Tandy/Radio Shack Advert - May 1988

Tandy's TRS-80 - the Tandy Radio Shack/Z80 - was one of the first three "appliance" computers - those you could take out of a box, plug in and use right away - ever, when it was launched in the August of 1977.

The first was Commodore's PET, and the other was the Apple II, but thanks to Tandy's nationwide chain of consumer-friendly Radio Shack shops in the US, the TRS-80 comfortably outsold the other two in the first few years, earning it a 60% market share.

By the end of the 1970s, Tandy had six factories dedicated to the production of its microcomputers, which by now included several models of the TRS-80 and the "Co-co" Colour Computer.

As with many micro companies of the era, its eventual demise was triggered by the arrival of the IBM PC. Its first attempt to market at an "IBM PC" - the Tandy 2000 - wasn't fully compatible, like many early clones, and so wasn't particularly successful.

Its fortunes improved with the release of the successful Tandy 1000 model - an IBM compatible but with some home features like sound and joystick ports and which was aimed at the IBM PC Jr. It was popular enough that game companies started targeting its specific graphics, marking them as "Tandy compatible".

Tandy's total market share though was now down to 10%.

Despite that, the advert was claiming that it sold 600,000 computers in 1987 and had sold an accumulated 2 million machines since its first.

However, it didn't last and by 1991 its share was down to 3.5%, whilst the cost of keeping its computers up-to-date in a changing market was becoming a financial drag. In 1993 it announced that it was selling its PC factories to AST Research^[1].

Commodore - its arch-rival in the early years - would outlast it for only one more year. However, whilst Tandy merely exited the manufacturing side of the computer industry and simply started selling other companies' micros instead, Commodore went bust in 1994, eventually being sold on in name only to Tulip.