The Trash Computer That Became Your Phone

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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

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