Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/19/what-it-was-like-to-actually-u.html
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I bet he needs to put in his earphones. That looks like one loud-ass keyboard.
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One of his anecdotes is getting reprimanded at a city council meeting because of the noise. The good old days!
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I used to get a great reaction from younger people when I told them that the RS in TRS-80, a popular personal computer in the 1980s, stood for “Radio Shack”. Now most kids don’t know what Radio Shack is, so the reaction is more puzzlement than laughter.
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Of course the weirder part of the story is the “T” for Tandy. Which was originally a leatherworking craft store. But they bought out RadioShack in 1963.
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The leather stores seem to be in rude health. Wikipedia says there are a hundred of them!
RadioShack is not dead, mind you. The profitable ones, a few hundred of them, just turned into independent franchisees licensing the brand.
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There’s still a Tandy in Essex, just East of Baltimore.
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the keyboards of the TRS-80s were the BEST. i always loved the way they felt and sounded. i have one of these in my basement, but i haven’t fired it up in years. i don’t even know if i COULD fire it up.
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It’s not the only example of a leatherworking company branching out into electronics, either.
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We used a Teleram T-3000 from '86-'89 with the detatchable acoustic coupler to file stories. Some of the workarounds for the typesetting software back at the newsroom involved an asterisk for an open quote while double apostrophes were the close quotes for the cold type output.
Yes, it was beeswax paste-up and remember to toggle that 72-point hed off or the Composing supervisor would yell about all the wasted Monotype photocomposition paper spilling out of the machine.
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I wonder if there was some special sauce leather companies had that let them jump into consumer electronics in the late 60s and 70s. Just a perfectly locked-down set of distribution networks, retail partnerships, regulatory connections…
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I remember my first job out of college was as guy-friday for the manager of a small factory. After 3-4 months of typing letters manually, the boss gave me this old computer-ish thing that could technically qualify as a word processor. It was slightly better as you could fix mistakes before they were typed, but slower overall as it was kind of fiddly and difficult to use.
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Just from looking at the Wiki pages, so it could be nonsense, but Tandy’s story seems to be “We’ve got some spare cash and it looks like there’s money in electronics”.
Coleco’s history is a rollercoaster ride through the allied toy industries which started when their leatherworking set won an award or something. Crazy.
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My guess is that the connection is selling crafting kits, at least some of them to summer camps and the like. It isn’t TOO far to connect leather wallet kits and crystal radio kits.
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I have a Model 100, but while it has potential, it was a disappointment.
Good keyboard, but not much memory, and the editor was simple. But in the eighties, too much trouble to transfer files to my main comouter, so while I even had the portable disk drive, I.Never made use of it much. Also do early I was inhibited using it in public.
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By the time they jumped into electronics COLECO had their hands in everything from swimming pools to snowmobiles.
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I don’t know if I would put a Pi Zero in a TRS-80, but building something like it does seem like a fun project. Somehow I managed to have two spare Zero W’s and a OG Zero just lying around…
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Do you think you could somehow hack this so it’d transfer files to your phone through Bluetooth ?
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I had so much hope when I first heard about the freewrite, but any writing I do is less than a hobby, so the price stopped me.
I’m almost suprised we didn’t see a story here about the failed pomera kickstarter, but with a similar price and less-fancy keyboard, it makes sense. It’s still slated to come out in the US soon? And Freewrite’s new portable version is still selling pre-orders at a discount. (delayed by low volumes or development?) Maybe I can talk myself into getting one or the other.
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That’s a fascinating look into the early 80s radio news world.
I had a girlfriend around that time who worked at the local newspaper as an intern. I was impressed with how many times she’d have to retype in a story to the paper’s cheesy timesharing system after the computer crashed when she was nearly done.
Later, another girlfriend was in journalism school, and they had such a computer donated to them. It was gathering as much dust as the Teletype model 14s were. PCs were a thing by then.
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