The Trash Computer That Became Your Phone
Hidden inside this leather protective sleeve is a device so futuristic that it shocked one of the greatest science fiction minds humanity has ever seen. For the first time, a computer that just decades before took up an entire room could fit in your pocket. But what could you actually DO with it? My journey to figure out what the TRS-80 Pocket Computer actually was led me down a winding path of endless incompatibility, having to learn a programming language, and one unbelievable discovery. Because the seminal building block that led to everyone in the world never leaving home without a computer in their pocket came from… a LEATHER company!? The November 1980 issue of Popular Science featured a cover story on hand-held computers. V. Elaine Smay wrote about a present that sounded like the future:
a new generation of tiny, lightweight personal computers you could take on the go. And I mean, really take on the go. Not like the 50-pound “luggable” IBM-5100, which was marketed as a portable computer. Under the subheading of “Radio Shack” she describes the TRS-80 Pocket Computer as measuring seven by 2 ¾ inches by ½ an inch, weighing just six ounces and powered by four mercury cells with a liquid-crystal display featuring space for 24 characters – which is about one and a half usernames on X. The “TRS” stood for “Tandy Radio Shack,” and the “80” referred to the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. It held 1.9 kilobytes of memory that couldn’t be expanded, and had a price tag of $250 – which is the equivalent of over $900 today.
But there’s something weird here… both a personal account by pilot Michael White detailing how he uses the device and the image for the TRS-80 refer to the Sharp PC-1211. What is going on here? Was this computer made by Sharp or Tandy or Radio Shack? Yes. The answer to that question is yes. But before we dive into THAT mess, I ordered a TRS-80 Pocket Computer off eBay and it opened up a can of archaic computer confusion worms slimier than anything I’ve ever encountered. It looked perfect – I found what appeared to be a complete kit including the Pocket Computer with fresh batteries in its leather case, backup batteries, the printer docking station, cassette player accessory, backup printer paper, and some blank cassette tapes. The note on the box says it was purchased from Boeing Surplus, so we’re back to pilots again. There’s probably a Boeing joke in here about this thing working. But we’ll just skip that.
It powers up great but the LCD screen has all of these black stains oozing from the top. Which is not too surprising – this is apparently a common problem because the screens deteriorate over time. I actually found an incredible tutorial by Tech Tangents on how to replace the screen, but I can read mine well enough for now so I’m just gonna roll with it.
The cassettes are what allow you to store and run programs, so I grabbed “Games” and “Games 2,” and that’s when THIS pilot crashed into a garbage mountain of 80’s retro incompatibility. Both of these are programmed for the TRS-80 Pocket Computer, but the model I have is known as the PC-1. “Games 1” is for the PC-2, which was the follow-up device, so it won’t run on the PC-1. My TRS-80 Pocket Computer was released on July 31, 1980, and it was only renamed to the PC-1 in 1982 after the PC-2 was introduced. None of the hardware or software for the PC-2 was
compatible with the PC-1. So, Games 2 is for the PC-1 and Games 1 is for the PC-2. Yeah. This is… pretty obnoxious. But it’s fine, I can at least play Games 2 on my PC-1, right? WRONG.
I don’t have the cables to actually connect the docking station to the Realistic Minisette-90 cassette player. Alright. So, I Google search ‘TRS-80 cassette player cable’ and there’s a website called 8-bit Classics that sells them brand new. Great! I buy the cable, unbox it, sit down to play Games 2, and surprise! It still doesn’t work. One end of THIS cable has a 5-pin connector, and I’ve got nowhere to plug THAT in. It’s like they’re messing with me on purpose – and this is just the beginning.
It turns out this cable is for the TRS-80 Model I desktop microcomputer, NOT the TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-1. So I went to the garage to get a hammer to smash through my temple, but a few milliseconds before sending 16 ounces of steel through my temporal squama, I realized… I need help. I reached out to the guy who sold me the games because he’d already been super helpful by explaining how he’d repair the tapes before he sent them to me. I didn’t even think I’d need that because I was buying one of the games unopened, but he mentioned right in the listing that, “Sealed sets quite likely have bad leader adhesive and will break the cassette (detach leader from magnetic tape) on first play, rendering the tape unusable.” I needed the tape usable. He responded in minutes and sent me a listing for the cables I needed to get this to work.
I actually want to say more about this – since doing a few of these retro tech videos, I’ve encountered a bunch of really kind, helpful, and knowledgeable retro tech eBay sellers. So many of them are serious hobbyists who love and repair old tech and want new generations to enjoy the same thrills they experienced decades ago. It’s genuinely great. So I grabbed the cables and got ready for MY thrill and… there was another problem. I’m drinking science juice. Actually, it’s just an orange sports drink. But you can hydrate, decorate, and support over 150 years of Popular Science with our brand new shop.
Featuring our new logo designed specifically for this YouTube channel. You can also choose between decades of iconic framed artwork to elevate your mancave, office or workshop walls. They make a great gift for the science lover in your life whether that’s your Uncle Stu or your Uncle YOU. So please click the link below and use code YOUTUBE to get 10% off everything. Please grab something from our store and support Popular Science on YouTube. Thanks. So whatever, I threw it all in a box for a few days and went down an insane rabbit hole of American industry to figure out what was going on. Because if it sounds like Tandy must have been
some fly-by-night electronics company riding the chaotic first wave of personal computers, the truth is that Tandy was so huge THEY WERE BROKEN UP BY THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. Norton Hinckley and Dave L. Tandy founded the Hinckley-Tandy Leather Company in Texas in 1919 – they supplied leather to shoemakers. Dave’s son Charles convinced his father that there was a burgeoning market for supplying leathercraft hobbyists during World War II, and by 1950, Hinckley and Tandy broke up so Hinckley could stick to shoe parts while Dave and Charles Tandy could expand into leathercrafting.
And Charles was totally right about the post-World War II DIY movement – even Popular Science billed itself on every cover as the publication for “Mechanics and Handicraft.” Business exploded for the Tandy Leather Company, and in 1955 they merged with the American Hide and Leather Company of Boston and by 1960 the Tandy Corporation was publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Then Charles Tandy grew so ambitious that it got them in trouble with the federal government. Here is a small sample of the businesses Tandy acquired during Charles’s shopping spree. In 1962, they got into the general home goods business
with Cost Plus Imports – which would eventually become Pier 1. Then they got into home improvement by buying Color Tile. Hey, why not just get a whole department store chain that sells everything? So they bought Leonard’s. And in 1963 it was obvious that electronics was the next big thing – so they bought Radio Shack. Radio Shack was founded in 1921 and was named after the room that housed a ship’s radio equipment. By the 1960’s, they’d already had decades of success selling parts to radio
and electronics enthusiasts through 9 retail locations and a mail-order catalog. But they found themselves deep in debt from selling products on credit, so they sold for $300,000 to Charles Tandy – and he was ready to do for electronics what he and his father had already done with leather. In 1970 Tandy bought Allied Radio Stores while already owning Radio Shack, and that’s when the Department of Justice intervened – they filed an antitrust lawsuit against Tandy that eventually forced them to divest and split up their different divisions. Even so, Tandy had taken hobbyists from leathercraft into ham radios – and then the Trinity of personal computing was born. In 1977, the Commodore PET 2001, the Apple II, and the TRS-80 desktop marked the first time that fully-assembled, programmable computers could be easily purchased by… pretty much everyone. Before that trinity,
hardcore enthusiasts had to put together their own minicomputer kit like the Altair 8800. The Trinity and the industry-wide competition it launched made personal computers accessible for a mass market. Everyone knows Apple today – half of you are probably watching this video on your iPhone.
But in 1977, Tandy was as significant as Apple is now – and they had a distribution system through the massively successful Radio Shack, which had more retail locations than McDonald’s. They dominated early personal computer sales by owning 60% of the PC market. But then everything slowly unraveled. Charles Tandy, the fearless visionary who had somehow built the Tandy Corporation into both an old school and new age empire, died. Their grip on the PC market didn’t just slip – the TRS-80 would eventually be known as the “Trash-80.” And now the guy running Radio Shack’s X account is begging for a job at McDonald’s. It was all such a precipitous disaster that my cable situation didn’t seem so bad in comparison – so let’s get back to my Pocket Computer.
Those new cables were all 3.5mm jacks, and what I needed to plug everything in was for each end to have two 3.5mm jacks and one 2.5mm jack. I ordered a female 3.5mm to male 2.5mm adapter, and waiting for that to show up bought me time to program a game myself. I bought TRS-80 Pocket Computer Programs by Jim Cole, which contained the BASIC code for 50 exciting programs like Compound Interest, Mortgage Loan, and Klingon Killer. BASIC is an acronym for Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic
Instruction Code, and it was designed to be a programming language that anyone could use. Hi! I’m anyone. And I have no idea what I’m doing. I actually went to Drexel University for computer science. For 3 weeks. I had a great professor who on the first day of class said half of us would drop out by the end of the year, and I decided to be the first to help him fulfill his prophecy. All my classmates seemed to love programming, or at least not hate it. And I hated it. So I transferred to a digital film program and wrote, directed, and starred in a short film about a reclusive guy trying to buy milk. I actually won an award for that thing.
Thankfully, the guide that came with the computer is EXCELLENT and I was able to go through the tutorial on writing programs well enough to code WHODUNIT? After showcasing 1982’s interactive home movie version of a murder mystery on the Selectavision, I wanted to see what the Pocket Computer’s version was like. After about 15 minutes of meticulously typing in every character and lines like 20 BEEP1: INPUT “MYSTERY NUMBER=”;S and storing each line of code in Program mode, I switched to RUN mode, typed in the RUN command, hit enter – and here’s WHODUNIT? First you have to choose which mystery to solve. I chose mystery 2. Who killed the Duke? Was it… Butler, Nanny, Gardene, or Burglar?
Gardene is supposed to be Gardener, and I thought the guide had a typo when it wrote “Gardner” so I spelled it correctly in my programming – and now I realize that it wasn’t a typo and that it was just working within a character limit. So, I’m stuck with Gardene. Now it asks “Whodunit?” and you just guess whether it was one of the four suspects. Was it the Butler? Not the Butler! If you guess wrong, it starts over again. Who Killed The Duke? Was it Butler, Nanny, Gardene, or Burglar? Whodunit? Nanny? Not the Nanny! On my third attempt I guessed Gardene and was rewarded with an endless series of BEEPS and a “Right!” message I customized to say “Right Kevin!” And that’s it. That’s the game. That’s the whole game. Uhhh… Surely the games sold to consumers on cassette tapes would be at least a little more advanced.
I got the jack adapters and I’m ready to find out – but first I wanted to solve the mystery of that Popular Science article discussing the Radio Shack TRS-80 while showing the Sharp-1211. The answer is: they’re the same thing. Tandy just rebranded pocket computers made by Japanese electronics companies throughout the 80s. The PC-1 was a rebranded Sharp-1211, the PC-2 was the Sharp PC-1500,
and the PC-3 was also a Sharp model – then they switched to Casio for the PC-4 through the PC-7 before going back to Sharp for the PC-8. The PC-8 was released in Japan in 1983, but it wasn’t brought over to the US by Tandy until 1987. So their final stab at the pocket computer line was to release a 4-year old computer… Charles Tandy was spinning in his grave. And that was it. The line of Tandy Pocket Computers was officially dead. Ok. It’s game time. Since my PC-1 can’t play Games 1 because it requires a PC-2, I’ll be missing out on Football, Taskforce, Lander, and TicTacToe. But I can play Games 2 on my PC-1,
so I’ve got Bandit, Numguess, Pslot, Craps, Missile, Baccarat, Blackjak and Acey. These programs are loaded into the Pocket Computer through literally the worst sound I’ve ever heard in my entire life. It’s like the old dial-up internet sound I grew up with, except someone decided to murder a pig on top of it… very, very slowly. It’s this constant, extremely high-pitched squeal. So you put the Pocket Computer in Definable mode, play the tape with the TONE and VOLUME cranked up all the way, and then type CLOAD “name of the program”.
Then you hear this: headphone warning. Yeah. And despite being subjected to a heinous cochlear assault, you don’t even know if the program is loading properly or not. There is no indication AT ALL of whether it’s making progress or it’s just going to keep squealing until the batteries die. Which is exactly what happened to me. I spent over 6 hours trying to get any of these games to load properly. The noise does stop if the program is finished loading,
so when I heard silence I figured I was ready to play. NOPE. The batteries were dead. And there were only 2 backup batteries in my kit while the unit requires 4. Awesome. At least they were the 675 zinc air batteries commonly used for hearing aids so I could grab them at my local pharmacy.
Oh, and the name on the back shows this was once owned by someone named Miles Johnson. So, Miles Johnson from Boeing, I have your Pocket Computer. I was able to load three of the games successfully: Pokerslot, One-Armed Bandit, and Acey Ducey. And I successfully played… NONE of them.
What happens is the instructions load, but as soon as you try to play the game it throws a “2……..” error with a corresponding line of code that isn’t working. Ironically, the instructions for Acey Ducey end with “GOOD LUCK!” and then it immediately dies with an error. The seller suggested I try flipping the tapes over because they copied the programs onto both sides as a built-in backup in case one side isn't working. Which means even when this was new, the prospects of it working were… somewhat dubious. You don’t have to build in a complete and total backup system when the thing just works. Flipping the tape did help some of the programs get to instructions, but none of them would ever play. So after all that, I’m left with playing… the error game.
The printer attachment works, so I can output my programs to the printer instead of the screen, but the ink ribbon inside has obviously long-since dried out, so nothing shows up. I found a tutorial from a guy named 8-bit Retro Journal who re-inked his ribbon by cutting up Sharpies. Which… looks almost as messy as the TRS-80 Pocket Computer itself. But at the time, the Pocket Computer was so revolutionary that one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time was so blown away by it that he became its spokesman.
Isaac Asimov won a Hugo Award in 1966 for “Best Series of All-Time” for his Foundation series. It beat Lords of the Rings. He wrote or edited over 500 books and has a crater on Mars named after him. A January 11, 1982 issue of InfoWorld has an article about his love for the Pocket Computer. It’s called “World-famous author Isaac Asimov
converts to word processing,” and in it he’s asked how close the Pocket Computer comes to the computer he described in the first volume of the Foundation trilogy. Asimov looked at the computer, nodded his head, and said, “This is it.” That same issue has a personal ad for “TRS-80 owner seeks micro pen pal” from a guy in remote Michigan looking to correspond with other TRS-80 Model II owners. Wonder what ever happened to that guy? I hope he found a friend.
The Pocket Computer fulfilled the world-defining dreams of one of the most fantastic, technofuturistic minds who ever lived – but it’s barely a footnote even in the history of Tandy Computers. The ONLY book I could find about Tandy computers was called “CoCo: The Colorful History of Tandy’s Underdog Computer,” and it mentions the Pocket Computer ONCE in a single paragraph by basically just saying, “Oh, yeah, and the Pocket Computer was a thing.” … which means I decided to make a video about a thing that even Tandy Computer historians are not all that interested in. Because of that I wanted to dig deeper into the Tandy experience – so my friend brought over a TRS-80 Micro Color Computer that was in his parents’ attic. He brought over THIS with no cables and a cassette deck falling apart because he lost the screws years ago whhile he was trying to repair it. When I tried to plug the power cord in, it crushed the prongs inside.
So yeah. Sorry dude. I ordered what I thought, again, was a complete Micro Color Computer off eBay, it has the original box and everything. Everything except… a way to actually connect it to a TV. AHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Luckily, I have a ton of old RF adapters from gaming consoles and one of them should work fine. No. No, they do not work fine. They don’t work at all. I still have no picture.
A 2011 message board post on Vintage Computer Federation Forums explains that without a physical switch on the adapter, which these automatic gaming adapters don’t have, the color computer cannot switch properly to display onto the TV. A female RCA plug to male F connector that RetroHacker_ suggested does seem to work? I get some kind of broken signal with the TV on channel 3, which means channel 4 might work? GUESS WHAT. This TV that I found in a dumpster HAS no Channel 4. It skips from Channel 3 to Channel 6. There’s not even a channel 5! The front panel has ADD and ERASE buttons so I should be able to ADD Channel 4 – but no, I have to BE ON channel 4 to ADD channel 4 and I can’t get to channel 4. This is a Kafka-esque Catch Tandy-2. The Sony KV-1393R manual I found online tells me to use a remote that I don’t have to add channels. I dug around and found an old Sony remote that works, but you need to hit ENTER
to go to Channel 4 and this has no ENTER button. I went back to the cables and remotes box and found an even older Sony remote with an ENTER button, so I was able to add Channel 4 back to the TV. And… IT WORKS. The lesson is: never, ever throw anything away. Ever.
Then when I was recording footage of the unit for this video, I flipped it over and noticed A SWITCH TO CHOOSE CHANNEL 3, which means my mom probably fell down all 354 stairs in the Statue of Liberty while she was pregnant with me. But now that it’s working, I have no idea what to actually do with this thing. I bought some more TRS-80 Micro Computer games off eBay and they do nothing. The
listing said they were for the color computer but they’re not for the color computer. The instructions say to press play on the cassette, and when MEMORY_SIZE? appears, hit ENTER – well, memory size question mark never appears so I just enter CLOAD and enter to see what happens and I get a screen with the letter “S.” Cool. My failure brought to you by the letter S. Yeah, apparently the TRS-80 Micro Color Computer isn’t compatible with any of the TRS-80 Micro Computer software. So I’m back to just making my own.
I found an amazing relic when I was searching for simple BASIC games to program – Enter Magazine from The Children’s Television Workshop. Now it’s known as the Sesame Workshop because they created Sesame Street, and their old computing magazine featured covers with Stevie Wonder, Star Trek, David Hasselhoff as Knight Rider, and a kid surrounded by awesome looking robots. This must have been the greatest magazine ever for early 80s computer kids. Each issue featured a section called “BASIC TRAINING” that gave you code for Apple, Atari, Commodore, IBM, TI, and the TRS-80. The December 1984 issue with Sting as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen from Dune had a coin flipping game, so it’s time to flip and coin and see if it works.
After another 15 minutes of typing in the code and making sure to replace lines 10, 40, 150, and 190 with code specific to the TRS-80, the RUN command actually did work! It asks how much money I want to start with and I put $500. Then it asks how much I want to wager – $100 – and what combination of heads and tails to bet on. Let’s try HTT. Heads, Tails, Tails. Your computer opponent then chooses their combination and you hit ENTER to flip the coin until one of you wins. There’s no graphic or animation of a coin or anything – it’s just all text. I lost 5 games in a row until I ran out of money and it asked if I wanted to play again. Yes or No? No. No, I do not.
The TRS-80 Coin Flip game isn’t exactly Elden Ring, but it does reflect a groundbreaking era of home computer interactivity that was like the neolithic wheel carved from solid wood that led to playing Call of Duty on the bus. But despite Tandy’s pioneering and early dominance, basically the only people left who know their name are over 40 or shop for hair-on cow hides. In 1992, Irvin Farman wrote “Tandy’s Money Machine: How Charles Tandy Built Radio Shack Into the World’s Largest Electronics Chain.” It concludes with a quote from Charles that said, “We have the dream, the organization, and the resources to accept the challenge… The opportunities are everywhere.” And Farman’s final line is “His dream lives on.” But just a year after that book came out, a struggling Tandy sold its PC manufacturing factories to AST Research, who were then themselves purchased by Samsung four years after that. In another 2 years that division was dead, too, and Samsung lost a billion dollars.
So what killed Tandy? Ruthless competition? The impossibility of surviving in a market built on breakneck innovation? Stubbornly not allowing any competitors to be sold alongside Tandy in Radio Shack? The “Trash-80” nickname and the diminishing reputation of Radio Shack’s brand? Yeah, it was everything. Charles Tandy wanted everything, and he got it until his dream had disappeared. Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Dell, IBM, HP, Samsung – they all managed to survive the initial bloodbath of computers, and we all know their names. But the stories of those who didn’t make it are increasingly lost to time, regardless of how successful or influential they once were. I wanted to end this video by creating an image in my TRS-80 Micro Color Computer, but it was just beyond my skill set. My friend Destin from SmarterEveryDay sent me a website
that converts any image into a BASIC program, but I couldn’t figure out how to get that file onto my computer without building or buying some kind of custom SD card adapter. I had to settle for an emulator of the TRS-80 Model III, which really is a fitting end for trying to make the past come alive today. An emulator is a software program that not only simulates another device, but simulates the experience of another device. The only portal we have into the past is through simulation – because we can never go backwards. We can’t return to the feeling of the explosive dawn of personal computers – we will never feel what Asimov did when he saw the first Pocket Computer. The best we can do is to create a re-enactment with a machine divorced from its native time or place, or substitute a simulacrum and hope that some faint, familiar echoes are good enough.
R. U. N. Enter. And sometimes good enough is actually pretty great. See you in the future.
2024-07-28 20:42
