Tandy/Radio Shack Advert - October 1978

It's another advert for one of the "1977 Trinity" - the Z80-based Tandy TRS-80.

A year after its launch, the Level-II system had appeared, with an expanded BASIC in ROM, now at 12K, and a numeric keypad on the keyboard.

The price has also increased, relatively - the fully-specced version with 16K was now £870 including VAT, or about £6,510 in 2024 terms, a leap up from the £400 (£3,720) that the original went for. That compares to the 16K Commodore PET's price of £625 (£4,680).

It's likely that the increase was for the same reason that Commodore's prices went up sharply after launch: as a way of managing demand. It was said that the initial production run sold out within the first month and that it took Tandy a year to catch up with the order backlog.

The TRS-80 was, for a while, the best seller of the '77 trinity, selling 200,000 in its lifetime, with 100,000 shifting in 1978 alone - four times the volume of its nearest competitor^[1].

In common with many sytems of the day, the default - and initially only - data storage mechanims was cassette tape, with the TRS-80 coming bundled with a "Realistic CTR-41" (Realistic was Radio Shack's consumer brand name).

Such use of domestic cassette records as computer storage devices even spawned a whole market in special short-length tapes, like the C-12.

Also in common with its competitors which also launched in 1977, it didn't make it to the UK until 1978, with Barney Price of Tandy UK taking delivery of the first 200 TRS-80s in March of that year^[2].

Personal Computer World was loaned one of these initial machines for a short period of time and published its review in September. The machine came out well, with Mike Dennis concluding:

"To be fair, one should examine this machine within its design context and as a machine to get you computing with the minimum of effort, it most certainly succeeds. Tandy has gone to a lot of trouble to make computing as easy as possible. I have some reservations regarding the package as a whole as you almost certainly will have your own cassette record. If a small UHF modulator was included in the case and some slight adjustments made to the display field rate then you could feed the TRS-80 into your own domestic television. If the computer was then sold as a stand-alone device, the extra money could either go towards extra facilities, such as Version 2 BASIC, or a price reduction. The computer would then offer exceptional valud for money^[3]".

Almost immediately after launch, problems with the TRS-80's quirky connections, plastic construction, limited BASIC and Tandy/Radio Shack's own corporate image as a source of cheap electronics - plus the fact that the model name itself is really asking for it - quickly led to the machines becoming known as the Trash-80^[4].