The Trash Computer That Became Your Phone

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Journeying down the path of vintage tech and retro computers is a good time even when it’s full of twists and turns… which it always is. But what happens when you’ve got a proto-portable computer that fits in your pocket, that struggles to function, that runs into incompatibility issues at every stage, and that was made by a leather company who decided to get into the home electronics business?

That’s the Tandy TRS-80 Pocket Computer, sold exclusively through Radio Shack. And there’s a reason why the portable TRS-80 and its desktop companion were dubbed the ‘Trash-80.’

Charles Tandy built an empire so sprawling that the federal government had to break it up, and the TRS-80 line was one of his crowning achievements before his death. Everything was looking great for both Tandy and Radio Shack – but the TRS-80 Pocket Computer revealed the vulnerabilities of both businesses, the volatility of the hyper-evolving personal computer market, and the risks of market leadership in one of the most uncertain, unstable technological eras humanity has ever seen.

The TRS-80 Pocket Computer was one of the earliest forerunners to Apple’s iPhone and to smartphones in pockets around the world. But it was also a cautionary tale for the entire tech industry… and it continues to serve as a warning for anyone interested in vintage computer restoration.

#Computers #retrotech #Science

[mrflamewars]

Stop all that hating - Radio Shack was the stuff of dreams during the time this was available.

[nocomment]

Radio Shack was such a great resource
for anyone with an IDEA.
You could almost always find parts to assemble in ways previously unimagined.

[mikebell]

You could have just run down to Radio Shack for that 3.5mm adapter.

[tomlake]

I feel sorry for those who weren't alive in the '70s. It was a wonderful time! Everything was new and exciting. Just being able to run BASIC at home was incredible. We all bought up Kilobaud, Byte, Interface Age, Creative Computing magazines and typed in the BASIC listings. Then the fun of debugging began just to find out we mistook a 0 for an O in line 1279. Once we got the program running, we had hours of fun hunting Wumpuses (Wumpi?), walking around Colossal Cave, etc. It was an age that will never be repeated.

[j.tann]

Having owned, and still own, Sinclair computers with tape loading I can tell you that many systems required the volume of the tape deck to be around the 70-80% range. This prevents the tape deck from possibly making the audio clip.
You said yourself that you turned up the volume to the max, this is likely why your games failed to load correctly.

[Tortenkopf]

Kids these days. Back in the 80s we did not even have the cables or the docking station and had to type all of the code by hand. And we were grateful!

[andywest]

Had to laugh at the idea of Tandy being a "fly-by-night electronics company". Tandy computers were EVERYWHERE in the 80s.

[missameliasara]

As a formal RadioShack employee familiar with the TRS-80, the cables you're looking for should basically be 1/8 inches audio cables. Most devices from that era used RCA and 1/8 barrel jacks, they were used like the C-Type USB cables we have today.

[jrbenning]

I got a TRS-80 Model I for Christmas as a young child. It was a defining moment in my life and led to an extremely rewarding 30+ year career in software. Thank you Mom & Dad… and Charles Tandy!

[rpelzer]

As a former Radio Shack Computer Center tech-support person, I can confirm that a LOT of their later hardware was modified from other manufacturers' gear. Usually, with modified ROMs to ensure you HAD to buy RadioShack software to match. For example, the DMP-2100 24-pin dot matrix printer was a relabeled Toshiba P351 but the character set was shuffled AWAY from standard ASCII so you had to use only Scripsit for word processing. But then, we discovered a secret DIP switch they left on the board so you could return to true ASCII translations...

[toddbu-WKL]

I was 17 years old when the TRS-80 Pocket Computer came out. I bought one as soon as I could afford one, at which time I probably made around $2.50/hour so 100+ hours of part-time work. Since I had already been writing BASIC programs on a PDP for a few years before that, all I wanted to do was write code (just like today! 🙂). My high school math class was doing conic sections (Ax^2 + Bxy + Cy^2 + Dx + Ey + F), so to do my homework I just wrote a program that took the six coefficients and would tell you what type of section that it was (circle, ellipse, hyperbola, etc) and its coordinates. I was so happy to do my homework in just few minutes (after hours of coding, of course). The only bad part was that I got a note on my homework that said "show your work!". I didn't care. And even though that was 44 years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday.

Did I mention that I love to write code? 🤣

[nunyabusiness]

It was 1980, I was 12 years old. My father comes home with a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III. Within a month I was writing my own software. Two years later I had mowed enough yards to purchase my own TRS-80 Pocket Computer 2. Within a few days of that I was sent to the principal's office by one of my teachers for having "a cheating device". My PC-2 was banned from school. Short sighted fools I thought. Over the next few years I learned how to program in Z80 and 6809 assembler. Since then I have been in the IT industry as a programmer, computer repair technician, Systems Administrator, and Computer Science Teacher. Thank you Charles Tandy for making computing available to the masses. The local Radio Shack was my drug of choice. I still own my PC-2 pocket computer and it still works. I still have my Tandy Color Computers, and they still work. My MC-10 still works and my Tandy 1000EX and 1000HX systems are still going strong. Amazing machines then, amazing machines now. Those were the glory days of computing, not this mega corporation spawned crap we have today.

[themaskedcrusader]

One of Tandy's computers was an Apple ][ clone. My grandfather gave me an apple ][ and the Apple-compatable Tandy (I still have all the floppies) and told me "Learn this, sluggo. this is the future". 40 years later, I am a senior software developer with over a 20 year career in computers and technology.

[sybrrr]

"This must have been the greatest magazine ever for early 80's computer kids" YES it absolutely was! I loved Enter Magazine!
I remember typing in a BASIC program that was basically a stick figure walking across the screen with sound effects onto my Commodore 64 computer and saving it onto a cassette drive. It literally took hours to save and load the program for a few seconds of animation.
Thanks for the walk down memory lane. Enter Magazine was one of my favorite things from my childhood.

[johntetreault]

Well. I'm here to tell you that you absolutely did go back and experience these computers exactly as we did. I remember spending 6 hours trying to get a program to load from cassette tape, the volume had to be just right...too loud or too soft, and the load would fail, of course you wouldn't know it failed until it hit the end block of the program. And I cannot tell you the countless hours of typing in programs from a magazine, only to be rewarded with a program that was far from impressive.... But here's the thing....back then, if it did anything, we were impressed, because computers were brand new...so a computer asking What is your name? And me responding "John" and then the computer replying "Hello, John" was positively mind blowing... It lit a spark, and from there I wanted to learn more, I even learned how to program rudimentary animations on my Sinclair ZX-81 in a whopping 1k of RAM on its horrific membrane style keyboard. It was sheer hell...but I loved it. I still have that ZX-81... I don't know if it still works, but I keep it, because it was my first ever computer.

[paulharrow]

TRS-80, VZ-200, ZX-81, Commodore 64, Apple IIe. Living through that period was such an incredible dream come true. Today's generation missed the excitement and wonder that us 80's nerds got to experience.

[viktorakhmedov]

My boss (an architect) STILL uses one of these, he says he has dozens of new-in-box ones as insurance, he loves it that much. He is super old school. He designed our campus in 1980 and I'm sure he used it then.

[grandetaco]

As I was watching you struggle with channel 4 I was thinking to myself, "those devices always had a switch to change the channel, I wonder why that one doesn't have one?" Glad you found it, I'm really old.

[jerrywatson]

I am 65, I lived thru all of this. I wished my mom had the money to buy that Altair 8080. I was building a lot of radio kits from Radio Shack back then. My first computer was the Timex Sinclair. I hated basic but typed in the programs and watched the 1 line display play out like you. My next "home" computer was the Commodore Amiga 500+ w/dual floppy drives and a Commodore color monitor. After two weeks of loading programs by multiple floppy disks. I bought a $800 40MB SCSI HD with 2MB of Fast Ram. With Wordperfect 5.0 It was my main computer for 4 years Until I got a Amiga 2000 with PC card and HD. I wish I had kept all that equipment now. Nothing like your 1st love.

[chris-mccoy]

I have the PC-4, and it works. It was my first computer as a child that nobody else in the family cared about. I learned BASIC on it. Thank you Radio Shack.