The Tandy Corporation
abortretry.fail
abortretry.fail
Quite unexpectedly, Tandy/Radioshack's computer business has gone kaput, but Tandy leathergoods still exists and has operating stores more than 100 years later.
But then military surplus electronics came along and seem to have kick started a number of businesses, not just Radio Shack.
Many of the trendsetters often fade into the past, as they are overtaken by their rivals (a certain electric car company comes to mind).
The earliest home computers (TRS-80 Model I, Apple ][, Commodore PET) used discrete logic for everything other than the microprocessor and RAM. Next generation machines had custom ASICs for the glue logic, display controller and such which brought costs down.
Modern retro-revival computers like the Commander x16 struggle with this because the conventional wisdom is that you need to ship 10,000 units for it to be worth making an ASIC. A display controller, particularly a color display controller, is conceptually simple, a really fun project in discrete logic, but the part count is absurd and since things like the x16 compete with the Raspberry Pi, the cost is a problem. Turns out to be most cost effective to implement a VDP in software with the ESP32
When they went to Level II basic, they had to fit 3 roms in the space of 2 sockets. No problem, just an add on board. Oops, that board won't fit on the back. We'll tape it to the front and use some long wires. The whole expansion interface part comes across as a total hack.
I get the impression this is what it would have been like if instead of making an Apple II, Jobs and Woz said "well, these keep selling" and just decided to keep hacking away on the Apple I.
That same Apple went on to make the infamously unreliable Apple ///, the Lisa's unreliable "Twiggy" floppy drives, etc.
Steve Jobs himself was responsible for many issues - he insisted upon the Apple ///'s attractive-but-impractical case design (which required splitting the motherboard across two boards connected by a ribbon cable), claimed that any computer with a case fan was junk (see: overheating in the Apple /// and Macintosh), etc.
Maybe we can convince them to restart production ;-)
This part is kind of amazing. They recognized the potential of computing, and wanted to have it for their use, but didn't think anybody else would want to do inventory management?
Really good projects fail for all sorts of really stupid reasons. It shouldn't be considered amazing to reduce the risk of a new and unproven product with a backup plan that makes use of nearly 100% of the unsold inventory. ;)
These two shops - the former a means of access to the TRS-80, the latter a means of access to the Apple II and Atari 800 computers - were my "second class-room", inasmuch as I learned so much in the few hours I got away with hacking there.
The TANDY salesmen were more than willing to let us kids play with their systems, but we were never allowed to use the disc drives (now I know why, finally) - whereas the COMPUTER AGE salesmen, once they noticed me furiously typing away every day after school, gave me a floppy disc to save things. This floppy disc was a constant accessory and a major source of hassle with my regular school teachers, who didn't have a clue what it was and were mostly just miffed with my obsession over it. "What is that thing and why do you carry it everywhere you go?", once teacher asked me during a break, to which my precocious answer was "its the future, lady!", earning me a visit to the headmaster for disrepect (catholic school...)
The TANDY I'd go to was in the middle of a shopping district in one of the wealthiest parts of town (Subiaco, Perth, Australia), and the COMPUTER AGE was located in the midst of all of the wealthy schools of the city (Claremont), which meant I was constantly battling with rich kids to gain access to the machines .. eventually I witnessed a wave of rich kids disappearing from the shops as they got their systems unpacked at home, but I could never afford it, so was a regular with the salesmen. One of the COMPUTER AGE guys noticed this one day, and it formed the basis of a long friendship.
I'll always remember those halcyon days, when things were really very adventurous. I'm pretty glad I never got to save much on the TRS-80's, as it gave me more motivation to study "The Apple Way", and that eventually led me to gaining access to modems and BBS's and things, which were always more fun on Apple than the TRS-80.
So its pretty nice to hear the backstory of Tandy, ultimately, as a shoelace vendor that became a digital pioneer.
It would be a dream job for a young ham but a disaster for a corporate guy putting together training for non-ham employees that would be making minimum wage.
I gotta admit, though: the TRS-80 series was a wonder, all told. You could legit go from a Model I to a 6000 running a full UNIX (Okay, it was XENIX, but still!)
You'd never WANT to do that - even running the 6000 on XENIX was a bad idea compared to running XENIX on an 80386, never mind that it was XENIX. This was back before SCO turned evil, anyway. But you COULD!
This very selective memory of theShack not offering radio equipment is divergent from my experience
Radio Shack sales tactics got on my nerve in the 70's, 80's. It was clear that everyone in the store got some kind of a commission — the way they would hound you. (Pushy salespeople are never a positive for the customer.)
My interest in electronics led me to apply there in around 1980 or so. It turns out I should have instead been interested in selling if I was applying there. My interview question (yep, there was an interview for a 16 year old applying at a local Radio Shack store) had nothing to do with knowledge about electronics as I had hoped. Instead I was handed the nearest thing to the manager, a stapler, and told, "Sell me this stapler."
And I'm thinking the customer either wants to buy the stapler or does not — there is little I am going to be able to do to get them to buy a thing they don't even want. Further, I don't even want to be doing that: maybe they need the money for something more important.
I don't remember exactly what I said (I think I was a little confused actually – caught off guard). But you can imagine that, given my perspective on the idea of hard-selling anyone, I was pretty lackluster in my enthusiasm.
Needless to say I was not offered the job. (Probably just as well, ha ha.)
I was offended. I couldn't grasp that he was so nakedly honest about his desire to make a fortune by hawking /something/.
Stuff I desperately wish I'd known about early computing:
- the patch to make the cassette copy of Pascal work on TRS-DOS --- I think that might have made for a markedly different trajectory in my life --- c.f., Microsoft BASIC vs. MacBasic on my first Mac: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
- that the "Softporn Adventure" was going to become a popular franchise and to keep, rather than remove the printed label on the erased disk I got as a blank from a local computer shop
- that Ultima was going to be important enough to me that I would miss the cloth map which came w/ my copy of Ultima II
- that I should have waited and got a Radio Shack PC-2 and its plotter, or better still a Radio Shack Model 100 rather than a PC-1
Ah well, at least I kept the poster I got from a copy of _Creative Computing_:
https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_11970...
Really do need to get it framed....
Quoting myself below on how Tandy, with the TRS-80 and 1000, blew its lead in the computer market twice in a decade. Prior discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41685915>)
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 assure you, Canada has both Tandy and Apple computers in the late 1970s / early 1980s. But they were much more expensive than a VIC-20.
Also, the Model 1 was a Z80 and the CoCos were 6809s, which I suspect had much more to do with the differences in third-party software offerings than Tandy's 'attempts' at obfuscation, given the competition all had 6502/6510 processors that were much easier to port between.
I could have worded that better; I had Europe more in mind for Tandy and Apple's absence. I am aware that Tandy and Commodore had significant presence in Canada; Radio Shack stores were almost as much a presence in small towns there as in the US, and the PET began a long tradition of Commodore computers being more popular outside the US than at home. (Commodore even began as a Canadian company, back in its office-furniture days.)
(I know the article we're discussing here mentions a Tandy store in Europe, and TRS-80 was actually among the very earliest microcomputers of any kind available in Britain, but it disappeared almost immediately from the market for whatever reason. As for Apple, again, despite the Apple II Europlus, the Cork Apple factory, and Douglas Adams and Stephen Fry being the first two Mac owners in the UK, Apple was almost completely absent from the market compared to other US companies until the 1990s.)
>Also, the Model 1 was a Z80 and the CoCos were 6809s, which I suspect had much more to do with the differences in third-party software offerings than Tandy's 'attempts' at obfuscation, given the competition all had 6502/6510 processors that were much easier to port between.
6809 definitely contributed, but that still does not change Tandy going out of its way to discourage third-party products sold outside its stores. As for Z80, not at all. Tandy could have 100% dominated the CP/M market from the get-go had the TRS-80 been out-of-the-box compatible, but instead it foisted TRSDOS onto its users, so incompetently written that Tandy eventually gave up and licensed one of the many third-party replacement OSes it spawned as the official TRSDOS 6.
Wozniak was the first to realize how much hardware can be replaced by software. The cassette routines were the same - the hardware an Apple II uses to read and write to tape (and to use the speaker) is minimal as well, entirely driven by the 6502. This is one of the reasons it’s complicated to increase the clock (or use an improved 6502) of an Apple II, since everything depended on perfect timing.
> Read this BYTE article from two years after the TRS-80's release which complains about the complete lack of Tandy documentation that motivated the author to write the article in the first place.
This nice, well-written technical manual (including a complete schematic for the system) was published by Tandy in 1978, the year before the BYTE article:
https://archive.org/details/TRS-80_Micro_Computer_Technical_...
As this blog post notes, it contained enough information not merely to enable you to understand and program the system (it's very simple, but clever, hardware, which is part of the charm of the 8-bit era), but to actually build your own clone:
http://www.trs-80.org/trs-80-micro-computer-technical-refere...
Cool story. I wish a few comments like the above had a bit more background. I wonder if the problem with "Realist" was the existence of the Stereo Realist, a popular 3-D camera made from 1947-71.
Edit: Yep! Google's so-called "AI" says:
"Tandy, through their RadioShack brand, could not use the name "Realist" for their private-label products because of a legal dispute with the company that produced the well-known Stereo Realist camera, according to 2080 Ventures. The Stereo Realist camera was a popular 35mm stereo camera produced by the David White Company.
This legal dispute led Tandy/RadioShack to change their brand name from "Realist" to "Realistic". The change occurred in 1954, after Radio Shack had already begun selling products under the "Realist" brand."