Radio Shack TRS-80 - A "powerful", "expandable" "microcomputer".

 Aaah, the simple pleasure of laughing at computers of the past. Here's a wonderful page from Allied Electronics' (Yep! Still around.) catalog of 1977, the first year that Tandy's TRS-80 microcomputer was available. Who can resist the lure of a computer rendered as a woodcut in vivid black, white, and brown?

There it is, in all it's liney glory. The TRS-80 actually was pretty "micro" for the time. Remember that computers tended to be sofa-sized or larger back then. Read the impressive specs! Read them again because you're not used to seeing numbers that small! Then marvel at the bargain price of $600. For me, the most shocking number in the price breakdown is the monitor. $200 for a twelve inch monochrome CRT seems criminal to my spoiled eyes.

For those of you too young to recall, computers of this vintage stored their info on tape. For consumer units like the TRS-80, that meant cassettes. Yes, you'd put in a cassette and press "play" to run a program. This was cutting edge, people, believe it or not.

There's some nicely weird art in this ad. The Blandishment and Photoshop Squad has separated the dorky clip art guys and the TRS-80 "product shot" from the catalog for solo performances in whatever document, email, or ransom note you choose. Send your letters of gratitude to them here at GO! Tower. I'll be sure the recycle bin reads every word. get your rude fingers ready to right click some clunky computing onto your hard drive in three, two, one...

1000 px wide.

1000 px wide.

200 px wide.

 

200 px wide

Click for big microcomputer.