Radio shack had a good early start, the first personal computer I saw was a TRS-80 (model 1) looked nice and the software was cool (think I saw backgammon as the first program) the monitor was cheesy though, literally a cheap BW TV in a somewhat nicer case. School went for Commodore PETs which I really enjoyed. I did get to use a TRS-80 for a few months the BASIC was great had simple character block graphics, program line editor kinda sucked. (except for the Commodore, all of the other computer BASIC line editors were pretty bad.) Another recollection of TRS, was the disk drives were pretty expensive - had to buy an expansion bus, a disk controller then the drive(s). I just used tape.

Radio Shack by then was it was long on the tooth with soundless black and white computers (OK, you could get sound by using a radio to tune into RF interference - not kidding). The color computer was kinda of a late comer, with the Apple, Atari then Commodore already on the market with compelling color systems... and games.

Another trend that was emerging was they were pretty much working on a lock-in strategy, it was buy only their stuff or the highway, all the way down to printers. They kept with that MO into their PC clones which had slightly incompatible card spaces in their PCs to force customers to buy RS cards.

RS users seemed to be a pretty nice sort though, I'm sure a lot of HAM radio guys got them since they frequented the store already. Their magazines like 80 Micro were informative.