Today is a momentous day in history. Really, it is! It is the birthday of the TRS80 and we should all rejoice.

I wonder how many remember what or who a TRS80 is? Well the TRS80 – also referred affectionately as the ‘Trash80’ was the first mass produced consumer level computer and was manufactured and sold by Radio Shack, also known as Tandy Electronics in countries outside the US.

And I was there. And it was a fun time.

My first exposure to a TRS80 was at the Karrinyup Shopping Centre in WA when I saw one at the local Tandy Store. It was the basic 4K Level I model, with a grey 12” screen. The cost was $699 back then, and the complete computer was in the grey plastic keyboard into which the (black and white)  monitor was plugged. Data storage was on cassette tape. The character set was upper case only and a “green screen” monitor was an option. A chipset came out later to allow lower case characters.

The BASIC language was inbuilt and you could also program the TRS80 in “machine language”, more correctly called Z80 Assembler. It was widely accepted, but I cannot confirm or deny, that the BASIC language in the ROM of the Level I and Level II (bigger memory, expanded BASIC language capability) was actually developed by Bill Gates himself.

As well as an expanded BASIC language, the Level II TRS80 could also have an expansion box attached, and onto this could be connected up to 4 disk drives (5 ¼” floppies) of 189K each. A range of printers were available as time went on from basic 9 pin dot matrix printers to colour plotters and daisy wheel “letter quality” beasts.

The TRS80 range expanded dramatically over the years as they went from being a hobbyist novelty to a legitimate business machine, way before the IBM PC was heard of.

The Model II was a mighty machine; 64K RAM expandable to 128K, a 12” screen,  500K 8” drive and an expansion box that could contain another three. The processor was still a Zilog Z80 and Tandy/Radio Shack stayed loyal to this workhorse processor as the base unit until the Xenix (UNIX) based Model 16 was released with an MC68000 Motorola.

One of the ironies of the Model 2 (and later the Models 3, 4, 12 and 16) was that Tandy bowed to popular opinion to build a machine that was all the components in a single case, including the keyboard. Of course, when the IBM PC was finally released, it was “revolutionary” in that it was modular, just as the original Model I TRS80 was, and the popular 6809 based Colour Computer (CoCo).

Within weeks of sighting my first TRS80, I was actually working for the company.( I also owned one having been bought it as a birthday present by my new mother-in-law).

This was more coincidence than design; my elder brother Stephen was a Computer Centre Manager – a new concept for Tandy – at the flagship Subiaco WA store, and as I was looking for work at the time, he organised an interview for me with the then Regional Manager as staff were needed as a flurry of new stores was being opened throughout Australia.

My first store, affectionately known as a “Junk Store” meaning a full Tandy Electronics shop, was at Maddington, a suburb south of Perth and luckily in the same suburb I lived. Starting out as a “company store”, Maddington was destined to become a “JV” or joint venture where a manager “bought” the rights to the store and shared the profits with Tandy. When this eventually happened, I was moved to the high turnover Carousel Store, and this is where my career in computers really took off. The main competition to the TRS80 Model I at the time was the Dick Smith System 80 – a clone – and Nintendo type games consoles. I managed to find a sales angle against the games consoles by letting people know they could play games on the computer as well as having an educational benefit. I taught myself the BASIC language and then Z80 Assembler and to this day believe this was a major success ingredient in my career as I could comfortably demonstrate the computer(s) actually doing things.

After selling a truckload of TRS80 Model 1s over a Christmas period (the year John Lennon died – when the news came over the PA in the shopping centre, I was actually signing an old boss up buying one!) I was shifted to the dedicated Subiaco Computer Centre, with my elder brother as my boss.

Initially I hated it. I was used to customers walking in through the day and selling to them, whereas here, I had to go and find them. Sure, there were some “walk-ins”, but even selling a system to each and every one of them would not cover the salary I was paid against commission from sales. And there wasn’t just me, with two other CMRs (Computer Marketing Reps) also vying for the business.

The turning point for me was my first sale of a “fully blown Model II” system to a Travel Agent. This was a $13,000+ sale, and the commission was very healthy indeed. Model II sales were rare. The base machine was $6999 without printer or software – or anything else for that matter. Tandy always made healthy profits on items with the average margin being a tad over 50%. The trick was to be a one stop shop for the customer so that they bought everything from you, thus upping the average margin to over 60% if possible. This affected commissions and bonuses dramatically, and as a consequence, a Computer Centre sold everything from the actual computers to the desks, covers, paper, ribbons for printers, floppy disks, binders for printouts - you name it, we sold it.

Software was off course the key and the big three were word processing (Scripsit versions 1, II ,III and 16) database (Profile, Profile Plus, Profile 16 and filePro) and spreadsheet (VisiCalc and Multiplan). Accounting per se was never a big seller and in truth, the packages we had were mainly adapted US based systems that were if we were honest, were not really suitable. Tandy – via big brother Stephen who by now had engineered himself as National Computer Marketing Manager based in Sydney – did commission some Australian made packages for accounting, the most notable being PABS (Personalised Australian Business Systems) but I recall the drama here was that PABS was CP/M operating system based, and while this did run on Tandy Model II computers, it was flaky with disk drive timing issues.

By far and away, the best seller was Visicalc. At the time, the concept of computer based row and column calculations was revolutionary. And even today over 30 years on, I would not hesitate to say it’s successors in Excel, Lotus 1-2-3 and the like – and there were many – are still the most popular applications used on computers.

VisiCalc fascinated me and I learnt it inside out. Modestly, I could make it sing and my two favourite sales of systems were both Model 3s with daisy wheel printers at $5096 a system. The first was to an ex-employer in the airconditioning business and I to prove the viability of using computers in the Estimations department, I successfully transferred a complex formula called the Carrier formula to VisiCalc. This reduced the time to calculate air movements and volumes from hours to minutes. The coding into VisiCalc probably took me three to four hours.

The second was to a housing/ apartment developer who had reams of huge sheets of paper with costings, estimations, cash flow progressions and all the other figures needed to go to a bank to get the finance for his multi-million dollar projects. The demonstration time with the customer to get this sale became a sweepstake! We reckon there was over 40 hours spent demonstrating how VisiCalc cold be used and actually setting up a real time system for him. This one sale led to another sales belief; if you can show a customer exactly what he wants working for him, especially if he helped build it, he or she has very little reason to go elsewhere to buy it. It also led to many, many referral sales.

VisiCalc also gave me a major foothold into sales to the State Government, Bond Corporation, Rothwells Bank and to anyone around in that time – popularly known as WA Inc – would know there were a lot of other “attached” companies. By now I was Manager of the Subiaco branch courtesy apparently of winning the CMR of the Year Award twice and CMR of the Month Award six times – and we managed to also pull off the Computer Centre of the Year twice. My staff at the time was superb I have to say.

We were also lucky in being in WA we were somewhat out of mind and sight to head office in Sydney, and managed to bend rules to make sales. Nothing serious, but as Tandy had a retail heritage, some things were very inflexible such as not allowing 30 day accounts, even to corporates or government departments, and discounting was a dismissable offence.

The peak of the reign of the TRS80 was in my mind the Model 16. As mentioned, this was a Xenix based machine and therefore was multi user. There was nothing on the market that could compete with the main computer and its maximum of five dumb terminals. By this time, Tandy had also released hard disks – a whopping 10Mb version that was double the size of a VCR, needed two to carry and had to be locked before being moved. It cost retail $8999. That’s right, 10Mb for nine grand! (16k of RAM back then was $449!) I remember dropping a client’s down the stairs leading to the service centre. It fell in slow motion and I died a thousand deaths as it bounced on every step. Once it was safely on the test bench though, it spun up and hummed along as if nothing had happened.

As testament to the robustness of the Tandy range, our secondary computer centre in Perth at Beaufort  Street in the City was totally destroyed by fire when the building behind caught alight, the rear wall collapsed and engulfed the store. The fire brigade was there within minutes, the place saturated, but basically by the time the time the fire was out, there was no store left. Two Model II’s that had been running in the window with self looping demonstration programs were taken to the service centre to see if any parts could be salvaged, and to our amazement, even though the ABS casing was totally melted, the machines booted!

But back to the Model 16. The secret weapon here was Profile Plus, a fully programmable 4GL language database system. At the time, the King in this sphere was undoubtedly dBase II which ran under CP/M, but with the flexibility of Profile, its multi-user capability and speed of development, we made a killing! I once demonstrated a customised rudimentary invoicing package created in Profile in around 30 minutes. It was subsequently developed for the Model 3 and 4 TRS80s (the new versions of the original Model 1 Level II) and we had the market covered with the Big Three applications of WP, database and spreadsheet.

Scripsit was a wholly developed Tandy word processing package, and would in my mind, still stand proud today in functionality and it too had basic programming optionality in terms of boilerplating, macros and the like. And it could share database information with Profile.

Tandy had two more major success stories, the CoCo and the Model 100. The CoCo – more correctly called the Colour Computer – was the first Tandy machine designed for the home with a library of purpose built entertainment and educational games, joysticks and even languages. It was powered by a Motorola 6809 processor and was incredibly powerful. A third party operating system was available through Tandy called OS/9 that even allowed multi-tasking and disk drives! I saw one on a visiting US warship with a staggering 512K (at the time) of RAM in it, and five terminals!

There was one flaw. Well two actually. The first was that the TV output from the games cartridges (as it didn’t have a dedicated monitor) was NTSC so half of them looked peculiar. The other was that the Chess game for it had the board laid out wrong, but not customer I had ever noticed. That’s true that!

The Model 100 was the first true Notebook computer. It ran on AA batteries (C cells for Australia), had the biggest – at the time – LCD panel yet made at 8 lines by 40 characters, 24K maximum RAM and a suite of built in programs for word processing, address storage, the BASIC language and calendar/diary. Importantly, it had a full size keyboard, which I still think is the best ever made, a built in modem (300 baud max) and an expansion port accessible by a bunch of things that started an entire cottage industry such as bar code readers, disk drives, printers and more. There was also a burgeoning third party software development industry.

I was given my demonstration unit at a convention in Sydney, and when I flew back to Perth that night, if I had had two hundred with me, I would have sold the lot by flight’s end. The Model 100 was $699 and for a Tandy product, incredibly inexpensive for what you got. I still have one and I still use it regularly. It can be said quite rightly that the Mod 100 revolutionised on-the-street journalism – reporters loved it. The Model 200 was an equal success, this one having a hinged clamshell design and a version of Multiplan (the predecessor to Excel in ROM.

Ironically, Tandy’s best ever computer was probably the smallest seller. This was the Model 2000 and designed and built to counter the now released IBM PC. It was faster, had better graphics, more storage and certainly aesthetically better, but there was one major flaw. To make it better, Tandy had opted for the 80186 Intel processor, the upgrade from the IBM PCs 8088. Sadly there were compatibility issues, so you couldn’t simply go and buy say a copy of Lotus 1-2-3; it had to be a Tandy version of Lotus.

This killed it in the Corporate eye.

Despite its obvious superiority, the public decided the IBM model was the way to go, and the later Tandy “fix”, the Model 1000 which was a true IBM “clone” came too late. That effectively was the end of the reign as Tandy leading the pack in business and home computers. Sure there were Apples and Commodores also selling in large volume and on the sidelines others such as Compucolour, Hitachi Peach and lots of others, but none came close to the sheer volume of TRS80s that were sold between 1979 – 1985.

There are many fond memories of those times, and the bunch of reprobates I worked with in those early days of computing as we now know it. I have kept track of some of them, but others have vanished into the mists of time. If any happen to read this, please get in touch! We have lots to remember and laugh over.

So Happy Birthday TRS80!

By David Hague

David Hague is the owner and publisher of AusCam Online. He has a background in media dating back to 1979 when he first got involved with photojournalism in motorsport, and went from there into technology via a 5 year stint with Tandy Computers. Following that, he ran a software distribution company on the Gold Coast and was one of the first to recognise the potential of Microsoft Windows.

Moving back to WA, David wrote scripts for Computer Television for video training for the just released Windows and Office 95 among others, and was then lured to Sydney to create web sites for the newly commercial Internet in 1995, building hundreds of sites under contract to OzEmail including Coates Hire, Hertz Queensland, John Williamson, the NSW Board of Studies and many, many more.

He went back into full time journalism as the Managing Editor for Channel 7's 'Gadget Guy', Peter Blasina's publications VideoCamera and Pixelmag, before starting Australasian Camcorder magazine when these publications were shelved. He now lives back in WA (Mandurah) on the ocean front with dog Budweiser and in his spare time is a nut for motor sport, road safety (he is on the Roadwise committee for Mandurah City Council), fishing, science fiction - especially Dr Who - and technology.

David can be contacted via david@auscamonline.com, vbthedog@gmail.com via Twitter via @vbthedog. or