Microcomputers – The Second Wave: Toward a Mass Market

In 1977, three new microcomputers appeared on the scene that broke free from the industry’s hobbyist roots: the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80. Much later, in the 1990s, journalists and historians began reverently referring to this group as “the Trinity.” Though all three machines had different origins and different trajectories (Apple, for example, appeared in 1978 to be an also-ran before rising to eclipse all of its rivals), the distinctiveness of the 1977 generation of computers is not merely a retrospective imputation by later writers. The hobby journalists of the time recognized that with the Trinity, something like an “appliance” computer had arrived on the scene, “a clean break from commercial and hobbyist computer systems requiring technical skill and dedication from their operators into a consumer market where no qualifications are required of the customer.”[1] Three factors were required to join this holy ensemble: the technical expertise to design a capable and reliable microcomputer, a nose for the larger business opportunity latent in the hobby computer market, and the capital resources to produce, market, and sell thousands (or even tens of thousands) of computers per month. Most of all it required a certain measure of daring, a willingness to a take a leap in the dark. After all, the transformation of the microcomputer hobby into a large-scale commercial enterprise came as a surprise to most outsiders. In 1977, the established mainframe and minicomputer makers remained cooly aloof from the microcomputer business. Clearly, computer enthusiasts had found in the Altair and its successors a fascinating gadget to occupy their spare hours. It did not necessarily follow that these toys had anything to do with the “real” computer business, any more than model rocketry had to do with putting a man on the moon. In a la of the leading minicomputer makers, Hewlett-Packard and Digital, were offered ready-made micro designs by computing-loving engineers within their ranks (Steve Wozniak and Dave Ahl, respectively), but both rejected the idea, unwilling to pursue a fringe market that seemed to have nothing to do with their business.[2] Even many of the hobbyists themselves didn’t believe that the market for a home computer would extend much beyond the existing circle of electronic hobbyists and computer enthusiasts. But a few people with access to deep pockets (not necessarily their own) smelled an opportunity in the microcomputer, and decided to pursue it, and those people formed the breaking edge of the second wave of personal computers. The obvious place to start to tell the story of the second wave is Apple Computer: not because it is, retrospectively, the most well-known of the three, but because it had the deepest roots in the first-wave hobby community. Commodore and Tandy were well-established companies, dragged into the computer business almost against their will by internal agitators who believed fervently in the idea of the personal computer. Apple was founded by and for hobbyists. If not for the fickle whims of fate and the chutzpah of Steve Jobs, it would have met a quiet demise in total obscurity, like so many other hobby computer companies of the day. Apple Computer The story of Apple Computer (later, simply Apple) continues to fascinate because of the company’s massive economic success and cultural impact (first in the early 1980s, then again in the twenty-first century), because of its meteoric rise from humble beginnings, and because of the vivid and contrasting personalities of its two primary co-founders: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. No other topic I will cover in this series has a comparably extensive literature: all of the known details of the early years of the two Steves and their company could fill more than one book (and have). Here we can note only the most important highlights. What became the first Apple computer began as an anonymous circuit board, the product of an intense burst of creative energy by Steven “Woz” Wozniak. Wozniak’s engineer father moved his family to Sunnyvale, California, at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, in the late 1950s, to take a job at Lockheed. The younger Wozniak developed an early fascination with electronics, and he came of age in the perfect environment to feed and reinforce that fascination: a suburban neighborhood teeming with engineer dads on every block, who had bins full of parts and minds full of expertise to lend to the eager young gadget enthusiasts who roamed the sidewalks.[3] By the time Woz graduated from high school in 1968, he had grown into a true electronics genius, with a level of insight and skill far beyond the typical hobbyist. He could envision a design that would produce the desired effect in the most efficient way possible, with the elegant finality of a mathematical proof. Socially isolated, he lived an inward life of imagination, spending every spare moment at home and in school sketching designs for electronic systems. His social awkwardness dwelled side-by-side with a love of pranks and juvenile humor: in his early twenties he ran a Dial-a-Joke service out of his home that played pre-recorded Polack jokes from an answering machine.[4] His high school electronics teacher gave Wozniak the opportunity to make weekly visits to a nearby corporate computer center, and he learned about minicomputers from the trade literature at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Like many other young men of his generation, these brushes with computing got him pining for his own computer; unlike most of them, he decided to do something about it. In 1971, while a student at University of California, Berkeley, he built a home computer with the help of a younger friend, a high school student named Bill Fernandez. This “Cream Soda Computer,” named for the beverage that fueled its creation, was roughly similar in character and capabilities to the Kenbak-1 sold by John Blankenbaker that same year: a very basic processor, a tiny memory, and a handful of lights for output. Meanwhile, Woz continued to pore over the brochures and manuals for dream machines like the Data General Nova minicomputer, and to work out schematics on paper for minicomputers of his own design.[5] For years, Wozniak’s dream of a computer to call his own slumbered. Then, in the spring of 1975, a sudden shock jolted it awake. His friend Allen Baum took Wozniak to the first Homebrew Computer Club meeting under false pretenses—he told Woz that the people there were working on computer video terminals like Don Lancaster’s TV Typewriter. Wozniak knew all about that: he had already designed his own terminal to use with a local time-sharing service, Call Computer. He was unprepared, then, when he arrived at Don French’s Menlo Park garage and found everyone chattering about microprocessors. Accustomed to mastery of all things electronic, Wozniak initially recoiled at being thrown into an environment that exposed him as ignorant.[6] After the meeting, though, he began looking into how these newfangled microprocessors worked, and found that they replicated the structure of his favorite minicomputers in miniature (indeed, the first Intel microprocessor was consciously modeled on the DEC PDP-8). Moreover, he saw that with a microprocessor, he could put a whole computer right in his TV terminal, and eliminate the need to actually “call” some outside computer.[7] Wozniak designed and built his second computer over the following months. For the processor, he opted at first for the Motorola 6800, but then found a much cheaper device with a similar design: the MOS Technology 6502, a new product that he acquired for $25 at the Western Electric Show and Convention (WESCON) at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, in June 1975. He assembled a circuit board around the processor with controller chips for a keyboard, TV screen, 4K bytes of static RAM, and a tiny program in ROM to bring up the keyboard interface at power on. Later in the year he upgraded to cheaper (but more finicky) dynamic RAM, with the help of his friend Steve Jobs, a classmate of Bill Fernandez.[8] Had it been only up to Wozniak, the story of his computer would end there, as a minor anecdote in the history of hobby microcomputers. Proud of his accomplishment but shy of self-promotion, he would set up his computer at Homebrew meetings and wait patiently to lure in fellow hobbyists, to whom he would offer free copies of the plans for the machine. He found few takers. Wozniak’s design was clean and self-contained, but others were cobbling together the same capabilities by combining an Altair, a Processor Technology memory board, and a TV Typewriter. Moreover, using the 6502 processor put him out of step with the mainline hobby culture of Intel 8080 machines based on Altair. Wozniak didn’t mind that at all. He had not designed his computer to fill a market need, but because he wanted it. Comfortably settled into his dream job—designing calculators for Hewlett-Packard (HP)—and into his first real romantic relationship (with Alice Robertson, whom he met through his Dial-a-Joke line), he was content with the direction of his life and felt no pull to parlay his talent for computer design into fame, recognition, or money. His young friend Steve Jobs, on the other hand, bristled with restless energy. Though he found electronics interesting, he lacked Wozniak’s all-consuming passion for the field, and did not know where to turn instead for fulfillment. Dissatisfied with the well-worn patterns around which others organized their lives, he spent his late teens and early twenties in search of some kind of vital spiritual awakening, whether through bizarre diets inspired by German-born writer Arnold Ehret, primal scream therapy, the ancient wisdom of India, or the All One Farm, a hippie commune in Oregon.[9] Jobs saw in Woz’s computer the potential for a business: instead of giving away the plans, they could sell the pre-assembled boards (with no case, keyboard, monitor, or other accessories). In early 1976, he cajoled his friend into a partnership; Woz agreed, but still considered this a sideline to his real work at HP. Inspired by the orchard at All One Farm where he had been spending much of his time, Jobs proposed the name Apple Computer. The partnership had a clear division of labor: Wozniak would design the hardware and software, Jobs would make the business decisions. Jobs and Woz in April 1976 with the original Apple Computer (later called the Apple I). [Joe Melena] Financed by the sale of their most valuable property (Jobs’ Volkswagen bus and Wozniak’s HP calculator), and thirty-day credit with a parts supplier, they made a fifty-computer deal with Paul Terrell, owner of the Byte Shop computer store. But this promising beginning also turned out to also be the end of their success; very few other Apples were sold. By mid-1976, the barebones board offered by Apple didn’t cut it anymore. A hobbyist could order a Processor Technology Sol-20 that came in a handsome case with integrated power supply, keyboard and cassette interface. Even when outfitted with all of that (which Terrell had to do himself in order to make a saleable computer), the Apple lacked compatibility with the growing array of software and hardware designed for the 8080 processor and S-100 bus.[10] Jobs knew that they would need a better computer and more money to build it. In late 1976, Woz lost himself in a second design. While he had built the first Apple so he could finally have a minicomputer of his own, he built the Apple II so he could create and play arcade games with full-color graphics. Woz knew the field well, because Jobs had an on-again, off-again job at Atari in Sunnyvale and Woz had taken a commission from his friend to design a Breakout game for the company—a single-player Pong variant, with the goal to break a whole array of blocks before losing the ball off the bottom of the screen. Unlike the Atari games of the time, though, Apple II games would be written in mutable BASIC code, not fossilized in hardware. As usual for Woz, the Apple II’s design was spare and efficient. The pièce de resistance was circuitry to time-share the memory bus so that the video card could read from memory while drawing each line of the screen, then hand control to the processor while waiting for the cathode ray beam to reset to the start of the next line. Jobs, meanwhile, went to work on finding an investor. He tried selling Apple Computer to Atari and Commodore (a calculator firm about which we’ll have much more to say very shortly), but the former had no interest in the product and the latter balked at the price. Jobs asked Atari founder Bushnell (his former employer) for an investment, and was rebuffed again. But Bushnell did ask venture capitalist Don Valentine to come take a look at Apple. Valentine was turned off by Jobs’ hippie vibes, but put Jobs in touch with a former employee of his from his Fairchild Semiconductor days, Mike Markkula.[11] Through this chain of happenstance, Apple Computer found exactly the right person to make it a success. Jobs exhibited taste and enterprise, but untempered by experience and marred by streaks of cruelty and pettiness. Wozniak possessed exceptional engineering talent, but entirely lacked business sense, and avoided any work that he didn’t find personal interesting. Markkula was an even-keeled veteran of Fairchild and intel, living in semi-retirement in his thirties after making several million dollars off of his stock. He brought to Apple $250,000 of his own money, and the connections to bring in far more. He also brought knowledge about how to build and develop a company, and a deep belief in the market for something like the Apple. Markkula was already personally invested in the idea of computing at home: at Intel he had used a home teletype terminal to connect to an Intel time-sharing computer. He used it for company business but also to balance his personal checkbook, and had always wondered why Intel didn’t package the 8008 or 8080 into a computer and sell it.[12] Markkula with the Apple II. By the spring of 1977, the Apple II was ready to sell. Wozniak had finished the circuit design, Markkula had laid out a business plan, and Jobs had selected, a sleek, molded-plastic case that would make Apple II the most elegant-looking computer on the market. At a starting price of $1,298, it was far from the cheapest, however, and its novel processor and bus still put it outside the mainstream of hobby hardware and software. Sales were initially slow. But Markkula kept the investment money flowing, and coaxed one last engineering miracle from Woz. Having ported his checkbook program to the Apple II, Markkula was annoyed at how long it took to load from cassette tape, and gave Wozniak the mandate to produce a magnetic disk drive for the Apple II, using the new 5.25 inch drives available from Shugart Associates. A floppy disk of the time could hold less data than a tape, but the computer could read and write it far faster and could instantly access any part of the rapidly-spinning disk (whereas tape could only be read or written at whatever position it was currently wound to). The interior of the original Apple II, showing the very tidy Woz board design and the extensive set of available expansion slots on the far right. [Howie Shen] The $595 Disk II immediately set Apple apart from its competitors, and set the stage for the company’s future growth. With the disk drive, color graphics, eight expansion slots, and the capacity for up to forty-eight kilobytes of memory, the Apple II was by far the most fully-featured and extensible of the Trinity. In 1977 and 1978, however, Apple Computer remained an also-ran. Other companies, with pre-existing manufacturing and distribution networks, raced ahead of with mass-market computers at half the price and many times the reach. They put up sales and production numbers far exceeding anything that the hobby computer market had ever seen. The first of these was Commodore. Commodore Commodore, co-founded by Jack Tramiel and Manfred Kapp, began life as a typewriter importer in Toronto, but pivoted into the calculator business in the late 1960s, selling re-branded Japanese imports from Casio and then later building its own factories, with the backing of Canadian financier Irving Gould.[13] Tramiel, born Idek Trzmiel in Poland, survived Auschwitz and came to the U.S. in his early twenties, where he worked his way up from the bottom. Not much of an idea man or product innovator, he got ahead on hard work, a hard nose, and ruthlessness (this adjective is attributed to him seven times by various persons in Brian Bagnall’s book, Commodore: A Company on the Edge). Behind him lurked the shadowy Canadian financier Gould, who brought large quantities of cash, international contacts, and clever tax evasion schemes. Like most North American calculator makers, Commodore found itself on the brink of disaster in 1974, after semiconductor firms like Texas Instruments began to flood the market with dirt-cheap calculators. Tramiel (now CEO of Commodore) decided to beat them by joining them: he vertically integrated by buying one of his suppliers, MOS Technology, the very firm that had built the 6502 processor used in the Apple I and II. Once again, we find a thread woven into the story of the personal computer out of the unraveling fabric of the North American calculator business. Tramiel showing off Commodore products at a 1984 trade show [Marty Katz/baltimorephotographer.com] Tramiel acquired MOS in September 1976 in exchange for a modest dollop of cash, a more substantial stake in Commodore, and a generous serving of pressure on his (also financially beleaguered) supplier.[14] In the bargain he had also acquired Charles “Chuck” Peddle, whose vision for the future of computing would pull Commodore in an entirely new direction. A cocky striver from a poor family in Maine, Peddle studied electrical engineering at the state university, then began bouncing around the country in search of bigger and better opportunities: to California to take a job at General Electric (GE), then to GE’s time-sharing systems division offices in Arizona and Ohio, then back to Arizona to take a swing at starting a smart terminal business, miss, and join the semiconductor design team at Motorola, then to Pennsylvania to join MOS Technology as part of a breakaway group of engineers who had worked on Motorola’s 6800 microprocessor. In contrast to the introverted Woz and the otherworldly Jobs, Peddle was brash and frankly carnal—the type of man who would compare the pleasures of computer use to sex and boast that his wife had the figure of Zsa Zsa Gabor.[15] The packaged MOS 6502 processor, which would power the Apple I, Apple II, Commodore PET, and many other computers and video game systems to come. [Konstantin Lanzet / CC BY-SA 3.0] Peddle helped to design the 6502 processor, but it was never targeted at microcomputers. It was designed as a controller for some larger application, such as an industrial machine, a traffic signal, or an automobile. At a price point of $25, it aimed to compete with the Intel 4040, the recently released successor to the 4004. MOS also sold the KIM-1, a single-board computer with a calculator screen and keypad built into it. It was intended as a marketing showpiece for the 6502, not a consumer product. Nonetheless, it sold in surprisingly large numbers to hobbyists who appreciated having a very inexpensive all-in-one computer. In late 1975, Peddle was visiting the Miami suburbs to help Allied Leisure, a maker of electro-mechanical arcade games, design a microprocessor-powered pinball machine using the 6502. Peddle discovered that one of the Allied engineers, Bill Seiler, was a hobbyist who had bought a computer from the Digital Group in Denver, but then struggled to figure out what to do with it.[16] Peddle decided he wanted to launch a full-fledged computer product: not because he had always dreamed of a computer of his own, but because he believed in the market opportunity, having witnessed both the not-quite-satisfied demand of hobbyists like Seiler for a computer that was both easy-to-use and able to do something useful, and the eagerness with which those same hobbyists had taken up the cheap, simple KIM-1. Up to this time, the microcomputer business was almost fully autochthonous, built by native hobbyists; Peddle was the first immigrant. With MOS scaling back under financial pressure, Peddle intended to jump ship for Allied Leisure, which had agreed to launch his planned computer. But then, in the fall of 1976, came the Commodore acquisition.[17] Commodore’s vice president of engineering, Andre Sousan, later a major player at Apple, didn’t want to lose Peddle, and agreed to help him pitch his computer to Tramiel. Tramiel, in turn, agreed to give Peddle a computer division in Palo Alto. Sousan and Peddle succeeded with Tramiel because they framed the project in terms of the familiar calculator market: as historian Brian Bagnall writes, “[they] pitched the product as an evolution of the calculator which would surpass the HP65,” adding new features like a TV monitor and cassette deck. Tramiel especially appreciated the idea of having electronics retailer Radio Shack market the computer under its own brand, in exchange for more Commodore calculator distribution in their stores.[18] Tramiel wanted something to show at the January 1977 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), just a few months away, so Peddle went to Apple, the only existing company with a working 6502-based computer, to try to acquire their design. As we have seen, those negotiations went nowhere, so Peddle and his team slapped the guts of a 6502-based sprinkler-system controller into a case with a rubberized keyboard sourced from Commodore’s existing calculator designs. Unimpressed by a demo of this barely-working machine at CES, Radio Shack decided they could do at least as well themselves, and broke off negotiations, too.[19] Chuck Peddle with a display of Commodore PETs. And yep, it’s Star Trek again. Commodore went ahead alone, and announced the imminent arrival of the “Commodore PET 2001” – its name inspired by the pet rock fad, and its numerical designation borrowed from the space odyssey. Peddle built hype for the machine with an early prototype at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco in April 1977, and the mob of over ten thousand attendees convinced Tramiel that this computer idea was something more than just a means of selling more calculators. As company revenues from calculators continued to dwindle, Tramiel kept the company afloat by transforming the excitement for the PET into cash flow with an advanced payment plan that secured eager buyers a place in line—once the computers were actually built.[20] In the fall of 1977, Commodore finally began to ship PETs to customers. The resulting computer had serious shortcomings. Tramiel had refused to pay the up-front cost for a modern-looking plastic-molded exterior, instead funneling some revenue to his struggling file cabinet subsidiary by ordering sheet metal cases. He also insisted on a calculator-style keyboard with small rubberized keys, which proved unpleasantly cramped and flimsy. With black-and-white character graphics and no expansion slots or speaker, the PET was neither as handsome nor (in most ways) as capable as the Apple II. But it held two decided advantages: Commodore’s existing retail distribution network and a lower price. An 8KB model with integrated tape deck and monitor included cost just $795—two-thirds the price of an Apple II without those accessories.[21] Commodore PET with the original ‘chiclet’ keyboard. Later iterations would have more usable keys. [Rama & Musée Bolo / CC BY-SA 2.0 fr] PET continued to attract attention from the press that fall, with an article in BYTE touting it as an “appliance computer,” extensive coverage in Personal Computing, and a cover feature in Popular Science. At first production failed to keep up with interest: “By the end of 1977,” Bagnall writes, “Commodore had only managed to assemble a meager 500 machines.” But Commodore straightened out its production lines, and by one estimate they sold about 25,000 PETs in 1978.[22] Nonetheless, Commodore remained in a slightly uncomfortable position. Peddle had tried and failed to a launch a disk drive for the PET, in large part because his lack of understanding of the hobby market led him to overshoot, aiming for a complex dual-disk drive that would appeal to the kind of corporate mini-computer user that he used to be (His failure incurred Tramiel’s wrath, leading Peddle to rashly jump ship to Apple –a move that wouldn’t last.) So, on the one hand, with no color graphics, limited memory, and no disk drive, the PET could not compete for the high-end customers who wanted those capabilities and could find them in an Apple II. On the other, Commodore had failed to dominate the market for low-cost, mass-produced machines either: the PET’s 1978 sales would have made it the fastest-selling computer of all time, if not for the final entry in the 1977 Trinity, the TRS-80.[23] Radio Shack Tandy Radio Shack was the creation of Charles Tandy, a driven World War II veteran from Brownsville, Texas, who expanded his father’s Forth Worth shoe leather business into a nationally-known leather and leathercrafts empire. By the 1960s, Tandy felt that leather had taken him as far as it could; he wanted to expand into new markets with more growth potential. So, in 1963, he acquired an ailing electronics chain headquartered in Boston called Radio Shack. Pouring money from the leather business into his new venture, he expanded Radio Shack from just nine stores to several thousand over the following decade. Customers could walk into a Radio Shack in nearly every city in the United States, from Eugene, Oregon to Fort Lauderdale, Florida: even sparsely populated states like Montana and Wyoming boasted several stores each. This ubiquity provided the springboard for the TRS-80’s success.[24] Tandy (right) with another executive and his signature cigar, in front of a map of Radio Shack locations [Irvin Farmin, Tandy’s Money Machine, photo insert]. The impetus for Tandy’s entry into the computer business came from a hobbyist on the inside. Don French started his career as a teenage salesman in a Radio Shack store outside San Diego and rose rapidly through the ranks to become a project manager at the Fort Worth headquarters in 1973, while still in his mid-twenties. His fascination with computers was sparked by a course on the topic he took at Grossmont Junior College, and kindled anew by the arrival of the first hobby computers. He ordered the Mark-8 kit from Jonathan Titus in 1974, and then the MITS Altair when it became available the following year. French, enamored with his new toys, became convinced that Radio Shack should bring out its own kit computer, and tried earnestly to convince his bosses of the same.[25] Leadership gradually came around to the idea that an expensive, innovative computer product offered an opportunity to revise Radio Shack’s image as a purveyor of low-cost, low-quality, imitative merchandise. According to French, the key turning point came in the fall of 1975, when audio equipment maker Advent wowed the market with a new speaker design. An infuriated Charles Tandy railed at the fact that his company couldn’t innovate like that, and latched onto French’s computer proposal as a way to make similar headlines. His passion for the idea could not have run too deep, however, because French’s plans for a Radio Shack computer went nowhere until the spring of 1976.[26] At that time, a group of Tandy Radio Shack buyers including John Roach (Radio Shack’s Vice President) visited National Semiconductor in Santa Clara, California, to check out the latest chip offerings, including the company’s new SC/MP microprocessor. While there, they met a young electrical engineer named Steve Leininger. Then, when they visited the local Byte Shop to scope out the hobby computer scene, there was Leininger again, working a part-time gig behind the counter. Leininger, as it turned out, in addition to his engineering credentials, regularly attended Homebrew Computer Club meetings and was spending his spare hours building a hobby computer and writing his own BASIC. Tandy had found the perfect man to kick-off French’s computer project, combining a passion for hobby computers with the engineering chops to understand the nuances of integrated circuits and microprocessor design. The opportunity to design a computer as a commercial product and access to a better job market for his out-of-work geologist wife were sufficient enticements to bring Leininger to Texas.[27] Leininger working on the innards of a computer. [Personal Computing, December 1981] Leininger grew up near South Bend, Indiana, and earned a bachelor and master’s degree in electric engineering in just four years at Purdue University before accepting a job at National Semiconductor. He did not have the bold personality of Woz, Jobs, or even Peddle, but he certainly had the skills that Tandy needed. French’s notional computer project only began in earnest after Leininger’s move to Fort Worth in July 1976. However, most of the company’s leaders did not really believe that a computer would or could be a successful Radio Shack product, and they left Leininger toiling away in almost total isolation, first in a speaker plant at the Fort Worth stockyards, then in a saddle factory. [28] It took several months before Leininger even knew what he should build. French had initially planned on a kit, as kits fell within his preserve at Tandy, making it relatively easy to sneak by leadership. But in October he and Leininger agreed to develop a pre-assembled computer instead, at the insistence of Radio Shack president Lew Kornfeld. Kornfeld felt burnt by a recent digital clock kit, which precipitated a high rate of returns from customers unable to put it together, and didn’t want to send and even more complicated kit project out the door. It is likely at this moment of uncertainty that French turned to Tramiel and Peddle to explore having Commodore build the computer instead, a notion which fell through at CES in January 1977, likely because the Tandy people saw that Peddle had nothing better to offer than what Leininger had prototyped to that point.[29] Other than general skepticism about the viability of a Radio Shack computer in the first place, the clearest message French and Leininger got from Tandy leadership was to keep the price as low as possible: the original target (under the kit plan) was a $195 retail price. Cost control guided the rest of the design. For example, Leininger’s choice of the Zilog Z80 microprocessor, an 8080-compatible architected by the same Federico Faggin who had led the design of that seminal Intel chip. It offered more built-in circuitry than its Intel predecessor, including circuitry for refreshing dynamic RAM. Because dynamic RAM was cheaper than static, this lowered the cost of building the TRS-80. To save more money on hardware, Leininger wrote software to generate the tones for saving data to tape rather than using a physical tone-generator circuit. Meanwhile, because RCA offered to provide a cheap black-and-white TV already finished in a plastic “Mercedes silver” case, Radio Shack let the tail wag the dog, and adopted the same color for the case of the computer and keyboard, housed as a single unit.[30] In February 1977 French, Leininger, and Roach presented the prototype to Charles Tandy and got the go-ahead to enter production. French thought they could sell 50,000 units; Lew Kornfeld found that laughable and proposed building 1,000; Roach finalized the number at 3,500 units, enough to get better economies of scale from the factory and to use a computer to manage inventory in each store if they found no buyers.[31] Despite this continuing internal skepticism, the TRS-80 attracted tremendous interest when it was announced to the public at the Waldorf Hotel New York City on August 3rd, and even more so when French showed up with a working TRS-80s at the ComputerMania hobby computer convention in Boston, later that month. At just $600 for a monitor, keyboard, cassette recorder, four kilobytes of memory, and a simple built-in BASIC, it was substantially cheaper even than the recently-debuted PET. Just like Commodore, it took Radio Shack several more months to get their factory production lines humming, but once they did, Tandy sold TRS-80s at an astonishing rate: 100,000 in 1978, exceeding the number of minicomputers sold by all manufacturers combined that year (though certainly not coming close to their total dollar value). Rather than the flop that company leaders feared, it proved to be a vital new revenue source, accounting for 10% of Tandy’s revenue in 1978. The TRS-80 arrived just in time to take up the slack from the flagging citizens-band (CB) radio craze that had filled Radio Shack’s sails in the mid-1970s.[32] Eager onlookers crowd around the newly-unveiled TRS-80. These astonishing sales numbers are not explained by the TRS-80’s low price alone. It was also more physically accessible and visible to a broad audience than any computer before it. Radio Shack store managers across the United States set up a TRS-80, powered it on to the BASIC programming language prompt, and left it sitting out for anyone to play with. The experience that students, scientists, and engineers had been discovering and falling in love with in computer centers, labs, and offices for the previous decade became available to anyone who walked into a Radio Shack—and available to take home for just a few hundred dollars. Every electronic hobbyist who had not yet caught the computer bug was exposed every time they came into the store to pick up a few parts for a project, but so were millions of people who dropped in just to get some flashlight batteries or blank cassette tapes. One TRS-80 owner reported: “I discovered the magic of computers in a Radio Shack. My brother and I typed in a small sample program [10 INPUT “WHAT IS YOUR NAME”; A$:PRINT “HELLO,“A$ ] and I was absolutely astounded at what it did.” Others became Radio Shack bums, hanging out in the store all day for a chance to play with the computer.[33] The TRS-80, however, did little to shake Radio Shack’s reputation for cut-rate products: the nickname “TRASH-80” appeared in print in late 1978, and would dog the product line for the rest of its existence, fairly or not. All of the personal computers of this era were clumsy and feeble compared to their minicomputer counterparts. The TRS-80 at least had a proper keyboard, unlike the early PETs. But much about it did exude a particular cheapness, including a mediocre BASIC written by Leininger (Radio Shack, like the rest of the Trinity, ended having to go to MicroSoft for a better version) and a finicky tape controller. Worst of all was the $300 Expansion Interface released in 1978, with ports for connecting a printer and a disk drive, and space for up to 32 kilobytes of additional memory and an expansion card. You could not do anything serious with the TRS-80 without an Expansion Interface, but it was notoriously unreliable, causing reboots, freezes, and monitor glitches. Even the TRS-80 advertisements were cheap knock-offs of Apple’s, with the attractive models in high-end homes replaced by unprepossessing Tandy employees posing awkwardly in Tandy offices or their suburban Fort Worth kitchens.[34] Selection from a TRS-80 ad that appeared in the October 1977 edition of BYTE and other magazines. It is populated with salt-of-the-earth Radio Shack employees. The culture of cheapness extended to French and Leininger, as well. As mere cogs in the Tandy corporate machine, they would never see the kind of monetary rewards that awaited the founders of Apple. French, at least, expected a promotion to vice presidency and a bonus from his work on the TRS-80, but was blocked by Radio Shack president Lew Kornfeld after Charles Tandy’s death in late 1978. Disgruntled, he left to start his own company, implementing the CP/M disk operating system for the TRS-80. Leininger stayed on for several more years, designing Radio Shack computers.[35] The Winnowing In 1975 and 1976, a slew of hobby-entrepreneurs had founded companies to try to turn their love of computers into a living. As in so many new, innovation-driven markets, this early burst of entrepreneurial energy was followed by a brutal winnowing. The majority of the hobby computer companies collapsed by 1979, unable to survive in a suddenly much larger and more competitive market. [36] MITS, though not founded as a hobby computer company, was the first to enter the market and also the first to leave. The company struggled to develop a focused and reliable line of products, and never really rose to the challenge of IMSAI, much less further waves of more powerful and easy-to-use computers. In May 1977, Roberts, who had tired of the business and wanted to cash in, sold MITS for six million dollars to Pertec, a maker of disk and tape drive systems. Most MITS employees disliked the new management. The best of them had already fled to MicroSoft or other ventures, or soon would (Dave Bunnell, for example, started the magazine Personal Computing). Pertec continued to make higher end microprocessor-based minicomputers into the 1980s, but retired the Altair in 1978, and never made another computer targeted at individuals.[37] Bill Millard’s IMSAI, as we have already seen, launched a dud of a second product and was sucked dry of cash to help fund Millard’s chain of ComputerLand retail stores. It went bankrupt in 1979. Millard continued his financial shenanigans for decades, and in the 1990s became a wanted man for over $100 million in unpaid taxes. Processor Technology simply froze, failing to update its Sol product line in response to the threats posed by the rise of the Trinity, and also met its demise in 1979.[38] The Digital Group of Denver had bet their company on a CPU-independent bus, the key product decision that made their computers attractive to hardcore electronic hobbyists who wanted to experiment with different processors. But this expensive and complicated setup also contributed to the company’s abysmal quality control, and new buyers began demanding to pay cash-on-delivery, not up front. This put Digital Group in a cash flow death spiral, and they, too declared bankruptcy in 1979 after a total of 3,000 computers sold.[39] One hobby enterprise, as we know, survived by metamorphosing into a venture-capital-fueled bet on a large-scale personal computer market: Apple Computer. The other survivors found specialized niches unserved by the mass-market Trinity: Cromemco, for example, focused on delivering reliable, powerful, rigorously engineered hardware, and became the darling of the hardcore scientific computerist; Vector Graphics built turn-key business systems. In 1975 and 1976, almost everyone entering the microcomputer business was attracted to it by their passion for the machines themselves; by 1978, with computers backed by deep-pocketed companies flying off of retail shelves, there was a new lure: the scent of money. Prior to that year, for example, almost every franchisee of the retailer ComputerLand was a computer-loving hobbyist. But after a Fortune magazine profile of the company ran in April, the franchise office was flooded with inquiries from businessmen and salesman with no prior interest in computers. For better and for worse, the microcomputer market was leaving its childhood, and its innocence was lost.[40] Even more money was in the offing for those who could figure out how best to market these dazzling devices: make them more accessible, make them more fun, or even convince buyers that they were actually useful. Our next few installments will focus on who was buying these computers in such large quantities, and what they wanted them for. [1] “Most Important Companies,” BYTE (September 1995), 100; Carl Helmers, “Reflections on Entry into Our Third Year,” BYTE (September 1977), 6; “Chuck Peddle on the PET Computer,” Personal Computing (September/October 1977), 31. [2] Freiberger and Swaine, Fire in the Valley, 25-28. [3] Michael Moritz, Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs, the Creation of Apple, and How it Changed the World (New York: Overlook Press, 2009), 31-32. [4] Moritz, Return to the Little Kingdom, 49-52, 129. [5] One important difference was the use of punched cards for input, though how exactly this worked is unclear. Punch card reader accessories for the computers of the time were typically large and expensive pieces of equipment, designed to read in hundreds of cards per minute. Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 86-88. Moritz, Return to the Little Kingdom, 54-63. [6] Wozniak, iWoz, 152-154. Wozniak also, at some point, began work on a video terminal design called the “Computer Conversor,” intended to be commercialized by Call Computer’s owner, Alex Kamradt. Whether this project began before or after the Homebrew meeting is unclear in the sources. Moritz, Return to the Little Kingdom, 124-126, 146-147. Wozniak briefly mentions the Call Computer project in his memoir (p. 170), but never mentions Kamradt, perhaps out of embarrassment that he ditched the never-finished Computer Conversor in favor of Apple Computer. Kamradt, a closeted homosexual, was murdered by a group of young men he picked up in 1991. Will Johnson, “Alex Kamradt,” 2010 (http://www.countyhistorian.com/knol/4hmquk6fx4gu-414-alex-kamradt.html). [7] Wozniak, iWoz, 155-158. [8] Wozniak, iWoz, 162-170; Mos Technology, “Mos 6502 Saves More Money,” September 1975 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/MOS_6501_6502_Ad_Sept_1975.jpg). [9] Moritz, Return to the Little Kingdom, 96-109. [10] Moritz, Return to the Little Kingdom, 144-161. [11] Moritz, Return to the Little Kingdom, 169-170, 182-185; Wozniak, iWoz, 194-196; Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 72-76. [12] Moritz, Return to the Little Kingdom, 183-185, 227-229; John Hollar, “Oral History of Armas Clifford (Mike) Markkula, Jr.,” Computer History Museum (May 1, 2012), 22-23. [13] Gareth Edwards, “How Commodore Invented the Mass Market Computer,” Every (March 10, 2025), https://every.to/the-crazy-ones/the-first-king-of-home-computing. [14] Brian Bagnall, Commodore: A Company on the Edge (Variant Press, 2011) 13, 55-58; “Calculator Maker Integrates Downward,” New Scientist (September 9, 1976), 541. [15] Bagnall, Commodore, 4-13, 99, 115. [16] Bagnall, Commodore, 43-44. [17] Bagnall, Commodore, 51-54. [18] Bagnall, Commodore, 59-61. [19] Bagnall, Commodore, 70, 73-77, 84. [20] Bganall, Commodore, 78, 97-101, 111, 117. [21] Early promotional materials put the planned MSRP at $495, and some sources still report that price, but it was never offered that cheaply. A $495 4KB model was quickly discontinued when it was found to be a money loser. Bagnall, Commodore, 99, 101, 111, 114-115. [22] “Commodore’s New PET Computer,” BYTE (October 1977), 50; “The PET Discussion,” Personal Computing (September/October 1977), 30-42; William J. Hawkins, “New Home Computers Can Change Your Lifestyle,” Popular Science (October 1977), 30-36; Bagnall, Commodore, 132; “BYTE News,” BYTE (May 1979), 117. [23] Bagnall, Commodore, 161, 171-127. [24] Irvin Farman, Tandy’s Money Machine: How Charles Tandy Built Radio Shack Into the World’s Largest Electronics Chain (Chicago: Mobium Press, 1992), 28-51, 154-163; Radio Shack, “1975 Electronics Catalog,” 84-85. [25] Ira Goldklang, “TRS-80 Computers: Don French – The Father of the TRS-80,” June 13, 2021 (https://www.trs-80.com/wordpress/trs-80-computers-don-french/); “Interview with Don French, Co-designer of the TRS-80 Model I,” Floppy Days (February 21, 2016), https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-53-interview-with-don-french-co-designer-of-the-trs-80-model-i. [26] “Interview with Don French, Co-designer of the TRS-80 Model I,” Floppy Days (February 21, 2016). [27] Farman, Tandy’s Money Machine, 402; David Welsh and Theresa Welsh, Priming the Pump: How TRS-80 Enthusiasts Helped Spark the PC Revolution (Ferndale, Michigan: The Seeker Books, 2013), 2-4. [28] Welsh and Welsh, Priming the Pump, 4-5. [29] The timeline of the TRS-80’s development has proved hard to pin down. My reconstruction of the timeline is anchored the very clear and precise dates given by Leininger in a 2024 interview: he started working for Tandy July 5th 1976, and demoed the computer to Tandy in February 1977. “Floppy Days 144 – Interview with Don French and Steve Leininger, Co-Designers of the TRS-80 Model I”, Floppy Days (Oct 27, 2024), https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-144-interview-with-don-french-and-steve-leininger. In the same interview (and in other accounts), Don French places himself and John Roach at the West Coast Computer Faire before hiring Leininger to start working on the TRS-80, but with the first West Coast Computer Faire took place in April 1977, months after the prototype TRS-80 had already been demonstrated and approved for production by Charles Tandy. He also puts his conversations with Peddle at Commodore about possibly designing a computer for Radio Shack at a point before hiring, Leininger, but Peddle didn’t work for Commodore at that point. A 1981 article on Leininger gives an even more nonsensical timeline, in which Leininger leaves California to work for Tandy in the fall of 1975 (before the first Byte Shop, where he worked evenings, had even opened), chooses the Z80 in February 1976 (months before its release), and presents the prototype for Tandy’s approval in April 1976 for delivery in August of that same year (a year early). Jonathan Erickson, “The Men Behind the TRS-80,” Popular Computing (December 1981), 26-27. [30] Welsh and Welsh, Priming the Pump, 4-5, 8. [31] Welsh and Welsh, Priming the Pump, 6-7. [32] Welsh and Welsh, priming the Pump, 25; “BYTE News,” BYTE (May 1979), 117; James L. Pelkey, “Chapter 7 – Data Communications: Market Order 1973-1979,” The History of Computer Communications (https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/7.1/Minicomputers,-Distributed-Data-Processing-and-Microprocessors). [33] Welsh and Welsh, Priming the Pump, 30. [34] Welsh and Welsh, Priming the Pump, 28, 36, 38; “Letters,” Kilobaud (December 1978), 18; Computer History Museum, “Radio Shack TRS-80 advertisement” (1977), https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/personal-computers/17/298/1163; “Interview with Don French, Co-designer of the TRS-80 Model I”, Floppy Days (February 21, 2016), https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-53-interview-with-don-french-co-designer-of-the-trs-80-model-i. [35] Welsh and Welsh, Priming the Pump, 37. [36] Apple and Cromemco are the only pre-1977 computer makers that survived long enough to be covered in Robert Levering, et al.’s The Computer Entrepreneurs, a 1984 collection of sixty-five industry founder profiles. [37] Frieberger and Swaine, Fire in the Valley, 70-73, 153-155. [38] Robert Frank, “After 20 Years, Missing CEO Reappears,” The Wall Street Journal (September 12, 2011). [39] Robert Suding, “Digital Group Computers – The Real Story,” (ca. 2004), https://web.archive.org/web/20060820083602/www.ultimatecharger.com/dg.html. [40] Jonathan Littman, Once Upon a Time in ComputerLand (New York: Touchstone, 1990), 133.