Monthly Archives: June 2011

As computers began to enter homes in reasonable numbers in 1977 and 1978, bemused (or not so bemused) spouses, parents, children, siblings, and roommates all asked the same question: but what can you actually do with it? Proud new owners didn’t find that a very easy question to answer, for these machines were absurdly limited; the TRS-80 had no color capabilities, only the barest of graphical capabilities, no sound, no lower case letters, for God’s sake. (Radio Shack, in what should be becoming a familiar theme by now, refused to splurge for the $2.00 or so they would have cost to include.) It was not even possible to connect a printer to the TRS-80 prior to the arrival of Radio Shack’s expensive “expansion interface” in mid-1978. Even the staple justification of a few years later for buying a computer — “We can use it for word processing, and the kids can do their school reports on it” — wouldn’t quite fly with 1977-era machines.

The TRS-80 shipped with two programs on an accompanying cassette, computerized versions of backgammon and blackjack. Radio Shack also had four “productivity applications” already available at launch. There were, for starters, some educational software to help the kids out in math and a personal finance system (Quicken in 4 K!). There was also a payroll program, presumably the same one that French and Leininger had demonstrated to Charles Tandy, head of the company, to sell him on the potential of the TRS-80; the program crashed when Tandy entered an annual salary (his own) too large for it to handle.

And there was a “kitchen” utility bundle, which could convert measurements and store messages for other family members. This last demonstrates how confused even Radio Shack was about what their computer would actually get used for. They seemed quite high on the idea of a TRS-80 in the kitchen, often including pictures of exactly that in their promotional literature, yet one has to wonder just what advantage a balky computer with cassette-based storage offers over a calculator and a good old pencil and pad. Solutions like this, far more convoluted and time consuming than the traditional methods they wanted to replace, were everywhere in the early software market. Hard as Radio Shack and owners might have tried to justify the TRS-80 as a “serious” tool, it’s probably safe to say that virtually all who purchased them wanted first and foremost just to play with them. No wonder they shipped with two games as their standard software starter package.

Still, Radio Shack showed considerable foresight in realizing that their machine needed supporting software. They actively encouraged early adopters to provide it, making it known that they would sell the best efforts in their stores, a plan that worked rather brilliantly and doubtless contributed to the TRS-80’s having a much larger software library than its competitors from Apple and Commodore by 1979. While that pipeline was ramping up, though, users had to find other ways of making their TRS-80s do something. One possibility, of course, was to write their own programs. To support this approach, the TRS-80 shipped with a thorough and friendly BASIC tutorial written by David Lien that is still regarded as something of a classic of its genre today. Yet many craved complete, working programs that they could enter and run, if only to learn from them and to use them as a base from which to start off on their own BASIC explorations.

Luckily, they quickly found a substantial library of code from which to draw. By 1977 BASIC had been in active use on larger institutional computers for well more than a decade, resulting in a large library of programs just waiting to be keyed into all those new TRS-80s. In the very early months there were sharp limitations imposed by available memory and by a primitive implementation of BASIC, but with the arrival of 16 K machines and Level 2 BASIC it became possible to port most of the extant BASIC library to the TRS-80 with relatively little effort, as well as to move programs among the three otherwise incompatible home-computer models of the era. Thus BASIC became a lingua franca, a bridge among all of these very different machines (or, if you like, the Java of the late 1970s). Huge swathes of the BASIC code that users of machines like the HP-2100 series had been trading and tinkering with for years now made their way into bedrooms and living rooms. Suddenly the back catalog of programs previously published in places like Creative Computing had new significance. Showing perfect timing, the magazine had published two “best of” collections as books in 1976 and 1977, full of programs to enter and programming problems to solve; both books now began to sell very well indeed to a new audience of microcomputer owners. In 1978 Creative Computing published BASIC Computer Games, a revision of a book its founder David Ahl had first published in 1973. It included 101 games taken from the magazine’s first five years and before, born of places like the People’s Computer Company, and it became a huge hit, a touchstone for a whole generation of budding gamers and programmers.

Of the programs I discussed previously in this blog, Hunt the Wumpus along with its predecessor games made it onto the TRS-80 in fairly short order. The Oregon Trail initially did not, perhaps due to MECC beginning to realize it had a valuable property under its hands and beginning to claim copyright protections, but in its October, 1979, issue SoftSide magazine published something called Westward 1847, allegedly by one John C. Sherman. A quick look at the code reveals Westward to be our old friend The Oregon Trail with modifications to let it run on the TRS-80. As for Adventure… well, that was a much more complex program and also not written in BASIC, making it a tougher nut to crack. I’ll come back to that soon.

Also among the programs that now began appearing on these new microcomputers was a curious simulation of a psychotherapy session. More on that hugely important program and its legacy next time.

As time permits for the next little while I’m going to be exploring some of the works produced for the TRS-80, the most popular platform of the very early home-computer era. For anyone whose interest is piqued by any of what will follow, I thought I’d offer some hints on getting your own TRS-80 up and running via emulation.

The most popular and publicized emulator as I write this seems to be TRS-32 by Matthew Reed. It’s certainly the slickest and most polished that I’ve come across. In addition to being Windows only, however, it also has some problems running under 64-bit Windows 7: it hangs for up to a full minute before displaying file dialogs. And since it’s a closed-source application, I can’t try to fix it.

I’ve therefore been using a much more obscure emulator, SDLTRS, which not only runs properly on my Windows machine but also has versions for the Mac and for Linux. The MESS project also includes an emulated TRS-80 that works very well, but getting that up and running will take a bit more effort. And there have been a number of other emulators released in years past, but I believe most of these are obsolete now in one way or another. David Keil’s emulators, for instance, want to bang the hardware of their host platform directly, and so are subject to some limitations when running on more recent Windows variants that disallow that sort of thing.

Whatever emulator you end up choosing, you’ll also need the TRS-80 ROMs. These are still under copyright to Radio Shack, and not distributed with most emulators. I’m going to take the chance that Radio Shack no longer thinks or cares about them and host them here. (If I learn otherwise, I’ll of course have to take them down.) Included in the zip file are ROMs for both the original BASIC authored by Steve Leininger (“level1.rom”) and the much more usable Microsoft BASIC that Radio Shack released in 1978 (“level2.rom”).

If you should have any problems getting an emulator working, feel free to contact me and I’ll try to help out.

Update, June 17, 2011:

Well, SDLTRS isn’t working out for me that well, and you guys apparently aren’t too thrilled with it either. Its cassette management seems hopelessly bugged, amongst quite a number of other small niggles. So, I’ve decided to do what I’d been hoping to avoid, and make The Official Digital Antiquarian TRS-80 Emulator the one that’s included in the MESS Project. This emulator can be a right bastard to get set up and running, and it’s certainly got its fair share of quirks, but it’s the most complete and usable TRS-80 emulator I’ve found. So, MESS it is. Bear with me and I’ll try to get you going as painlessly as possible.

Download the latest version of MESS from the Mess home page. Stick the whole thing in a single folder somewhere. (I believe Linux users will have to compile it to get an executable.)

Next, download this little TRS-80 add-on kit I’ve created for you. Unzip it into the same directory where you put the rest of MESS, making sure your decompression program unpacks the full folder structure. In addition to a “mess.ini” file, it will create two folders, “roms” and “sta.” The “roms” folder contains the TRS-80 Level 1 and Level 2 ROMs, which are stored under MESS in a somewhat different format than under most emulators. You won’t need to mess with this folder, unless you decide to emulate more systems using MESS in the future. The “sta” folder is where your saved states will go. More on that in just a moment.

To get your TRS-80 running, you need to open a command prompt in the root directory of your MESS installation and type “messpp trs80” for the Level 1 BASIC TRS-80, or “messpp trs80l2” for Level 2 BASIC. (All of the resources I provide on this blog will be for the latter.) Note that I’m running the Windows MESS; it’s possible that the executable will have a slightly different name under another OS.

When I look at a work for this blog, I’ll provide a way for you to also have a look on the emulator, should you wish. Mostly I’ll distribute state files, as this seems the simplest approach on this platform. However, MESS is a bit buggy in handling these — well, okay, quite buggy. If you try to “Save State As…” while running the emulator, you’ll probably crash it. Likewise if you try to load a state from the menu. You can only save a state by doing a simple “Save State” from the menu, which will place it under a default name in the “sta/trs80” or “sta/trs80l2” directory. And you can load a state only from the command line.

Let’s say you want to bring up the Eliza program I am currently nattering on about as of this writing. You would place the state file I provided on the blog, “eliza.sta,” in the “sta/trs80l2” directory. Then you would start the emulator with “messpp trs80l2 -state eliza.” (Note that you do not include the “.sta” suffix.)

Update, July 20, 2023:

The MESS project is no more. TRS-80 emulation is now incorporated into the MAME emulator. Unfortunately, I haven’t messed with MESS or MAME in many years now. If you’d like to follow the instructions above to the letter, you’ll need to acquire an old version of MESS, preferably from circa 2011. As of now, a repository is available at https://www.progettosnaps.net/mess/repository/. If any reader who stumbles across this post would like to update the instructions above to make use of the latest and greatest MAME, by all means, let me know.

In the mid-1970s a fellow named Don French was working at Radio Shack’s corporate headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. Unlike pretty much everyone else there, Don was himself an amateur electronics enthusiast, and so actually understood those strange displays at the back of the Radio Shack stores. And he was fascinated with the idea of computers, so much so that in mid-1974 he was one of the few who managed to put together a working version of Jonathan Titus’s Mark-8 computer after seeing it in an issue of Radio-Electronics magazine. Barely six months later, when the vastly more accessible MITS Altair 8800 arrived, hobbyists across the country began hacking together machines of their own, forming loose communities of interest such as the famous Homebrew Computer Club attended by Jobs and Wozniak among other current and future luminaries. The people involved with these new “microcomputers,” as they were then known, were mostly experienced solder-gun wielders who had cut their teeth on HAM radio or radio-controlled cars — the sort of do-it-yourselfers, in other words, who had been standing in the back of all those Radio Shacks digging through boxes and shelves of wires and diodes for years. Now that they worked with computers, they continued to use the Shack as their source for the non-specialized components they needed.

French understood the hunger so many people had for a computer of their own, because he had felt the same hunger himself. And he thought that Radio Shack could do very well if it began serving that hunger more directly, by offering computer equipment at its thousands of stores instead of leaving hobbyists to rely on the network of tiny, often dodgy companies that had jumped into the new market. His problem was convincing management, and that was a tough nut to crack indeed; few have ever accused Radio Shack’s management of vision, after all.

Still, even they eventually had to see that something was happening when an event like the March, 1976, World Altair Computer Convention could attract over 700 people from seven countries to Albuquerque, New Mexico, home of MITS. After that, management began to take French’s ideas a little bit more seriously, and about May of 1976 officially authorized him to start making a computer for them. But they certainly didn’t overdo their commitment; French got to hire exactly one engineer to work on the project. Fortunately, he made a good choice in Steve Leininger, a Homebrew Computer Club member whom he imported from Silicon Valley. Together they labored over the TRS-80 in a disused room inside Radio Shack’s speaker factory, with French taking the Jobs role of public relations-man, business manager, and general vision articulator, and Leininger taking the Wozniak role of technical designer.

A few months in something happened that changed the direction of the project dramatically. (This anecdote and many others is taken from Priming the Pump, a fun if rambling memoir of the TRS-80 scene by David and Theresa Walsh.)

The whole project almost died one day when a heavy package came in the mail to the engineers. It was an expensive digital clock kit that the customer had put together and sent back. The customer’s story was that he had followed all the instructions and the clock didn’t work; in fact it blew a fuse when he plugged it in. “We opened it up,” says Leininger, “and the thing had an eighth of an inch of solder all over the bottom. The instructions said, ‘Put all the parts on the board, turn the board over, and solder everything to the bottom of the board.'”

That, my friends, is why it was best for everyone concerned if Uncle Jerry confined himself to the front of the store. With visions of thousands of do-it-yourself computer kits coming back to them in a similar state, management almost killed the project. Instead, miraculously, French was able to convince them to do something else: to make the machine a complete, turnkey computer rather than a kit. It’s good that he did, because in January of 1977 a struggling calculator manufacturer called Commodore Business Machines announced the PET, an event which marked the beginning of the end of the Altair era of (literally) home-brewed computers. With little funding and turnkey systems by Commodore and Apple in the pipeline, French and Leininger did what they could with what resources and time management allowed them to have. The result, which was officially announced on August 3, 1977, and started shipping about a month later, was a solidly engineered core brocaded with a heap of questionable choices, the sort of thing that could only have come from Radio Shack.

Unlike the PET and Apple II, which used the MOS 6502 CPU, the TRS-80 used the Zilog Z80. (The first part of the name “TRS-80” stood for Tandy Radio Shack, the second for the Z80.) It was clocked at 1.78 MHz, 78% faster than the Commodore or Apple, and it would prove quite amenable to expansion and modification. Luckily so, because the version that Radio Shack put on sale that autumn was… limited.

Inside its chunky plastic case was just 4 K of RAM, because that’s all Radio Shack would pay for. They also refused to pay the licensing fees to acquire BASIC from what was at that time the leading provider of microcomputer BASICs, a little company called Micro-Soft. Just as well, because they also weren’t going to pay for the 12 K of ROM needed to house it. So Leininger himself hacked together a limited subset of the language based on a standard known as Tiny BASIC, and squeezed it into the 4 K of ROM Radio Shack allowed him. This full-featured development environment came equipped with exactly three error messages: “HOW?” when some sort of logical error such as division by zero occurred; “SORRY” when out of memory (something that must have happened quite a bit); and “WHAT?” when it just didn’t understand you at all (something else that must have happened quite a bit).

At some point, Radio Shack had decided they wanted to sell the TRS-80 as a truly complete computing package, with a monitor and a permanent storage solution included. So, they grabbed the cheapest and smallest black-and-white television in their catalog (the TRS-80 had no color capabilities) and also the cheapest audio-cassette recorder and the turnkey package was complete. The computer itself was molded in what Radio Shack optimistically called “Mercedes silver” because that was the color of the already extant TV-cum-monitor. They didn’t even bother to remove the volume control from the tape recorder, which led to all sorts of fun. Here’s some contemporary advice on getting it calibrated to actually, you know, function, from an early issue of SoftSide magazine:

Get an AM radio and place it beside your computer keyboard (on the side opposite the tape recorder, so that it doesn’t get in the way). Tune it to a spot in between stations and turn the volume down low enough so that it isn’t too annoying. This will help you keep track of what is going on inside the computer when you are loading from tape. If there is little or no sound, you are either listening to a blank tape, or the volume is too low for the computer to pick up the information. If you get an interrupted buzzing, the volume is either too loud or too soft. Turn the volume (on the tape recorder, not the radio) so that there is a steady tone. Then rewind the tape and start over. If you get a steady tone, the volume is approximately (unfortunately, only approximately) correct.

Such tricks were only possible because of the truly epic levels of RF interference that the TRS-80 put out. Televisions were best placed at the other side of the house from it, and (hopefully false) rumors had it that a handful of well-placed machines could take out whole city blocks. In fact, the original TRS-80 design was finally discontinued in 1981 because it violated FCC standards for RF interference. (How it ever got approved in the first place is the real mystery…) TRS-80 loyalists darkly suggest to this day that the machine was ratted out to the FCC by Texas Instruments, who were about to enter the market with a machine of their own and wanted to trim the field a bit.

All in all, the TRS-80 reminds a bit of the old MG and Fiat sports cars my friends and I used to tinker with years ago. As we stalwartly intoned every time trying to run the engine, the windshield wipers, the headlights, and the radio off a single Lucas electrical system left us with a smoking hunk of melted plastic where the fuse panel used to be, its failings gave it personality, even made it lovable. But its lovable personality isn’t the reason that the TRS-80 became the most popular of the trio of 1977, and remained the leading system until perhaps 1980 or 1981. No, that was because (unlike the Apple II, which cost $1300 for a 4 K system without a monitor) it was relatively cheap at $600, and because (unlike the Commodore PET, which was bedeviled by supply issues throughout 1977 and 1978) it was, at least after the initial surge of interest had convinced Radio Shack to begin manufacturing it in numbers, readily available at thousands of stores all over the country.

Realizing at last that there was gold in these here hills, Radio Shack began to relent with some of the penny pinching, gradually transforming the TRS-80 into a usable little system. The standard 4 K of RAM soon became a much more reasonable 16 K, and Leininger’s primitive BASIC was replaced with a much better Microsoft-licensed variant. (Early adopters got the privilege of paying to have their machines retrofitted with these enhancements; Radio Shack never took its munificence too far.) By the time the TRS-80 had its first birthday, disk drives had appeared, as had the possibility of further expanding RAM to as much as 48 K. Such options, which had never been part of the original design plan, required the purchase of a bulky expansion box to house them and were certainly not cheap, but they did exist and were gradually adopted by those who stuck with the platform.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s say it’s late 1977 or early 1978, and you’ve just brought your shiny new Trash-80 home. What might you do with it? I’ll talk about that next time, and in the process also discuss a program that’s much older than any I’ve talked about so far, but that holds an important place in the history of interactive narrative.

The conventional wisdom, as found in fictionalized accounts like Pirates of Silicon Valley and as regurgitated by lazy journalists everywhere, is that the personal computer was invented in a garage in Palo Alto by the charming rogue Steve Jobs and his sidekick Steve Wozniak, who was admittedly a bit weird and nerdy but acceptable in the role of second fiddle. Given his role and personality, it’s not really surprising that Jobs hasn’t done anything to divest the world of this founding myth. Somehow more disappointing, though, is the similar failure of Wozniak, who always struck me as the member of the pair I’d most like to have a beer with. Yet Woz, alas, went so far as to make part of the subtitle of his autobiography “How I Invented the Personal Computer,” when the hard facts are that the legendary Apple II was neither the first fully assembled PC available for purchase (that was the Commodore PET), nor the most successful of the formative era (that was the Tandy / Radio Shack TRS-80, the subject of my entry today). Granted, the Apple could make a pretty good claim for being the best of this dynamic trio of 1977, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

(Update: In the course of researching later posts I’ve come upon some new facts that rather muddy these waters. It is true that Commodore announced the first turnkey PC in the form of the PET at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January of 1977, and brought with them a rough prototype that, at least by the last day of the show, basically worked. However, Commodore did not finally start shipping finished PETs to customers until September of 1977, by which time the Apple II had been shipping for almost three months. So, Apple was the first to market with a turnkey PC, if not the first to begin development on one. (What was Commodore doing for so long? Well, if you have to ask you don’t know Commodore…) But I still think that Apple’s role in the first ten years of the PC era is, while very important, exaggerated by the “winners write the history” syndrome.)

The reasons for the conventional wisdom about the history of the PC aren’t hard to divine. It may be a cliché to say that history is written by the victors, but that makes it no less true — and with Commodore defunct for 17 years at this writing and Radio Shack, or “RadioShack” as they now prefer to be called, having given up on manufacturing computers almost as long ago, the winners in this case are obvious. Further, the story of Apple Computer, of these two plucky all-American visionaries inventing the future in their garage, is the sort that the mainstream media loves to write. How can Commodore, an ex-calculator and office furniture manufacturer led by an abrasive and petty middle-aged man, compete with the two Steves? How can the conservative, stodgy, very establishment Tandy Corporation, parent of the Radio Shack chain of electronics stores?

For those who are not American or who missed this corner of American retail culture, I’m going to try to describe Radio Shack, at least as they were up to a decade or so ago. That’s about how long it’s been since I had much real contact with any of their stores; it’s possible that the new millennium and the bold switch from “Radio Shack” to “RadioShack” has changed everything. But somehow I doubt it; Radio Shack strikes me as one of those seemingly eternal institutions like Montgomery Ward that can only be itself, until one day, poof, it’s suddenly gone altogether. I actually must admit to some surprise that Radio Shack is still around in 2011. It feels like something from another time, a musty piece of shopworn Americana that inexplicably still lives and breathes — and much as I’m about to make fun of them, that makes me feel kind of warm and happy inside.

There were two distinct kinds of Radio Shack customers.

The first was your uncle Jerry, who worked down at the lime mine, drank a twelve-pack of Bud every weekend, and tooled around in a Ford Granada. Jerry shopped at Radio Shack for the same reason that he bought the Granada: some vague sense of patriotic obligation. And like with the Granada, the stereos and televisions he bought at Radio Shack basically got the job done, even if knobs tended to fall off, inexplicable discolored patches tended to appear, and unexplained buzzes occasionally issued forth then disappeared again. Operating them always felt a little bit more awkward than it ought to, and as for the aesthetics of the things… well, let’s just say aesthetics weren’t a priority at the Shack and leave it at that.

And then there was your brother-in-law Don, the real-estate agent and frustrated inventor. Don had subscriptions to Popular Electronics and Radio-Electronics among others, and read every issue cover to cover. His garage no longer had room for the family cars, filled as it was with HAM-radio equipment, every television discarded in the neighborhood for the last ten years (he was sure they’d come in handy for something at some point), and that homemade soda fountain that hadn’t yet produced a swallow of drinkable soda but had exploded alarmingly on several occasions. When Don came to Radio Shack, he strode right past the Uncle Jerrys and the displays of “Realistic”-brand consumer electronics to the back of the store, where hung transistors, diodes, capacitors, and God knows what else — an area that was incomprehensible to anyone else, including the poor befuddled employees hanging about the place. These were all allegedly paid on commission, but seemed strangely unaware of that fact, and mostly confined themselves to trying to push batteries on everyone who walked through the door for reasons that were known only to Radio Shack management.

Occasionally a specimen from outside the normal Radio Shack milieu would wander in; there were lots and lots of Radio Shack stores, literally thousands spread all over the country, so they were occasionally selected by default, even if only for the purpose of buying batteries, in places where the alternatives were, shall we say, limited. Given the sales staff’s passion for batteries, one would think these people would be greeted with open arms, but this was not the case. Radio Shack in fact had in place a policy almost guaranteed to drive them from the store in abject frustration, one that would soon have them driving right past the convenient local Shack to get their batteries somewhere, anywhere, else.

When you made it to the sales counter with your $3.00 package of batteries, the heretofore apathetic salesperson would spring to life, asking in an excited tone whether you were on the mailing list. “No thank you,” you might answer, “I’d just like to buy the batteries, please,” optimistically attempting to hand over your $5.00 bill. What you failed to understand was that the salesperson had no more interest in your money at this point than he did in the racks of capacitors at the back of the store; what he wanted was to get you and your address “into the system” by whatever means necessary. Only after accomplishing that, a laborious process likely entailing a false start or two and lots of fiddling with a balky terminal, was he interested in taking your money and earning his freebie commission on this pack of batteries you had walked in and picked up off the shelf for yourself. This process was not optional; you could provide a name and address along with your cash or you could take your goddamn business elsewhere.

Given the priority Radio Shack placed on acquiring this information, one would think that they would treat it as a precious resource. Oddly, though, this didn’t seem to be the case. Even well into the 1990s, long after every other retail chain had networked its computer systems together, Radio Shack, the “technology store,” seemed to have no shared customer database whatsoever. Therefore every time you dropped into a different location of the 237 in your city to get some more batteries, you would have to go through this process again. Even more bizarrely, even a single store had only about a 50-50 chance of retaining your information from one visit to the next. Truly, Radio Shack refined customer aggravation to an art. Only Jerry was willing to put up with it, because it was his duty to “buy American,” and Don, because you just couldn’t get this shit anywhere else.

When we take all of these factors into consideration it becomes clear why Radio Shack had an image problem in 1977. That’s not an unusual state of affairs for the company; having an image problem is a part of what Radio Shack is, as fundamental to it as those mazes were to Adventure. Radio Shack has always been, and will always remain, the anti-Apple Store, the antithesis of hipster cool. When they decided to release their own computer that year, the awkward but lovable contraption that resulted left no doubt about its parentage.