Comment by TMWNN
1 year ago
This article covers the TRS-80's introduction and quick rise; presumably part 2 will cover its fall. I do not know whether part 2 will also cover the Tandy 1000; if it does not, I hope the author considers a part 3 as that story is as interesting as the TRS-80's.
Quoting myself below on how Tandy, with the TRS-80 and 1000, blew its lead in the computer market twice in a decade. Prior discussion: <https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1979-08/1979_08_BYT...>, which a) discusses how to implement machine language graphics and b) complains about the complete lack of Tandy documentation that motivated the author to write the article in the first place.
[3] It's clear in retrospect that TRS-80 was intentionally designed to not be compatible with the existing 8080/Z80 standards. ROM's location in the memory map broke CP/M compatibility, and the expansion bus is not S-100 compatible.
[4] Actually PCjr-compatible, which the original Tandy 1000 was designed to clone
> Tandy otherwise kept all software technical information secret
> Read this BYTE article from two years after the TRS-80's release which complains about the complete lack of Tandy documentation that motivated the author to write the article in the first place.
This nice, well-written technical manual (including a complete schematic for the system) was published by Tandy in 1978, the year before the BYTE article:
https://archive.org/details/TRS-80_Micro_Computer_Technical_...
As this blog post notes, it contained enough information not merely to enable you to understand and program the system (it's very simple, but clever, hardware, which is part of the charm of the 8-bit era), but to actually build your own clone:
http://www.trs-80.org/trs-80-micro-computer-technical-refere...
>Commodore's Jack Tramiel never ever understood the importance of software development, and the PET fell far behind Tandy and Apple in the US; until the VIC-20 in 1980 most of Commodore's computer sales were in Europe and Canada, where Apple and Tandy didn't compete.
I assure you, Canada has both Tandy and Apple computers in the late 1970s / early 1980s. But they were much more expensive than a VIC-20.
Also, the Model 1 was a Z80 and the CoCos were 6809s, which I suspect had much more to do with the differences in third-party software offerings than Tandy's 'attempts' at obfuscation, given the competition all had 6502/6510 processors that were much easier to port between.
>I assure you, Canada has both Tandy and Apple computers in the late 1970s / early 1980s.
I could have worded that better; I had Europe more in mind for Tandy and Apple's absence. I am aware that Tandy and Commodore had significant presence in Canada; Radio Shack stores were almost as much a presence in small towns there as in the US, and the PET began a long tradition of Commodore computers being more popular outside the US than at home. (Commodore even began as a Canadian company, back in its office-furniture days.)
(I know the article we're discussing here mentions a Tandy store in Europe, and TRS-80 was actually among the very earliest microcomputers of any kind available in Britain, but it disappeared almost immediately from the market for whatever reason. As for Apple, again, despite the Apple II Europlus, the Cork Apple factory, and Douglas Adams and Stephen Fry being the first two Mac owners in the UK, Apple was almost completely absent from the market compared to other US companies until the 1990s.)
>Also, the Model 1 was a Z80 and the CoCos were 6809s, which I suspect had much more to do with the differences in third-party software offerings than Tandy's 'attempts' at obfuscation, given the competition all had 6502/6510 processors that were much easier to port between.
6809 definitely contributed, but that still does not change Tandy going out of its way to discourage third-party products sold outside its stores. As for Z80, not at all. Tandy could have 100% dominated the CP/M market from the get-go had the TRS-80 been out-of-the-box compatible, but instead it foisted TRSDOS onto its users, so incompetently written that Tandy eventually gave up and licensed one of the many third-party replacement OSes it spawned as the official TRSDOS 6.
> Steve Wozniak's Disk II is a combination of a brilliantly simple and reliable disk controller
Wozniak was the first to realize how much hardware can be replaced by software. The cassette routines were the same - the hardware an Apple II uses to read and write to tape (and to use the speaker) is minimal as well, entirely driven by the 6502. This is one of the reasons it’s complicated to increase the clock (or use an improved 6502) of an Apple II, since everything depended on perfect timing.
Author here. Yeah, there's a part 2, a part 3, and I hope to get part 4 out tonight after work.
Hopefully we see the history of the color computer as well. Tandy was really surprising: they had three successful computer lines, all different, and all for different kinds of markets, and STILL ended up where they are.
Thank you. Amazing post.