The Tandy/RadioShack Story: Pioneers of the PC Revolution

Three companies Apple, Commodore, and Tandy each released fully assembled home computers, they began the computer revolution an industry that would grow to be worth billions in just a few short years, despite the boom that followed after the release of the 1977 trinity, the only surviving member of the Trinity is Apple, so what happened to Tandy the leather company that owned Radio Shack and at one point commanded 60% of the home computer market. but unfortunately in this world, Radioshack is a bankrupt compan. Tandy found itself at the forefront of the home computer revolution releasing one of the first-ever mass-produced home computers and yet failed to win the home computer wars.

The story of the Tandy Radio Shack Corporation or TRS for short begins with Tandy, Tandy was founded in 1919 as a leather supply store. By the end of the 1950s, under the tutelage of then-CEO Charles Tandy, the company expanded into the hobby market, making leather purses and other products, making huge sales among Scouts, leading to fast growth in sales. In the 1960s, aiming to broaden the company horizon, Charles Tandy acquired a number of craft retail companies, including RadioShack in 1963. Radioshack was a radio parts and electronics store founded in 1921, after a few decades in business it faced bankruptcy in the early 60s and was subsequently purchased by Tandy a successful leather retailer to form the Tandy Radio Shack corporation. At the time of its acquisition Radioshack had only 9 stores but it quickly expanded to become a hobbyist’s dream, it had all types of electronics and it didn’t only cater to the DIY crowd but also to anyone in search of the coolest and latest gadgets.

technical expertise to assemble. A Tandy employee by the name of Don French had purchased a MITS Altair kit computer that he assembled. He immediately began designing his own computers. He showed his designs for a home computer to the vice president of manufacturing at Tandy John V. Roach. Although the design did not impress Roach, the idea of selling a microcomputer did. When the two men visited a company called National Semiconductor in California in mid-1976, Homebrew Computer Club member Steve Leininger's expertise on microprocessors impressed them.

Tandy at the time owned a chain of 3000 radioshack stores, these stores provided Tandy with a customer base of 11 million shoppers that might buy a microcomputer, but a microcomputer would be way more expensive than the US$30 median price of a Radio Shack product.

lowercase characters saved US$1.50 in components and reduced the retail price by US$5. In February 1977 they showed their prototype, running a simple tax-accounting program, to Charles Tandy, head of Tandy Corporation. The program quickly crashed as the computer's implementation of Tiny BASIC could not handle the US$150,000 figure that Tandy typed in as his salary, and the two men added support for floating-point math to its Level I BASIC to prevent a recurrence.

n the summer of 1977, Radio Shack introduced the TRS-80 for $599. This offering included a BASIC language interpreter, four kilobytes of RAM, a Zilog Z80 processor, a twelve-inch video monitor, a cassette recorder, and a cassette tape containing the games Blackjack and Backgammon. The availability of the TRS-80 on five thousand Radio Shack store shelves helped the TRS-80 sell over one hundred thousand units during its first year, which was 50 percent of the total home computers sold in 1978.

Their first attempt at a business machine was the Tandy 10 Business Computer System released in 1978. The machine was priced at a jaw-dropping price of $8995 or upwards of $37 000 in today’s money. The machine did not sell in large numbers and was quickly discontinued. 1978 Tandy began development on the TRS-80 Model II specifically to target business users. It was released in 1979 at a price tag of $3 450. the TRS 80 computers had been nicknamed quite unfairly as “trash 80.”

In the 1980s a Japanese company called Kyocera released a portable computer called the Kyotronic 85 for the Japanese market. Sales for the laptop started off slow, at the time Tandy was seeking to enter the emerging portable computers market and decided to purchase the rights to the portable computer. They renamed it the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100.

Featuring the last code that Bill Gates ever wrote himself. The model 100 is widely regarded as the first successful laptop selling over 6 million units worldwide.

Tandy turned its attention back to the home computer market releasing the MC-10. It was a low-cost alternative to Tandy's own TRS-80 Color Computer to compete with entry-level machines such as the Commodore VIC-20 and Sinclair ZX81.

Tandy created its own IBM-compatible computers. The first of these computers was the Tandy 2000. Tandy aimed to improve on that with the Tandy 1000 which was marked as “highly compatible with IBM PCs” it was actually designed to be an enhanced IBM PCjr-compatible computer