Priming the Pump: How TRS-80 Enthusiasts Helped Spark the PC Revolution

By Theresa Welsh

Although people persist in crediting Apple or IBM with inventing personal computing, the idea was in the ether much earlier. In the early 1970s, electronic hobbyists began tinkering with the new microchips which spawned a modest business in mail-order computer kits. Hand-built, these computers required patience, skill, and a burning desire to learn arcane programming techniques.

The introduction of the TRS-80 Model I in August 1977 changed this. It was the first completely assembled, off-the-shelf microcomputer, available to anyone for $599.95 through 3500 Radio Shack stores nationwide.

David Welsh, one of those hobbyists-turned-programmers, created a word processor for TRS-80 which was sold worldwide to enthusiastic fans who were eager to throw away their typewriters. David and his wife Theresa were part of the leading edge of the software business, joining hundreds of other small entrepreneurs selling software out of garages, basements and whatever space they could rent cheap.

David and Theresa wrote this book because no one else had told the story of these years. They interviewed legendary pioneers who told amazing tales as well as forgotten pioneers whose work paved the way for today's computer-saturated society. This book, with over 100 illustrations, is their stories and the story of the computer revolution of the late Twentieth Century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Theresa Welsh
• Release date: Dec 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310346491

Theresa Welsh

Theresa Welsh is a writer/photographer based in the Detroit area. Besides being a pioneer in the software business in the early 1980s, she has numerous publication credits and is the author or co-author of four books including an unconventional guidebook to Detroit.

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Priming the Pump: How TRS-80 Enthusiasts Helped Spark the PC Revolution

by David Welsh and Theresa Welsh

copyright © 2013 by David Welsh and Theresa Welsh

Published by The Seeker Books at Smashwords

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without the permission of the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Published by:

  The Seeker Books

  PO Box 20806

  Ferndale, Michigan 48220-0806

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the many people who talked with us and shared their stories. We did lengthy interviews over the phone, corresponded by email with some and met face-to-face with others. These include Vernon Hester, Steve Leininger, Don French, Oliver Bailey, Mark Lautenschlager, Bill Schroeder, Randy Cook, Wayne Green, Dick and Jill Miller, R. H. Rosen, Stan Veit, Scott Adams, Ed Juge, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, David Ahl, Ira Goldklang, Tim Mann, Larry Ashmun, Robert Doerr, Howard Brown, Eric J. Rothfus and others. We thank them all for the the great stories they gave us.

The pictures in this book are from a number of sources. Most of the photographs are our own, taken at the time the events in this book were happening. Some of the photos are recent, as we did some set-up shots of our old equipment.

The ads and articles from magazines were selected from our collection of vintage computer magazines and are meant to serve as general historical examples of the style of ads and magazine content of the time.

We thank everyone who gave us advice on what should be in this book, those who reviewed versions of the manuscript, and the advice and comments on the cover design.

We also thank you, our readers, and acknowledge that this book has been in the works for at least eight years, and that is a long time for anyone to believe that it would ever be finished. We doubted it too over the years, but, because we think the story we tell in these pages is important (and because no one else has told it), we made the final push, and, after endlessly rewriting, reviewing and pretty much agonizing over every page in hopes of getting it all right, we present it to you. We are solely responsible for the contents.

      David & Theresa Welsh

www.microcomputerpioneers.com

www.theseekerbooks.com

Preface

The Legacy of Microcomputer Pioneers

During the 1980s, David and I had a small office located over a vintage clothing store on busy Michigan Avenue, in Dearborn, Michigan. We had variously, two to four rooms, depending on our prosperity at the time, and we employed part-time college kids to help. Out of this simple headquarters, we sold software for the TRS-80 Model I, Model III, and later Model 4 computers. Our main product was a word processor called Lazy Writer that David programmed, working by himself with occasional input from me, as we tested the various versions and features.

David did his programming in the basement of the small house we owned in southwest Detroit. This was a neighborhood of old homes on small lots in a part of town my mother-in-law was too afraid to enter. We had been unable to get a mortgage because, at that time, mortgage companies treated self-employment like unemployment and we were making a living doing free-lance writing and photography. But we discovered we could buy a house in Detroit on a land contract. I liked the quirky character of the neighborhood, and was thrilled to finally own a house; we built a darkroom and office in the basement.

Once the TRS-80 came into our lives, things changed as David got the idea that software could be a business. From our contact with other TRS-80 owners, we knew everyone wanted more software. We acquired the office only after we had a product that was already bringing in enough money to afford the rent. I spent my time at the office, writing ads, manuals, and a newsletter, besides making sure orders were filled and customers satisfied.

Our story was many times mirrored in other basements, garages, and small offices across the country by other people who created software for the TRS-80 and other early microcomputers. A first wave of users bought what we sold. Most were small business people, people like ourselves. Sellers and buyers formed the bleeding edge of the personal computer revolution.

People who create technology are sometimes driven by curiosity about machines and gadgets, but other times they are visionaries who see the future. In the hundred years of the twentieth century, the advances in technology were incredible: the airplane, the mass-produced automobile, radio and television, rockets that put a man on the moon, and last, but certainly not the least, the personal computer.

In the 1920s in America, a major 20th Century technology breakthrough happened with the discovery of radio broadcasting. As with personal computers, its first users were hobbyists. They soon began buying mail order hardware and experimenting with the new medium. As the hardware got better, commercial ventures popped up to bring content to the growing numbers of users. Radio was powerful. In a decade, it found its way into every home and became an addiction as content-creators filled the airwaves with The Shadow, the foibles of Amos ‘n Andy, and the comedy of Jack Benny. World War II became real to a whole generation who heard live broadcasts from Europe, the news as it was happening. The technology became commonplace and its inner workings forgotten.

TV happened because radio led the way. Adding pictures extended the capabilities of the medium, increasing its impact.

The introduction of the microcomputer in the 1970s and 1980s represented a further breakthrough. Many people contributed to this, some building the chips and the circuit boards and creating protocols that let the basic signals (ones or zeroes) send messages. But, as with radio and TV, the real revolution was in the content made possible through the technology. Users interacted with software, unlike the more passive radio and TV, and grew to rely on it for business as well as entertainment.

As small computers gradually took over the workplace and all kinds of mechanical devices became electronic, another revolution was brewing. The seeds were planted by early Bulletin Board Systems like Compu-Serve and The Source, which let users send each other email and download files. The real breakthrough technology, initially financed by the government for military use, came in the early 1990s and had the promise of providing everyone with instant distribution of electronic content. Universities were using the technology, and when it became more widely available, it was dubbed the information superhighway.

This newest medium would unite people across geographical, cultural and political boundaries, and take the world into the unknown territory of the 21st century. The Internet revolution is still happening and it is not my purpose to say where it will lead us, but to point out that it could not have happened without what went before it.

As I write this, 30 years have passed since the TRS-80 came on the scene in 1977 and let ordinary people use a computer. This book is the story of the people who gave the machine its importance, by making it a useful tool. You will learn of their triumphs and their pain, as they gave birth to brilliant operating systems, ingenious utilities, and business programs with features that would later be invented by companies with more money but not more talent.

Theresa Welsh    2007

1   The First Complete Microcomputer: TRS-80

The TRS-80, the first complete, off-the-shelf microcomputer, has roots in the same fertile ground of Silicon Valley as other computer success stories, but its story is largely unknown. Back when Steve Wozniak was demonstrating his hand-built Apple I to the Homebrew Computer Club, one member who watched with great interest was a young engineer from National Semiconductor named Steve Leininger. A computer hobbyist, Leininger had bought an IMSAI, an early kit computer, and was moonlighting at the Byte Shop in Santa Clara to indulge his interest in computer design.

In the Spring of 1976, a few representatives from Tandy Corporation visited National Semiconductor to look at a new microprocessor called SC/MP for their Radio Shack stores. They were there because of Don French, an employee at their Fort Worth Texas headquarters, who had been urging his superiors to consider selling a kit from which customers could build their very own computer. French had been filled with zeal for this new phenomenon ever since seeing the Mark 8 kit computer in the pages of Radio Electronics in 1974. Reacting to his own desire to have a computer, French bought and built the Mark 8.

But he’d gotten little support in his efforts to get his Radio Shack employers to consider small computers a potential hot new product. What had convinced French computers were a good market was what he discovered when he contacted a company that made a board for computer kit projects. French learned the company had sold 8000 boards. That hit me, he says. This has got to be something. Later, when the Altair, a more advanced kit than the Mark 8, appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics in January of 1975, French bought one of those too. The magazines, which saw computer kits as an extension of the you build it kind of projects they regularly featured, fired the imagination of enthusiasts who purchased the kits and built the first microcomputers. Entirely on his own, French began quietly working on a computer product that could be sold by Radio Shack stores.

It was a hard sell to Radio Shack President Lew Kornfeld and Vice President John Roach, who remained skeptical, and it was only after the Tandy bosses saw pictures of people lined up to get into the West Coast Computer Faire to see these new computer products that they began to think French might have a point.

When the Tandy representatives arrived at National Semiconductor to take a look at a computer chip they might use in a Radio Shack product, they learned the marketing person they were supposed to see was unavailable. Instead, Steve Leininger, the young engineer who hung out at the Homebrew Computer Club, was asked to meet with the men from Tandy. Leininger had worked extensively with the SC/MP chip, experimenting with connecting a video terminal and implementing a tiny BASIC on it. He talked to his visitors about what they would need to build a computer. They were interested, asked questions, and as they were leaving, asked if there was, as Leininger puts it, one of those new-fangled computer stores anywhere nearby. Since Radio Shack was in the retail business, they wanted to see how computers were sold. Leininger gave them directions to the Byte Shop on Camino Real owned by Paul Terrell.

When the Tandy buyers went to the store that evening, they were surprised to again see Leininger who was working behind the counter. He once again explained what went into a microcomputer: a processor chip (like the SC/MP) plus memory. He showed them the wares, which consisted of the Apple I and other early kits and parts. After checking out the merchandise and asking some more questions, one of the men asked Leininger if he would consider consulting on a computer kit project for Tandy. Sure, he said.

Don French had been fighting the battle for a long time. He had been a Radio Shack store manager before coming to work at headquarters, and he recalled that his superiors did not feel that small computers should be taken seriously. French had to periodically provide a list of each item sold (the one of a kind report) in his store. Seeing a use for his Altair, he programmed a way to maintain the list using paper tape storage. One time when he had to turn in this report, he says, I just gave them the print-out. My handwriting isn’t easy to read and I figured this would be easier. They handed it back to me with a columnar pad and said ‘Copy it.’ He adds, then they took the pad where I had copied the information from my print-out and they sent it to keypunch where it would all be typed once again and entered into a mainframe computer.

French felt totally isolated in his belief in the potential of small computers, and that feeling continued after he went to work at Tandy headquarters in Fort Worth. But he kept working on computer projects on his own and continued to make the case that Tandy should get into the small computer business. The contact with Leininger was a breakthrough for his hopes of having a Radio Shack product for computer hobbyists.

But six weeks went by after the visit by the Tandy people to National Semiconductor, and Steve Leininger figured they had forgotten about their interest in hiring him as a consultant. Then one day he got a call at home from Tandy asking if he would consider coming out to Fort Worth to look at our facilities. That sent up a flag for Leininger that Tandy was interested in more than a consulting contract. If they wanted him to look at their facilities, it seemed pretty certain they wanted to make him a job offer. He’d only been married about four months and wanted to talk it over with his wife, Susanne, who had just gotten a Master’s Degree in marine geology from Texas A&M University. She had been unsuccessful at finding a job in her field. While she searched for something more suitable, she was working the breakfast shift at McDonald’s. She thought moving away from what was then high unemployment in an area becoming known as Silicon Valley would be a good idea, especially after she called a cousin from Texas to ask about the job market there. Yes, her cousin told her, there were jobs for geologists in the state known for its oil. There was another factor too. Some employees at National Semiconductor had been given stock options, but Leininger was not among them and it irritated him. So he called the Tandy contact and said he would be willing to come to Texas, but they’d have to send two airline tickets so his wife could come too. This was a bit unusual, but Tandy sent the tickets.

Both Leiningers flew to Texas and were met at the airport by Jack Sellers and John Roach, who was then Vice President of Manufacturing. On the way, Roach apologized for what he obviously thought would be a disappointing first impression for Leininger. National Semiconductor had a modern facility, but Leininger was driven to an old box factory, with the engineering sections next door in an former tire store, with only around 20 by 40 feet of space for the work of building and testing products. It was a Saturday morning but Leininger noted that people were in the building working. Tandy only had one engineer who, as Leininger puts it, had made it all the way through school to actually get a degree. Most of the people employed at the facility were former managers or store people who showed some talent and were brought inside. Leininger, with a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue, would be their most educated employee.

Once the tour was done, they went back to the old box factory and went upstairs where Leininger was introduced to Don French. While the others left the room, it was clear to Leininger that they wanted French to check him out. As the only computer hobbyist at Tandy, French was best qualified to see what Leininger really knew. The two men discussed what French already had on the drawing board, and Leininger told French he could help put together the rest of what they needed for a kit product. The others came back into the room, along with John Roach, who took everyone out to lunch. At lunch, Roach made Leininger a job offer; the job would consist of designing and building a computer kit to be sold in the Radio Shack stores. It was just what Don French had hoped for. With Leininger on board, the kit product could become a reality.

Lunch over, Leininger retrieved his wife and they talked it over. The money he’d been offered was good and Texas had no income tax; even if National Semiconductor came up with stock options for Leininger, he’d be better off with the Tandy deal, plus Susanne Leininger felt she had better prospects of getting a job in her field in Fort Worth. So, in May of 1976, the Leiningers moved to Texas.

Leininger worked alone in the tight quarters of the former tire store, as he puts it without a whole lot of people to bounce ideas off of other than Don. They worked on kit concepts, trying to keep down the cost. Tandy management wanted a $200 computer, so every part had to be cheap. Keyboards at the time were expensive, but they got a breakthrough from a company that made keyboards for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC); they had some keyboards DEC couldn’t use, so they made Tandy a good deal on a quantity purchase.

Originally, Leininger planned to use the 8080 microprocessor. Although Tandy had hired him for his expertise with the SC/MP, he convinced them early on that the 8080 would be better. Those plans changed when he learned about the Z80. A technical representative along with a manufacturer’s representative from Zilog, creator of the Z80, visited the old tire store to show Leininger the microprocessor. The technical guy from Zilog, who was inexperienced in these situations, wanted to be paid $75 before he would leave the microprocessor for Leininger to work with. The manufacturer’s rep, who had more sense, pulled the other man aside and told him to leave Leininger the chip. Leininger, who had already researched the capabilities of the Z80, liked it but knew he had to get a low price for quantity purchase. Eventually, a deal was struck with Zilog to provide the Z80 at a price agreeable to Tandy. That shifted the design work over to the Z80.

The Z80 had the same instruction set as the 8080, but added additional instructions. Leininger liked the Z80 for two reasons, both of which promised to let him build a cheaper computer: The clock that controlled timing required less circuitry because more was built into the chip, and the Z80 had the circuitry to automatically refresh dynamic RAM which meant they wouldn’t have to use the more expensive static RAM.

The whole project almost died one day when a heavy package came in the mail to the engineers. It was an expensive digital clock kit that a customer had put together and sent back. The customer’s story was that he had followed all the instructions and the clock didn’t work; in fact it blew a fuse when he plugged it in. We opened it up, says Leininger, "and the thing had an eighth of an inch of solder all over the bottom. The instructions said put all the parts on the board, turn the board over, and solder everything to the bottom of the board."

The Vice President in charge of buyers, who was not keen on the computer idea anyhow, saw the bungled clock project and, fearing computer kit builders would do no better, shouted That’s it! There will be no computer kit! A discouraged Steve Leininger realized the computer project had mainly involved his time. Tandy would not be out much by just forgetting the whole thing.

But Don French still wanted a computer product. French, Leininger, and John Roach talked it over and consulted with Bernie Appel, French’s boss, and Lew Kornfeld. They decided to try to design a finished product. Customers would not have to solder anything. To sell this idea to Charles Tandy, they would need to build a prototype, but Leininger said he couldn’t get the work done as long as he had to do other work as well. Since he was working in close quarters with the other engineers, he ended up spending time helping with their work and talking to customers. So, Roach arranged for Leininger to work in another place, a room in their speaker plant out in the Fort Worth stock yards, in what had been a World War II-era insulin plant. Alone in his room at the stock yards with the Swift packing plant next door, protected by a combination lock, Leininger put together what would be the first TRS-80.

As he worked on his creation, Leininger constantly had to find ways to keep down the cost so they could make Radio Shack type profits on the final product. That meant building it for about half of the final selling price. Despite these limitations, Leininger wanted to provide a monitor. Adding a monitor would add cost, but Leininger wanted a better display than you could get out of an ordinary television set, which displayed only 32 to 40 characters across. By modifying a TV and providing it as a monitor, they could get that up to 64 characters across, which would be more attractive to buyers. The reason for the black and silver color of the final product was because the modified RCA TV it used already came in those colors which RCA called Mercedes Silver. Tandy opted out of displaying lower case letters to save $1.99. In the end, the TRS-80 cost less than $300 to make, including the monitor and the tape recorder.

Don French told us the concepts — what went in it, what it was, how it was going to work — in the TRS-80 were his, but the physical hardware and software design was Steve’s. The two men together, with few resources and little support, created and built the TRS-80 Model I, the first complete microcomputer, a product that would change the lives of millions of people.

On February 2, 1977— Ground Hog Day — Leininger brought his creation, wire-wrapped cards in a chassis screwed onto the bottom of a table with a little curtain around it and the RCA TV monitor on top, to a demonstration for company executives, including top boss Charles Tandy.

Charles Tandy almost didn’t make it to the demonstration. He was on his way out of the building, but Lew Kornfeld chased after him in the parking lot and asked him to come back inside and attend. Kornfeld had by this time signed on to the project and wanted Tandy to see what Leininger and French had created. According to Kornfeld’s 1992 book, To Catch a Mouse, Make Noise Like a Cheese, Tandy knew nothing about the project at this point. Here is Kornfeld’s version, from the book:

Charles, I panted, I need you to come upstairs to bless a new project we’re going to release today for manufacturing. I’d like you to see it and know about it on the bare chance it might be a real, exclusive winner.

What is it?

A computer, a little desktop computer.

Computer! Tandy said. Who wants a computer?

I told him that I wanted it in the worst way, even though there were no known customers asking for one; it was virtually impossible to identify buyers at this time; it wasn’t a home computer, hence maybe it wasn’t even a consumer item; and that all we had today, aside from a mock-up and working sample, was a very rough idea of its parts and labor cost, so its selling price had yet to be firmed up, but 'I guarantee not to give away gross margin just to prove my point.'

So Charles Tandy returned to the building, ready to see this new product. Leininger, waiting for the bosses to appear, was nervous about this all-important demo. The engineering people didn’t see Mr. Tandy too often, explained Leininger. He was too busy... taking care of business.

Lew Kornfeld too had a lot invested in the demo. Although he was President of Radio Shack, a position he’d held before Tandy had bought the company, he wanted Charles Tandy’s blessing on something that was a departure from anything they’d sold before. Marketing was Kornfeld’s strong suit and he hoped to show Tandy a product he could sell, not promises or technical jargon. A microcomputer was a risky product with no proven market or selling method. It would be his job to find customers for the machine that Steve Leininger was about to demonstrate.

Tandy, who knew nothing about computers, sat puffing his cigar in the company conference room. He listened as Leininger explained how the hand-built computer worked and demonstrated a simple BASIC program called H&R Shack, written by Don French. The program let a user input a salary, and Charles Tandy typed $150,000, but that didn’t work. French told him to take a pay cut since the program only went up to $40,000. Aside from the limits of the demo program, the prototype performed well. Leininger recalls that a big puff of smoke from the boss’ cigar (He was always smoking big cigars) bounced off the monitor screen almost suffocating me. Finally, the explanations and demonstrations finished, Leininger was dismissed. He left, wondering: Was that it? We’re done?

Inside the conference room, Charles Tandy was pondering what he’d just seen. The tension was thick as Tandy finally looked casually around the room at his management team and asked how many they should build. The project was a go! Don French suggested they could sell 50,000 of them, a number he and Leininger believed was possible. I was almost laughed out of he room, he remembers. Radio Shack had never sold that many of anything except batteries. Lew Kornfeld, with a more cautious attitude, suggested they build 1000 units.

John Roach, who was in charge of manufacturing and would have to build the new product, went to find Leininger who had already left the room with his creation, and told him he’d been given a go-ahead to make 1000 units. Later that week, they changed the number to 3500 because Roach discovered they couldn’t get a good enough deal on parts if they only built 1000 units. The new number was exactly how many Radio Shack stores they had at the time. Roach figured if they couldn’t sell the computer to customers, the stores could use them.

Leininger was again moved to another location, this time to a saddle factory, to finish the work without disturbance. He got a faster printer and a development package from Zilog; the keyboard box was specified and built. The hardware was coming together, but they also needed software. They planned to supply BASIC and Leininger was using Li-Chen Wang’s Palo Alto Tiny BASIC, which was public domain, for demonstration purposes. They had a consultant from Florida who was supposed to write a floating-point BASIC, but the consultant just disappeared. When they couldn’t find him, Don French told Leininger he’d better plan on writing the BASIC himself. On their low budget, buying Bill Gates’ BASIC, already in use on the MITS Altair microcomputer, was not even under consideration. Leininger made his own fixes, including writing the floating-point, to the Palo Alto BASIC and that became TRS-80 Level I BASIC. Leininger says one of his innovations was the CLS (clear screen) command, which Microsoft later used in its BASIC.

CH1menbehind

An article in the December 1981 Popular Computing looked back at the TRS-80s, with a rare picture of Steve Leininger.

Leininger, no longer part of the crazy California techie culture, had no camaraderie like Steve Wozniak must have had from his fellow-enthusiasts at the Home Brew Computer Club when he was creating the first Apple, yet he built the first TRS-80, a product that turned out to be a classic computer, and he did it virtually working alone amid the grimy surroundings of the Fort Worth saddle factory. The final development cost of the TRS-80 was less than $150,000, according to John Roach, quoted in a 1992 book, Tandy’s Money Machine by Irvin Farman (The Mobius Press, 1992)

Finding a cheap way to load and save programs was important to keeping down the cost of the computer. Using cassette tape was the obvious choice, but the standard hardware interface was too expensive, so Leininger used a software approach. He went back to something he’d learned at National Semiconductor and created a cheap interface giving the microprocessor direct access to the port to operate the cassette player. This scheme, which Leininger calls a bit banger, creates tones in software. It was similar to the Kansas City standard, but the Kansas City method depended on hardware to make the tone. In the very first issue of 80 Microcomputing magazine, Patrick and Leah O’Connor, TRS-80 buffs from Chicago, would tell readers what they had discovered about how the computer-to-tape worked: The TRS-80 tape output port is noteworthy because of its simplicity, they wrote. By utilizing software, for parallel to serial conversion, and for the baud-rate generator, Radio Shack has reduced cost without sacrificing quality.

Leininger was interviewed for the December 1981 issue of Popular Computing. Here’s what he said about his work at Tandy:

I think I’m still proudest of the Model I because I did most of that by myself. None of what we’re doing today would ever have taken place if it hadn’t been for that computer. And it was great doing a job that nobody else had done before — that no one thought possible. It was a real challenge, one of those once-in-a-lifetime happenings that I hope only happens once.

Tandy Corporation was not a glamorous start-up and had no ties to Silicon Valley, other than hiring Steve Leininger. Instead, they were a scrappy Texas company that dated back to 1919 when Dave Tandy and a partner opened a leather business. Dave’s son, Charles Tandy, had joined the company after a tour of duty in World War II, and a disagreement with his father’s partner about the direction of the business ended the partnership in 1950. The company was sold in 1955 to another company traded on the New York Stock Exchange, but the Tandy group got management control and renamed the company Tandy Corporation. Charles Tandy presided over the business his father had started, which still consisted of leather shops. It wasn’t until 1963 that Tandy made a deal to buy a string of electronics stores called Radio Shack. These stores had been known mainly as junky places full of surplus electronic parts before the Tandy Corporation turned them into a profitable chain best known for their battery-of-the-month club, big stock of CB radio equipment and the remote-controlled toys they trotted out each Christmas.

The TRS-80 (TRS=Tandy Radio Shack) was announced to the world on Wednesday, August 3,1977 at the Warwick Hotel in New York City. Tandy managers decided New York would be a more suitable locale for announcing their entrance into the computer business than their own Fort Worth location because they hoped to impress the Wall Street crowd. As a publicly traded company, Tandy Corporation could use a boost to its stock price, and the managers hoped it would boost their image with the public as well.

photo

Our original TRS-80 Model I, with cassette player and manual.

The New York Times for August 4 contained not one word about the previous day’s introduction. When the Tandy managers were trying to get some notice for their new microcomputer, the news was dominated by stories of widespread bomb threats on August 3, including two actual bombs that exploded in Manhattan office buildings and killed one person. The entire Word Trade Center was evacuated because of threats that more bombs would go off. The perpetrators were members of the FALN, a radical group trying to get independence for Puerto Rico. The August 4 headline read: 100,000 LEAVE NEW YORK OFFICES AS BOMB THREATS DISRUPT CITY; BLAST KILLS ONE AND HURTS SEVEN

Dick Miller, who later became a Tandy consultant in the Northeast, says he was told by someone from Tandy that some of the managers who came to New York wanted to increase the drama by making an announcement about their computer on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange. When the time came, the story goes, the Tandy guys were there on the steps with their TRS-80 with a respectable crowd of press and onlooker when a reporter came running into the area shouting about a bomb threat a few blocks away. Everyone scattered. We can’t verify this story, but the bomb scare was real.

The New York Times, like most other general news vehicles of the day, did not see anything newsworthy about the entry of a complete off-the-shelf affordable microcomputer.

It Began With the Altair in 1975

We (David and Theresa Welsh) were innocently making a living doing free-lance writing and photography when the microcomputer revolution got going. Only in retrospect is it clear that we truly lived in interesting times. We’d grown up with the flower children of the 1960s, protested the Viet Nam war and mingled with long-haired hippies, seen a man walk on the surface of the moon, and were eyewitnesses to one the Twentieth Century’s greatest achievements— the personal computer. It all started out so simply, with a picture on a magazine cover. But more than a picture. An idea.

The Altair 8800, a small box the size of a microwave oven with 16 address switches and 8 data switches on its front, was the first significant microcomputer, although the cover of Popular Electronics from which it made its first appearance in January, 1975, called it a minicomputer. Commentators have tended to call all early small computers PC’s, but that was a term introduced later with the IBM PC. In the late 1970s, small computers were always called microcomputers. What you did with them was personal computing.

The Altair was a kit — you had to build it from parts — and it didn’t do much when you got it together. It seemed as far removed from those huge computers in the business world as a toy plastic car is from a Rolls Royce. But the existence of the Altair planted the idea that an ordinary person could own a computer. It was a seductive idea.

The Altair almost didn’t make it to market because its creator was $300,000 in debt. Ed Roberts, founder of Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS) and the father of the Altair, was able to build the first Altair because he persuaded the bank to let him borrow another $65,000 to finish his work. He’d made a bold assumption that the 8080 microchip from Intel could be turned into a real computer, but had run out of money on the way to making it happen. He told the bankers he could sell 800 computers, a number he made up in hopes of getting the loan. The bankers may not have believed him, but they gave him the money. Working with Les Solomon, Technical Editor of Popular Electronics, Roberts had to meet the magazine’s deadline for featuring the new computer kit on the cover of the first issue of 1975; if he couldn’t deliver, the magazine might drop the project and MITS, which was based in a small store next to a Laundromat in Albuquerque, would be finished. Before taking a gamble on building a computer, Roberts’ company had built calculators and he’d seen the bottom drop out of the calculator market as prices plunged. Could MITS stay alive by selling a low cost computer kit?

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The famous magazine cover, January 1975, and an assembled Altair.

Solomon, known to his writers as Uncle Sol, had been actively looking for a computer project for his magazine and needed something better than the Mark 8 kit, based on the Intel 8008, that had been featured in rival Radio Electronics. While the 8008-based computer was little more than a teaching tool, the 8080 had the potential to be a real computer. He also wanted to feature a computer that the hobbyists who read his magazine could afford. It had to cost under $500. The name Altair was suggested by Solomon’s 12-year old daughter Lauren who got the name from an episode of Star Trek she was watching one night when Solomon asked for suggestions for a name. According to the book Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine (McGraw-Hill, 1999), Roberts’ response to the name Altair was I don’t care what you call it. If we don’t sell 200 of them, we’re finished. As it turned out, he would sell a lot more than that.

Roberts finished his prototype and shipped it to Solomon. But Popular Electronics ended up using a picture of a model on the cover because the actual Altair — the very first complete Altair — which MITS shipped to Popular Electronics was lost in transit and never found.

Bill Gates tells us in his book, The Road Ahead (Viking Press, 1995), that it was that picture of the Altair on the cover of Popular Electronics that spurred him to action. He didn’t want the computer revolution to happen without him. He and buddy Paul Allen had been using a DEC PDP-8, a real minicomputer of the day, at Harvard where Gates was a student. But they believed in a future when time-sharing would be a thing of the past and ordinary people could own and use their own dedicated computer. And they wanted to be part of it.

What you needed to make a computer do something useful was a programming language, but the Altair lacked the kind of languages that were available for the PDP-8. Higher level languages needed memory to work in, and the Altair shipped with only 256 bytes of memory. Extra memory was available in 1K cards, so by using four cards — to make up 4K of memory — Gates thought you could have enough room for a small language and some data. Gates threw himself into writing a version of BASIC that could run in 4K with the idea of selling it to MITS for the Altair.

He and Allen called up Ed Roberts at MITS who agreed to look at their BASIC. Gates and Allen did not have an Altair to test it on. Instead, they used the manual written by Adam Osborne that explained the instruction set for the Intel 8080 chip in the Altair. They developed the language on the PDP-8, using software Paul Allen wrote that simulated the 8080.

The night before they were to deliver the software to MITS, Gates stayed up all night studying the code to make sure he’d gotten it right. Allen got on a plane for Albuquerque the next morning, carrying with him a paper tape containing the code for a mini version of BASIC. He wrote a bootstrap loader, software you need to get data from the punched tape into the computer’s memory, on the plane on the way out. When he got there and the big moment came, to his surprise and delight, everything worked. Allen and Ed Roberts tested the BASIC with a small program that printed the answer to 2 + 2 on a teletype machine. MITS became Bill Gates’ first customer in the business of selling software. In an interview, Gates described the event, which Allen related to him on the phone, as very, very exciting.

People who love to hate Bill Gates often don’t realize he was there from the beginning. His belief that small computers could run a higher level language and accomplish real tasks was important. Gates had a vision of what the future could hold, believing the power of small computers could grow at an incredible rate. Most people who are computer-literate know about Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors that can fit on a chip doubles every 18 months. If Moore’s Law were to prove to be true, then small computers would became powerful enough to actually replace the multi-million dollar big computers. This insight also meant that a successful computer company would have to be constantly jumping to the next level. They could not let themselves be so immersed in one technology that they could not make the next jump.

The Revolution Begins

The Altair caught the interest of hobbyists, but it was not the most technologically advanced microcomputer. That distinction belonged to the Xerox Alto, developed by the creative team at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in1973. The Alto already had a graphical user interface and a mouse and friendly word processing software. But Xerox waited until 1981 to market the technology used in the Alto as the Xerox Star and at $16,000, it was too expensive for most potential buyers. Xerox expected companies would buy more than one Star and network them together using the built-in Ethernet. But the business world was not ready to lay down that kind of money for something they didn’t understand. Apparently, the network technology was also not ready for prime time. Mitchell and Company of Cambridge Massachusetts was a beta site for the Star, and was willing to spend the money for the system, since they felt it would be useful, but sent it back when they found the network crashed whenever it rained (as reported in The Ultimate Competitive Advantage by Donald Mitchell and Carol Coles, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, March, 2003).

Steve Jobs, in a pair of legendary visits to PARC in 1981, absorbed the concepts of the Alto, and teams at Apple created the Lisa, the forerunner of the Macintosh, which would make Apple Computer a major player in those early days. If Xerox had understood how many ordinary folks longed to own a computer, they might have given the world an advanced microcomputer years before Gates got around to borrowing the Alto-inspired technology (Windows) from Apple who’d gotten the ideas from Xerox. When the dust settled from all the lawsuits over who stole what from whom, it seemed that Bill Gates ended up with all the money.

Venture capital had already begun to build Silicon Valley. Intel, in business since 1968, had been founded with venture capital money from Arthur Rock. By 1971, they had created their first microprocessor, the 4004. When he saw the 4004 in use in a calculator, Rock believed it was the start of a business that could not fail. One year later, Intel doubled the power of its first chip when it produced the 8008. With the 8080 in 1974 — the computer on a chip — they had created the