The Undeniable Greatness of the Radio Shack TRS-80

I spent part of last weekend at the Vintage Computer Festival at the Computer History Museum down in Silicon Valley. And the highlight by far was a talk by David and Theresa Welsh, the authors of Priming the Pump, a relatively new book about Radio Shack's TRS-80 microcomputers and the world they spawned in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Yup, an entire book (348 pages!) on the subject. And it's about time. There are scads of books that delve into the founding of Apple; the first, Michael Moritz's The Little Kingdom, was published way back in 1984. There have even been a couple of books about Commodore and its pioneering PET and other machines, including Brian Bagnall's recent On the Edge. But the origins of the TRS-80, which debuted in 1977--at more or less the same times as the Apple II and PET--have gone largely unchronicled until now.

I've always taken that sort of personally, since the TRS-80 Model 1 was the first computer I used (my father brought one home in the Spring of 1978). Even during its heyday, using a Radio Shack computer was enough to give you an inferiority complex; they rarely got credit for being the most mass-marketed machines of their era. Apple II users treated us with such contempt--even though the TRS-80 likely sold better than the II, at least for a spell--that it's a wonder there were no "I'm an Apple II/I'm a TRS-80" commercials. And it's only been in recent years that I could hear the slander nickname "Trash-80" without my blood coming to an instant boil.

At the time I got into TRS-80s, it didn't seem like the dawn of a revolution. Actually, I kicked myself for not having learned about personal computers earlier--they'd been around for all of three years, and I felt like I'd missed out on the golden age. But there's a direct path from the TRS-80 era, as rinkydink as it seems in retrospect, to just about everything that makes up the world of personal technology circa late 2007.

Anyhow, Priming the Pump authors David and Theresa Welsh are part of the history they record in this book--David was the author of Lazy Writer, a word processor which I still remember. They managed to track down a number of significant TRS-80 players, including Steve Leininger (one of the machine's inventors), Wayne Green (founder of 80 Microcomputing magazine, the first computer magazine about a single platform--the template for magazines like PC World), and Dick Miller (who was the president of the TRS-80 user group I attended while a high school student in Weston, Massachusetts). The book is bursting with history, trivia, personal side notes from the Welshes, and scrapbook-like illustrations.

Reading it was a wonderfully nostalgic experience. If you ever sat in front of a TRS-80, pounding out Level II BASIC code on the notoriously bbouncy keyyboarrd and crossing your fingers as you saved your programs to the cassette recorder, you need this book...