Please Don’t Call It Trash-80: A 35th Anniversary Salute to Radio Shack’s TRS-80

Those of you who mentioned the legendary Apple II–that’s fine. I respect your decision. Forced to think objectively in 2012, I may even agree. But if you just named Radio Shack’s TRS-80, you made me smile.

Your choice is entirely defensible. And back in the TRS-80’s heyday, I not only would have agreed with it but would have vehemently opposed any other candidate.

Gadget-retailing giant Radio Shack unveiled the TRS-80 Model I at a press conference at New York’s Warwick Hotel 35 years ago today, on August 3, 1977. (The company didn’t call it the Model I at the time: Like Apple’s Apple I, it only became the I after a II was introduced.)

It wasn’t the city’s biggest news story that day. That would be the bombings of two office buildings by Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN, which killed one man and prompted the evacuation of 100,000 people from other buildings, including the Empire State Building and both towers of the World Trade Center. But it was a big moment in the burgeoning microcomputer industry: The TRS-80, which began shipping in September, was one of 1977’s trinity of early consumer PCs, along with the Apple II and Commodore’s PET 2001.

I wasn’t paying attention at the time, but my father was. In the spring of 1978, as I was wrapping up junior high, he brought a TRS-80 home. The moment I saw it could do graphics and animation, I was transfixed.

That fall, I entered a high school whose rudimentary computer lab was outfitted with TRS-80s. I rarely left the lab except when I was supposed to go to class, and sometimes not even then. The fact that I was a TRS-80 user was a defining aspect of my identity until 1982, when I bought an Atari 400. And the TRS-80 helped to define things about the PC industry that persist to this day.

The project had been instigated by Don French, a Radio Shack executive and computer hobbyist. In 1976, he convinced the company’s president, Lew Kornfeld, and vice president, John Roach, that it should look into the PC market. They were initially skeptical about the idea, but French’s timing was fortuitous: The market for CB radios, which had been extraordinarily good to Radio Shack, was on the verge of faltering. The company needed something new to pick up the slack.

Forced with the challenge of creating a PC in Radio Shack’s headquarters of Fort Worth, Texas — nowhere near the epicenter of the PC revolution in Silicon Valley — Radio Shack did a sensible thing: It imported a computer nerd from the Valley.

That nerd was Steve Leininger, an employee of chipmaker National Semiconductor. Like Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, he was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club, whose members designed their own PCs for fun. He’d also been an employee of Paul Terrell’s Byte Shop, the pioneering computer store where the first Apple machines were sold. Working to French’s specifications, Leininger did most of the heavy lifting of designing the TRS-80.

The computer’s name sounded a bit retro even in the 1970s. The “TRS” stood for “Tandy Radio Shack” and the “80” referenced the machine’s microprocessor, the Z-80. Radio Shack kept the branding even on later models which used different chips.

Radio Shack parent company Tandy Corporation–which started out as a maker of products for leather handicrafters–was run by Charles Tandy. His main role in the TRS-80 project seems to have been not preventing it from proceeding, which is often the most important contribution a CEO makes to a groundbreaking effort. In November of 1978, he died of a heart attack — a little over a year after the TRS-80 shipped, and before it and its competitors and successors really started making a dent in the universe.

Ronnie J. Willis is a staff reporter for The Navigator.