward that not only included information on the character set, memory map, assembly language programming, etc. but also full schematics for the system. In addition to the Z-80 machine language monitor described in the article, they shipped a full editor-assembler in 1978. The Z-80 (perhaps not as popular as the 6502 is on HN but it appears from time to time) was itself well documented (and also ran 8080 code.) Documentation notwithstanding, it does seem like Tandy didn't understand how important third party software was becoming and mistakenly viewed it as competition.
But that LISP-focused issue of BYTE from 1979 is still phenomenal. I wish we had computer magazines like that now that covered such a wide range of interesting things. At least we have the MagPi which tries to do that a bit for the Raspberry Pi platform.
I also love the Apple ad copy on page 17:
"Apple's the one you can program yourself. So there's no limit to the things you can do."
Technically that's still sort of true (Swift Playgrounds, for example, or just hacking javascript in the browser), but in the "there's [already] an app for that [would you like to buy it?]" era, programming the machine yourself seems like an afterthought.