Priming the Pump:

How TRS-80 Enthusiasts Helped Spark the PC Revolution

by David Welsh and Theresa Welsh

copyright © 2013 by David Welsh and Theresa Welsh

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without the permission of the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Published by:

The Seeker Books

PO Box 20806

Ferndale, Michigan 48220-0806

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the many people who talked with us and shared their stories. We did lengthy interviews over the phone, corresponded by email with some and met face-to-face with others. These include Vernon Hester, Steve Leininger, Don French, Oliver Bailey, Mark Lautenschlager, Bill Schroeder, Randy Cook, Wayne Green, Dick and Jill Miller, R. H. Rosen, Stan Veit, Scott Adams, Ed Juge, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, David Ahl, Ira Goldklang, Tim Mann, Larry Ashmun, Robert Doerr, Howard Brown, Eric J. Rothfus and others. We thank them all for the the great stories they gave us.

The pictures in this book are from a number of sources. Most of the photographs are our own, taken at the time the events in this book were happening. Some of the photos are recent, as we did some set-up shots of our old equipment.

The ads and articles from magazines were selected from our collection of vintage computer magazines and are meant to serve as general historical examples of the style of ads and magazine content of the time.

We thank everyone who gave us advice on what should be in this book, those who reviewed versions of the manuscript, and the advice and comments on the cover design.

We also thank you, our readers, and acknowledge that this book has been in the works for at least eight years, and that is a long time for anyone to believe that it would ever be finished. We doubted it too over the years, but, because we think the story we tell in these pages is important (and because no one else has told it), we made the final push, and, after endlessly rewriting, reviewing and pretty much agonizing over every page in hopes of getting it all right, we present it to you. We are solely responsible for the contents.

David & Theresa Welsh

www.microcomputerpioneers.com

www.theseekerbooks.com

Preface

The Legacy of Microcomputer Pioneers

During the 1980s, David and I had a small office located over a vintage clothing store on busy Michigan Avenue, in Dearborn, Michigan. We had variously, two to four rooms, depending on our prosperity at the time, and we employed part-time college kids to help. Out of this simple headquarters, we sold software for the TRS-80 Model I, Model III, and later Model 4 computers. Our main product was a word processor called Lazy Writer that David programmed, working by himself with occasional input from me, as we tested the various versions and features.

David did his programming in the basement of the small house we owned in southwest Detroit. This was a neighborhood of old homes on small lots in a part of town my mother-in-law was too afraid to enter. We had been unable to get a mortgage because, at that time, mortgage companies treated self-employment like unemployment and we were making a living doing free-lance writing and photography. But we discovered we could buy a house in Detroit on a land contract. I liked the quirky character of the neighborhood, and was thrilled to finally own a house; we built a darkroom and office in the basement.

Once the TRS-80 came into our lives, things changed as David got the idea that software could be a business. From our contact with other TRS-80 owners, we knew everyone wanted more software. We acquired the office only after we had a product that was already bringing in enough money to afford the rent. I spent my time at the office, writing ads, manuals, and a newsletter, besides making sure orders were filled and customers satisfied.

Our story was many times mirrored in other basements, garages, and small offices across the country by other people who created software for the TRS-80 and other early microcomputers. A first wave of users bought what we sold. Most were small business people, people like ourselves. Sellers and buyers formed “the bleeding edge” of the personal computer revolution.

People who create technology are sometimes driven by curiosity about machines and gadgets, but other times they are visionaries who see the future. In the hundred years of the twentieth century, the advances in technology were incredible: the airplane, the mass-produced automobile, radio and television, rockets that put a man on the moon, and last, but certainly not the least, the personal computer.

In the 1920s in America, a major 20th Century technology breakthrough happened with the discovery of radio broadcasting. As with personal computers, its first users were hobbyists. They soon began buying mail order hardware and experimenting with the new medium. As the hardware got better, commercial ventures popped up to bring content to the growing numbers of users. Radio was powerful. In a decade, it found its way into every home and became an addiction as content-creators filled the airwaves with The Shadow, the foibles of Amos ‘n Andy, and the comedy of Jack Benny. World War II became real to a whole generation who heard live broadcasts from Europe, the news as it was happening. The technology became commonplace and its inner workings forgotten.

TV happened because radio led the way. Adding pictures extended the capabilities of the medium, increasing its impact.

The introduction of the microcomputer in the 1970s and 1980s represented a further breakthrough. Many people contributed to this, some building the chips and the circuit boards and creating protocols that let the basic signals (ones or zeroes) send messages. But, as with radio and TV, the real revolution was in the content made possible through the technology. Users interacted with software, unlike the more passive radio and TV, and grew to rely on it for business as well as entertainment.

As small computers gradually took over the workplace and all kinds of mechanical devices became electronic, another revolution was brewing. The seeds were planted by early Bulletin Board Systems like CompuServe and The Source, which let users send each other email and download files. The real breakthrough technology, initially financed by the government for military use, came in the early 1990s and had the promise of providing everyone with instant distribution of electronic content. Universities were using the technology, and when it became more widely available, it was dubbed “the information superhighway.”

This newest medium would unite people across geographical, cultural and political boundaries, and take the world into the unknown territory of the 21st century. The Internet revolution is still happening and it is not my purpose to say where it will lead us, but to point out that it could not have happened without what went before it.

As I write this, 30 years have passed since the TRS-80 came on the scene in 1977 and let ordinary people use a computer. This book is the story of the people who gave the machine its importance, by making it a useful tool. You will learn of their triumphs and their pain, as they gave birth to brilliant operating systems, ingenious utilities, and business programs with features that would later be "invented" by companies with more money but not more talent.

Theresa Welsh    2007

1   The First Complete Microcomputer: TRS-80

The TRS-80, the first complete, off-the-shelf microcomputer, has roots in the same fertile ground of Silicon Valley as other computer success stories, but its story is largely unknown. Back when Steve Wozniak was demonstrating his hand-built Apple I to the Homebrew Computer Club, one member who watched with great interest was a young engineer from National Semiconductor named Steve Leininger. A computer hobbyist, Leininger had bought an IMSAI, an early kit computer, and was moonlighting at the Byte Shop in Santa Clara to indulge his interest in computer design.

In the Spring of 1976, a few representatives from Tandy Corporation visited National Semiconductor to look at a new microprocessor called SC/MP for their Radio Shack stores. They were there because of Don French, an employee at their Fort Worth Texas headquarters, who had been urging his superiors to consider selling a kit from which customers could build their very own computer. French had been filled with zeal for this new phenomenon ever since seeing the Mark 8 kit computer in the pages of Radio Electronics in 1974. Reacting to his own desire to have a computer, French bought and built the Mark 8.

But he’d gotten little support in his efforts to get his Radio Shack employers to consider small computers a potential hot new product. What had convinced French computers were a good market was what he discovered when he contacted a company that made a board for computer kit projects. French learned the company had sold 8000 boards. “That hit me,” he says. “This has got to be something.” Later, when the Altair, a more advanced kit than the Mark 8, appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics in January of 1975, French bought one of those too. The magazines, which saw computer kits as an extension of the “you build it” kind of projects they regularly featured, fired the imagination of enthusiasts who purchased the kits and built the first microcomputers. Entirely on his own, French began quietly working on a computer product that could be sold by Radio Shack stores.

It was a hard sell to Radio Shack President Lew Kornfeld and Vice President John Roach, who remained skeptical, and it was only after the Tandy bosses saw pictures of people lined up to get into the West Coast Computer Faire to see these new computer products that they began to think French might have a point.

When the Tandy representatives arrived at National Semiconductor to take a look at a computer chip they might use in a Radio Shack product, they learned the marketing person they were supposed to see was unavailable. Instead, Steve Leininger, the young engineer who hung out at the Homebrew Computer Club, was asked to meet with the men from Tandy. Leininger had worked extensively with the SC/MP chip, experimenting with connecting a video terminal and implementing a tiny BASIC on it. He talked to his visitors about what they would need to build a computer. They were interested, asked questions, and as they were leaving, asked if there was, as Leininger puts it, “one of those new-fangled computer stores” anywhere nearby. Since Radio Shack was in the retail business, they wanted to see how computers were sold. Leininger gave them directions to the Byte Shop on Camino Real owned by Paul Terrell.

When the Tandy buyers went to the store that evening, they were surprised to again see Leininger who was working behind the counter. He once again explained what went into a microcomputer: a processor chip (like the SC/MP) plus memory. He showed them the wares, which consisted of the Apple I and other early kits and parts. After checking out the merchandise and asking some more questions, one of the men asked Leininger if he would consider consulting on a computer kit project for Tandy. “Sure,” he said.

Don French had been fighting the battle for a long time. He had been a Radio Shack store manager before coming to work at headquarters, and he recalled that his superiors did not feel that small computers should be taken seriously. French had to periodically provide a list of each item sold (the “one of a kind” report) in his store. Seeing a use for his Altair, he programmed a way to maintain the list using paper tape storage. One time when he had to turn in this report, he says, “I just gave them the print-out. My handwriting isn’t easy to read and I figured this would be easier. They handed it back to me with a columnar pad and said ‘Copy it.’” He adds, “then they took the pad where I had copied the information from my print-out and they sent it to keypunch” where it would all be typed once again and entered into a mainframe computer.

French felt totally isolated in his belief in the potential of small computers, and that feeling continued after he went to work at Tandy headquarters in Fort Worth. But he kept working on computer projects on his own and continued to make the case that Tandy should get into the small computer business. The contact with Leininger was a breakthrough for his hopes of having a Radio Shack product for computer hobbyists.

But six weeks went by after the visit by the Tandy people to National Semiconductor, and Steve Leininger figured they had forgotten about their interest in hiring him as a consultant. Then one day he got a call at home from Tandy asking if he would consider coming out to Fort Worth “to look at our facilities.” That sent up a flag for Leininger that Tandy was interested in more than a consulting contract. If they wanted him to look at their facilities, it seemed pretty certain they wanted to make him a job offer. He’d only been married about four months and wanted to talk it over with his wife, Susanne, who had just gotten a Master’s Degree in marine geology from Texas A&M University. She had been unsuccessful at finding a job in her field. While she searched for something more suitable, she was working the breakfast shift at McDonald’s. She thought moving away from what was then high unemployment in an area becoming known as Silicon Valley would be a good idea, especially after she called a cousin from Texas to ask about the job market there. Yes, her cousin told her, there were jobs for geologists in the state known for its oil. There was another factor too. Some employees at National Semiconductor had been given stock options, but Leininger was not among them and it irritated him. So he called the Tandy contact and said he would be willing to come to Texas, but they’d have to send two airline tickets so his wife could come too. This was a bit unusual, but Tandy sent the tickets.

Both Leiningers flew to Texas and were met at the airport by Jack Sellers and John Roach, who was then Vice President of Manufacturing. On the way, Roach apologized for what he obviously thought would be a disappointing first impression for Leininger. National Semiconductor had a modern facility, but Leininger was driven to an old box factory, with the engineering sections next door in an former tire store, with only around 20 by 40 feet of space for the work of building and testing products. It was a Saturday morning but Leininger noted that people were in the building working. Tandy only had one engineer who, as Leininger puts it, “had made it all the way through school” to actually get a degree. Most of the people employed at the facility were former managers or store people who showed some talent and were brought inside. Leininger, with a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue, would be their most educated employee.

Once the tour was done, they went back to the old box factory and went upstairs where Leininger was introduced to Don French. While the others left the room, it was clear to Leininger that they wanted French to check him out. As the only computer hobbyist at Tandy, French was best qualified to see what Leininger really knew. The two men discussed what French already had on the drawing board, and Leininger told French he could help put together the rest of what they needed for a kit product. The others came back into the room, along with John Roach, who took everyone out to lunch. At lunch, Roach made Leininger a job offer; the job would consist of designing and building a computer kit to be sold in the Radio Shack stores. It was just what Don French had hoped for. With Leininger on board, the kit product could become a reality.

Lunch over, Leininger retrieved his wife and they talked it over. The money he’d been offered was good and Texas had no income tax; even if National Semiconductor came up with stock options for Leininger, he’d be better off with the Tandy deal, plus Susanne Leininger felt she had better prospects of getting a job in her field in Fort Worth. So, in May of 1976, the Leiningers moved to Texas.

Leininger worked alone in the tight quarters of the former tire store, as he puts it “without a whole lot of people to bounce ideas off of other than Don.” They worked on kit concepts, trying to keep down the cost. Tandy management wanted a $200 computer, so every part had to be cheap. Keyboards at the time were expensive, but they got a breakthrough from a company that made keyboards for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC); they had some keyboards DEC couldn’t use, so they made Tandy a good deal on a quantity purchase.

Originally, Leininger planned to use the 8080 microprocessor. Although Tandy had hired him for his expertise with the SC/MP, he convinced them early on that the 8080 would be better. Those plans changed when he learned about the Z80. A technical representative along with a manufacturer’s representative from Zilog, creator of the Z80, visited the old tire store to show Leininger the microprocessor. The technical guy from Zilog, who was inexperienced in these situations, wanted to be paid $75 before he would leave the microprocessor for Leininger to work with. The manufacturer’s rep, who had more sense, pulled the other man aside and told him to leave Leininger the chip. Leininger, who had already researched the capabilities of the Z80, liked it but knew he had to get a low price for quantity purchase. Eventually, a deal was struck with Zilog to provide the Z80 at a price agreeable to Tandy. That shifted the design work over to the Z80.

The Z80 had the same instruction set as the 8080, but added additional instructions. Leininger liked the Z80 for two reasons, both of which promised to let him build a cheaper computer: The clock that controlled timing required less circuitry because more was built into the chip, and the Z80 had the circuitry to automatically refresh dynamic RAM which meant they wouldn’t have to use the more expensive static RAM.

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 a 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.”

The Vice President in charge of buyers, who was not keen on the computer idea anyhow, saw the bungled clock project and, fearing computer kit builders would do no better, shouted “That’s it! There will be no computer kit!” A discouraged Steve Leininger realized the computer project had mainly involved his time. Tandy would not be out much by just forgetting the whole thing.

But Don French still wanted a computer product. French, Leininger, and John Roach talked it over and consulted with Bernie Appel, French’s boss, and Lew Kornfeld. They decided to try to design a finished product. Customers would not have to solder anything. To sell this idea to Charles Tandy, they would need to build a prototype, but Leininger said he couldn’t get the work done as long as he had to do other work as well. Since he was working in close quarters with the other engineers, he ended up spending time helping with their work and talking to customers. So, Roach arranged for Leininger to work in another place, a room in their speaker plant out in the Fort Worth stock yards, in what had been a World War II-era insulin plant. Alone in his room at the stock yards with the Swift packing plant next door, protected by a combination lock, Leininger put together what would be the first TRS-80.

As he worked on his creation, Leininger constantly had to find ways to keep down the cost so they could make “Radio Shack type profits” on the final product. That meant building it for about half of the final selling price. Despite these limitations, Leininger wanted to provide a monitor. Adding a monitor would add cost, but Leininger wanted a better display than you could get out of an ordinary television set, which displayed only 32 to 40 characters across. By modifying a TV and providing it as a monitor, they could get that up to 64 characters across, which would be more attractive to buyers. The reason for the black and silver color of the final product was because the modified RCA TV it used already came in those colors which RCA called “Mercedes Silver.” Tandy opted out of displaying lower case letters to save $1.99. In the end, the TRS-80 cost less than $300 to make, including the monitor and the tape recorder.

Don French told us the concepts — “what went in it, what it was, how it was going to work” — in the TRS-80 were his, but “the physical hardware and software design was Steve’s.” The two men together, with few resources and little support, created and built the TRS-80 Model I, the first complete microcomputer, a product that would change the lives of millions of people.

On February 2, 1977— Ground Hog Day — Leininger brought his creation, wire-wrapped cards in a chassis screwed onto the bottom of a table with a little curtain around it and the RCA TV monitor on top, to a demonstration for company executives, including top boss Charles Tandy.

Charles Tandy almost didn’t make it to the demonstration. He was on his way out of the building, but Lew Kornfeld chased after him in the parking lot and asked him to come back inside and attend. Kornfeld had by this time signed on to the project and wanted Tandy to see what Leininger and French had created. According to Kornfeld’s 1992 book, To Catch a Mouse, Make Noise Like a Cheese, Tandy knew nothing about the project at this point. Here is Kornfeld’s version, from the book:

“Charles,” I panted, “I need you to come upstairs to bless a new project we’re going to release today for manufacturing. I’d like you to see it and know about it on the bare chance it might be a real, exclusive winner.”

“What is it?”

“A computer, a little desktop computer.”

“Computer!” Tandy said. “Who wants a computer?”

“I told him that I wanted it in the worst way, even though there were no known customers asking for one; it was virtually impossible to identify buyers at this time; it wasn’t a home computer, hence maybe it wasn’t even a consumer item; and that all we had today, aside from a mock-up and working sample, was a very rough idea of its parts and labor cost, so its selling price had yet to be firmed up, but 'I guarantee not to give away gross margin just to prove my point.'”

So Charles Tandy returned to the building, ready to see this new product. Leininger, waiting for the bosses to appear, was nervous about this all-important demo. “The engineering people didn’t see Mr. Tandy too often,” explained Leininger. “He was too busy... taking care of business.”

Lew Kornfeld too had a lot invested in the demo. Although he was President of Radio Shack, a position he’d held before Tandy had bought the company, he wanted Charles Tandy’s blessing on something that was a departure from anything they’d sold before. Marketing was Kornfeld’s strong suit and he hoped to show Tandy a product he could sell, not promises or technical jargon. A microcomputer was a risky product with no proven market or selling method. It would be his job to find customers for the machine that Steve Leininger was about to demonstrate.

Tandy, who knew nothing about computers, sat puffing his cigar in the company conference room. He listened as Leininger explained how the hand-built computer worked and demonstrated a simple BASIC program called H&R Shack, written by Don French. The program let a user input a salary, and Charles Tandy typed $150,000, but that didn’t work. French told him to “take a pay cut” since the program only went up to $40,000. Aside from the limits of the demo program, the prototype performed well. Leininger recalls that a big puff of smoke from the boss’ cigar (“He was always smoking big cigars”) bounced off the monitor screen “almost suffocating me.” Finally, the explanations and demonstrations finished, Leininger was dismissed. He left, wondering: Was that it? We’re done?

Inside the conference room, Charles Tandy was pondering what he’d just seen. The tension was thick as Tandy finally looked casually around the room at his management team and asked how many they should build. The project was a go! Don French suggested they could sell 50,000 of them, a number he and Leininger believed was possible. “I was almost laughed out of he room,” he remembers. Radio Shack had never sold that many of anything except batteries. Lew Kornfeld, with a more cautious attitude, suggested they build 1000 units.

John Roach, who was in charge of manufacturing and would have to build the new product, went to find Leininger who had already left the room with his creation, and told him he’d been given a go-ahead to make 1000 units. Later that week, they changed the number to 3500 because Roach discovered they couldn’t get a good enough deal on parts if they only built 1000 units. The new number was exactly how many Radio Shack stores they had at the time. Roach figured if they couldn’t sell the computer to customers, the stores could use them.

Leininger was again moved to another location, this time to a saddle factory, to finish the work without disturbance. He got a faster printer and a development package from Zilog; the keyboard box was specified and built. The hardware was coming together, but they also needed software. They planned to supply BASIC and Leininger was using Li-Chen Wang’s Palo Alto Tiny BASIC, which was public domain, for demonstration purposes. They had a consultant from Florida who was supposed to write a floating-point BASIC, but the consultant just disappeared. When they couldn’t find him, Don French told Leininger he’d better plan on writing the BASIC himself. On their low budget, buying Bill Gates’ BASIC, already in use on the MITS Altair microcomputer, was not even under consideration. Leininger made his own fixes, including writing the floating-point, to the Palo Alto BASIC and that became TRS-80 Level I BASIC. Leininger says one of his innovations was the CLS (clear screen) command, which Microsoft later used in its BASIC.

An article in the December 1981 Popular Computing looked back at the TRS-80s, with a rare picture of Steve Leininger.

Leininger, no longer part of the crazy California techie culture, had no camaraderie like Steve Wozniak must have had from his fellow-enthusiasts at the Home Brew Computer Club when he was creating the first Apple, yet he built the first TRS-80, a product that turned out to be a classic computer, and he did it virtually working alone amid the grimy surroundings of the Fort Worth saddle factory. The final development cost of the TRS-80 was less than $150,000, according to John Roach, quoted in a 1992 book, Tandy’s Money Machine by Irvin Farman (The Mobius Press, 1992)

Finding a cheap way to load and save programs was important to keeping down the cost of the computer. Using cassette tape was the obvious choice, but the standard hardware interface was too expensive, so Leininger used a software approach. He went back to something he’d learned at National Semiconductor and created a cheap interface giving the microprocessor direct access to the port to operate the cassette player. This scheme, which Leininger calls a “bit banger,” creates tones in software. It was similar to the Kansas City standard, but the Kansas City method depended on hardware to make the tone. In the very first issue of 80 Microcomputing magazine, Patrick and Leah O’Connor, TRS-80 buffs from Chicago, would tell readers what they had discovered about how the computer-to-tape worked: “The TRS-80 tape output port is noteworthy because of its simplicity,” they wrote. “By utilizing software, for parallel to serial conversion, and for the baud-rate generator, Radio Shack has reduced cost without sacrificing quality.”

Leininger was interviewed for the December 1981 issue of Popular Computing. Here’s what he said about his work at Tandy:

I think I’m still proudest of the Model I because I did most of that by myself. None of what we’re doing today would ever have taken place if it hadn’t been for that computer. And it was great doing a job that nobody else had done before — that no one thought possible. It was a real challenge, one of those once-in-a-lifetime happenings that I hope only happens once.

Tandy Corporation was not a glamorous start-up and had no ties to Silicon Valley, other than hiring Steve Leininger. Instead, they were a scrappy Texas company that dated back to 1919 when Dave Tandy and a partner opened a leather business. Dave’s son, Charles Tandy, had joined the company after a tour of duty in World War II, and a disagreement with his father’s partner about the direction of the business ended the partnership in 1950. The company was sold in 1955 to another company traded on the New York Stock Exchange, but the Tandy group got management control and renamed the company Tandy Corporation. Charles Tandy presided over the business his father had started, which still consisted of leather shops. It wasn’t until 1963 that Tandy made a deal to buy a string of electronics stores called Radio Shack. These stores had been known mainly as junky places full of surplus electronic parts before the Tandy Corporation turned them into a profitable chain best known for their “battery-of-the-month” club, big stock of CB radio equipment and the remote-controlled toys they trotted out each Christmas.

The TRS-80 (TRS=Tandy Radio Shack) was announced to the world on Wednesday, August 3,1977 at the Warwick Hotel in New York City. Tandy managers decided New York would be a more suitable locale for announcing their entrance into the computer business than their own Fort Worth location because they hoped to impress the Wall Street crowd. As a publicly traded company, Tandy Corporation could use a boost to its stock price, and the managers hoped it would boost their image with the public as well.

Our original TRS-80 Model I, with cassette player and manual.

The New York Times for August 4 contained not one word about the previous day’s introduction. When the Tandy managers were trying to get some notice for their new microcomputer, the news was dominated by stories of widespread bomb threats on August 3, including two actual bombs that exploded in Manhattan office buildings and killed one person. The entire Word Trade Center was evacuated because of threats that more bombs would go off. The perpetrators were members of the FALN, a radical group trying to get independence for Puerto Rico. The August 4 headline read: 100,000 LEAVE NEW YORK OFFICES AS BOMB THREATS DISRUPT CITY; BLAST KILLS ONE AND HURTS SEVEN

Dick Miller, who later became a Tandy consultant in the Northeast, says he was told by someone from Tandy that some of the managers who came to New York wanted to increase the drama by making an announcement about their computer on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange. When the time came, the story goes, the Tandy guys were there on the steps with their TRS-80 with a respectable crowd of press and onlooker when a reporter came running into the area shouting about a bomb threat a few blocks away. Everyone scattered. We can’t verify this story, but the bomb scare was real.

The New York Times, like most other general news vehicles of the day, did not see anything newsworthy about the entry of a complete off-the-shelf affordable microcomputer.

It Began With the Altair in 1975

We (David and Theresa Welsh) were innocently making a living doing free-lance writing and photography when the microcomputer revolution got going. Only in retrospect is it clear that we truly lived in interesting times. We’d grown up with the flower children of the 1960s, protested the Viet Nam war and mingled with long-haired hippies, seen a man walk on the surface of the moon, and were eyewitnesses to one the Twentieth Century’s greatest achievements— the personal computer. It all started out so simply, with a picture on a magazine cover. But more than a picture. An idea.

The Altair 8800, a small box the size of a microwave oven with 16 address switches and 8 data switches on its front, was the first significant microcomputer, although the cover of Popular Electronics from which it made its first appearance in January, 1975, called it a “minicomputer.” Commentators have tended to call all early small computers “PC’s,” but that was a term introduced later with the IBM PC. In the late 1970s, small computers were always called microcomputers. What you did with them was personal computing.

The Altair was a kit — you had to build it from parts — and it didn’t do much when you got it together. It seemed as far removed from those huge computers in the business world as a toy plastic car is from a Rolls Royce. But the existence of the Altair planted the idea that an ordinary person could own a computer. It was a seductive idea.

The Altair almost didn’t make it to market because its creator was $300,000 in debt. Ed Roberts, founder of Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS) and the “father” of the Altair, was able to build the first Altair because he persuaded the bank to let him borrow another $65,000 to finish his work. He’d made a bold assumption that the 8080 microchip from Intel could be turned into a real computer, but had run out of money on the way to making it happen. He told the bankers he could sell 800 computers, a number he made up in hopes of getting the loan. The bankers may not have believed him, but they gave him the money. Working with Les Solomon, Technical Editor of Popular Electronics, Roberts had to meet the magazine’s deadline for featuring the new computer kit on the cover of the first issue of 1975; if he couldn’t deliver, the magazine might drop the project and MITS, which was based in a small store next to a Laundromat in Albuquerque, would be finished. Before taking a gamble on building a computer, Roberts’ company had built calculators and he’d seen the bottom drop out of the calculator market as prices plunged. Could MITS stay alive by selling a low cost computer kit?

The famous magazine cover, January 1975, and an assembled Altair.

Solomon, known to his writers as “Uncle Sol,” had been actively looking for a computer project for his magazine and needed something better than the Mark 8 kit, based on the Intel 8008, that had been featured in rival Radio Electronics. While the 8008-based computer was little more than a teaching tool, the 8080 had the potential to be a real computer. He also wanted to feature a computer that the hobbyists who read his magazine could afford. It had to cost under $500. The name Altair was suggested by Solomon’s 12-year old daughter Lauren who got the name from an episode of Star Trek she was watching one night when Solomon asked for suggestions for a name. According to the book Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine (McGraw-Hill, 1999), Roberts’ response to the name Altair was “I don’t care what you call it. If we don’t sell 200 of them, we’re finished.” As it turned out, he would sell a lot more than that.

Roberts finished his prototype and shipped it to Solomon. But Popular Electronics ended up using a picture of a model on the cover because the actual Altair — the very first complete Altair — which MITS shipped to Popular Electronics was lost in transit and never found.

Bill Gates tells us in his book, The Road Ahead (Viking Press, 1995), that it was that picture of the Altair on the cover of Popular Electronics that spurred him to action. He didn’t want the computer revolution to happen without him. He and buddy Paul Allen had been using a DEC PDP-8, a real minicomputer of the day, at Harvard where Gates was a student. But they believed in a future when time-sharing would be a thing of the past and ordinary people could own and use their own dedicated computer. And they wanted to be part of it.

What you needed to make a computer do something useful was a programming language, but the Altair lacked the kind of languages that were available for the PDP-8. Higher level languages needed memory to work in, and the Altair shipped with only 256 bytes of memory. Extra memory was available in 1K cards, so by using four cards — to make up 4K of memory — Gates thought you could have enough room for a small language and some data. Gates threw himself into writing a version of BASIC that could run in 4K with the idea of selling it to MITS for the Altair.

He and Allen called up Ed Roberts at MITS who agreed to look at their BASIC. Gates and Allen did not have an Altair to test it on. Instead, they used the manual written by Adam Osborne that explained the instruction set for the Intel 8080 chip in the Altair. They developed the language on the PDP-8, using software Paul Allen wrote that simulated the 8080.

The night before they were to deliver the software to MITS, Gates stayed up all night studying the code to make sure he’d gotten it right. Allen got on a plane for Albuquerque the next morning, carrying with him a paper tape containing the code for a mini version of BASIC. He wrote a bootstrap loader, software you need to get data from the punched tape into the computer’s memory, on the plane on the way out. When he got there and the big moment came, to his surprise and delight, everything worked. Allen and Ed Roberts tested the BASIC with a small program that printed the answer to 2 + 2 on a teletype machine. MITS became Bill Gates’ first customer in the business of selling software. In an interview, Gates described the event, which Allen related to him on the phone, as “very, very exciting.”

People who love to hate Bill Gates often don’t realize he was there from the beginning. His belief that small computers could run a higher level language and accomplish real tasks was important. Gates had a vision of what the future could hold, believing the power of small computers could grow at an incredible rate. Most people who are computer-literate know about Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors that can fit on a chip doubles every 18 months. If Moore’s Law were to prove to be true, then small computers would became powerful enough to actually replace the multi-million dollar big computers. This insight also meant that a successful computer company would have to be constantly jumping to the next level. They could not let themselves be so immersed in one technology that they could not make the next jump.

The Revolution Begins

The Altair caught the interest of hobbyists, but it was not the most technologically advanced microcomputer. That distinction belonged to the Xerox Alto, developed by the creative team at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1973. The Alto already had a graphical user interface and a mouse and friendly word processing software. But Xerox waited until 1981 to market the technology used in the Alto as the Xerox Star and at $16,000, it was too expensive for most potential buyers. Xerox expected companies would buy more than one Star and network them together using the built-in Ethernet. But the business world was not ready to lay down that kind of money for something they didn’t understand. Apparently, the network technology was also not ready for prime time. Mitchell and Company of Cambridge Massachusetts was a beta site for the Star, and was willing to spend the money for the system, since they felt it would be useful, but sent it back when they found the network crashed whenever it rained (as reported in The Ultimate Competitive Advantage by Donald Mitchell and Carol Coles, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, March, 2003).

Steve Jobs, in a pair of legendary visits to PARC in 1981, absorbed the concepts of the Alto, and teams at Apple created the Lisa, the forerunner of the Macintosh, which would make Apple Computer a major player in those early days. If Xerox had understood how many ordinary folks longed to own a computer, they might have given the world an advanced microcomputer years before Gates got around to borrowing the Alto-inspired technology (Windows) from Apple who’d gotten the ideas from Xerox. When the dust settled from all the lawsuits over who stole what from whom, it seemed that Bill Gates ended up with all the money.

Venture capital had already begun to build Silicon Valley. Intel, in business since 1968, had been founded with venture capital money from Arthur Rock. By 1971, they had created their first microprocessor, the 4004. When he saw the 4004 in use in a calculator, Rock believed it was the start of a business that could not fail. One year later, Intel doubled the power of its first chip when it produced the 8008. With the 8080 in 1974 — the “computer on a chip” — they had created the brains for the Altair and begun the evolutionary development of the microprocessors that would fuel the computer revolution.

Although it was originally created for a customer who rejected it, the 8008 was put into production as a general purpose microchip for whoever wanted to buy it. This was a change from developing large-scale integrated circuits only for specific uses. Microprocessor development could not be justified by the number of computer customers around at the time, so it was a risky approach, based on opening new markets. Those markets included the many people who wanted a computer of their own or would want one as soon as they learned what a computer was and what it could do. Intel took a chance that desire for computers would grow.

Intel made the microprocessors that led to the PC’s that would soon be used everywhere, but they were not the only game in town. Another early entry was the 6502 microprocessor from MOS Technology, created in 1975, which powered the popular Apple II family. The Motorola 6800 was also available in 1975 and it was less than half the cost of the Intel 8080. A new Altair model, the 680, was featured on the cover of the November 1975 Popular Electronics. The article on building a 6800-based computer listed its advantages as “ease of assembly (only one large pc board), built-in TTY interface, and high speed.” Like its sister Altair, the 680 had 16 address switches and 8 data switches. The 6800 was the predecessor to the 6809 used in the TRS-80 color computer and the 68000 used in the Apple Macintosh.

Software

A computer is not very useful unless you have a way to get programs and data in and store programs you write. Big computers used paper tapes, teletype machines, and disk drives with disks two feet in diameter to get data in and out, but these devices were too expensive for microcomputers. The eight-inch floppy disk drives had been around for a while, but these were also expensive. They had been invented with the idea of eliminating punch cards by having operators “key to disk.”

The man who made the breakthrough in input/output for microcomputers was the legendary Gary Kildall, who had begun working with the 4004 chip. An instructor for the Naval Postgraduate School and a consultant for Intel, Kildall developed PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers) for the 8008. But working with PL/M still required use of paper tape. When the 8080 was ready for market, Kildall was determined to find a way to connect a disk drive to a microcomputer. To do that, he needed software that communicated between the processor and the drive.

The “mini-floppy disk drive” had appeared on the scene in 1973, and its inventor, Al Shugart, loaned Kildall a used drive so he could develop the input/output routines needed. By 1974, Kildall had produced the first disk operating system, CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers).

In an interview he gave for the book Programmers at Work, published in 1986 by Microsoft Press, Kildall said:

I didn’t know CP/M would be such a hit, but I did know that floppy disks would be. I had been working with paper tapes for a year and a half. A floppy disk drive was $500 and a paper tape reader with a fancy punch was over $2000.

Kildall founded Digital Research, Inc. (DRI) mainly to market CP/M. During the period from the late 1970s and through the 1980s, DRI was a major force in computing. CP/M was the operating system of choice for the companies that followed the Altair. The IMSAI, a computer created by Bill Millard to compete with the Altair, was the first CP/M machine, followed by later machines like the Kaypro and the Osborne (the first “transportable” computer created by another legendary early pioneer, Adam Osborne, who had worked at Intel and documented the 8080 chip).

Both Bill Gates and Gary Kildall understood computers earlier than most of us and both were out there, before the field got crowded, trying to sell to a public that didn’t know much about computers. Bill Gates, while still in college, along with Paul Allen, built a machine based on the 8008 chip. It was a special-purpose machine they called the Traff-O-Data; it was supposed to analyze information collected by traffic monitors. They never found any buyers, although Gates says they made some money analyzing traffic tapes. The first task for Gary Kildall’s CP/M was controlling a coin-operated astrology machine, but the instructions were too hard to follow and the paper that was supposed to print out the horoscope usually jammed. It never made any money. The concept of computing as a general purpose tool that ordinary people could use had not been established. The public had to see the potential of microcomputers and the Traff-O-Data and astrology machine did not do that. But both men eventually created products people wanted. The June 1978 issue of Kilobaud magazine, in a picture story about the West Coast Computer Faire, captioned a picture of the Digital Research booth “..there are two pieces of software playing a dominating role in this microcomputing industry: Microsoft BASIC and Digital Research’s CP/M Operating System.”

The IMSAI 8080. Like the Altair, it had switches on the front that provided a crude user interface.

CP/M was destined for bigger things than running an astrology machine. A big break came when DRI licensed CP/M to IMSAI for $25,000. It helped make IMSAI the first business microcomputer and built awareness of the power of a hardware-independent operating system that could talk to peripherals. The Spring 1979 issue of Micro Shopper says the IMSAI 8080 had a disk controller that “allows both large and small disk drives to be operated, providing up to one megabyte of storage for development and permitting the tailoring of programs to run on the smaller, lower cost minidisk drives.” Other new companies building computers followed IMSAI in licensing CP/M. These included the Dynabyte and the Altos. But others, like the SOL (named for Les Solomon) had their own proprietary operating system.

IMSAI’s Bill Millard created his first computer because he couldn’t get enough Altairs for the small business customers he was courting. A former salesman for IBM, Millard took positive thinking to new levels. All of his professional employees were trained in Erhard Seminars Training or “EST,” one of the self-help, new-thinking kind of training systems with roots in the 1960s. He got into building computers because a car dealer had asked for help setting up a computer for his business; Millard saw possibilities in becoming a system integrator by adding peripherals and software to computers for businesses. He went into computer manufacturing only because Ed Roberts did not share his enthusiasm for the business market and could not deliver reliable machines or offer quantity discounts. Millard concluded he would have to build his own computer to satisfy business customers.

Millard’s enthusiasm created a big success for the first IMSAI, the IMSAI 8080, which was more or less a knock-off of the Altair. Originally, he sold the $400 IMSAI from the basement of his house, but soon moved into a real office and began hiring employees. When he decided to create a more finished computer, complete with monitor, he ran into problems. The VDP-80 was released too early because the company needed the money from the orders to keep going. It was never reliable and machines came back for repair almost as fast as they were shipped. Replacing the 8-inch drives that never worked right with 5 1/4 inch drive, they renamed it the VDP-40.

Millard’s IMSAI Corp. was officially dead in September 1979 when a final meeting was held with remaining employees, after which police came and padlocked its headquarter. Two former employees, Todd Fischer and Nancy Freitas, bought the inventory and the IMSAI name and made a living repairing IMSAI computers and servicing existing customers.

Hardware Standards

The Altair, besides having started it all, left the computer community another legacy, the S-100 bus used by most of the early computers that ran CP/M. The bus is the physical means by which the processor communicates with peripherals. Often called the “Altair/S-100 bus,” it was later declared to be a standard, but Radio Shack did not use it, nor did Apple. Like many “standards” that were to follow in the computer business, S-100 was often ignored and finally disappeared.

Bill Millard continued to believe computers would become a huge business. The IMSAI founder started the Computerland chain of retail computer stores and became one of the richest men in America (he was number 31 on the Forbes list of the richest Americans in 1984), but he later got into trouble over $250,000 he had borrowed back in 1976 and, in a court battle that lasted from 1981 to 1985, ended up having to give 20% of Computerland to a company called Micro/Vest. At the time, Computerland had over 100 franchised stores, but Millard’s franchisees moved against him too, saying they were not getting enough for their franchise fees. Millard lost control of the company, just as he had with IMSAI. He surfaced in the news six months later when newspapers reported he had moved to a South Pacific island.

During the years when Ed Roberts over at MITS could not keep up with orders for the Altair and Bill Millard had his wife and kids assembling IMSAI’s from parts in muffin tins on their kitchen table trying to fill orders that were pouring in, demand for small computers continued to grow. Despite Millard’s belief that there was a business market for microcomputers, the hobbyists were the main buyers and they were often fanatic in their longing for a computer of their own. As Ed Roberts said in an interview years later about this era, “to have a computer was better than sex.”

In the late 1970s, the concept of the microcomputer was in the ether. The Altair had been an artistic success, but MITS sold the Altair for little more than the cost of the parts and had struggled to survive financially. In 1977 Ed Roberts sold out to Pertec, a disk drive maker. Roberts feared the same kind of competition that plummeted calculator prices would bring down computer prices too. He didn’t want the pressure of trying to stay afloat with Radio Shack and others entering the market. Later there would be a lawsuit between Microsoft and Pertec over the ownership of the BASIC. As usual, Bill Gates emerged victorious, the courts ruling that Microsoft owned the BASIC.

Electronic Games Pave the Way

Video games were popular long before microcomputers. In the 1970s, game systems that connected to a TV were selling in the millions, while microcomputer sales in 1977 were about 25,000. Game-lovers had for years been playing a game called Pong, a wonderful game you played sitting at a table with a CRT built into it. When you put a quarter in the slot, two brightly-lit “paddles” appeared, along with a “ball” that you batted back and forth. We once spent two long evenings in a bar in Huntsville Alabama playing Pong for hours and hours with some construction workers. It was so much fun, deciding whether to use big paddles or, when you thought you were hot stuff, switching to the more challenging small paddles. And you could speed up or slow down the ball too. These machines used analog, not digital, technology, but Pong created a market for the digital games that followed.

As with so many of the early computer products, there’s a story behind Pong. Nolan Bushnell, another legend from those days, had hired Al Alcorn to develop Pong, letting him believe they had a buyer for it. But there was no buyer and once the game was developed, Bushnell was unable to sell it to any manufacturer. That left only one thing to do — Bushnell started his own company which he called Atari. The first coin-operated Pong game went into a bar in Sunnyvale California in 1972. It quit working the first day, due to the fact that so many quarters had been fed into the machine that the coin feeder mechanism jammed. In 1975, the same year that began with the Altair on the cover of Popular Electronics, a home version of Pong appeared. The game was immensely popular and Atari developed variations and new games.

In 1976, Steve Jobs came to Bushnell and suggested he build a personal computer. Bushnell, with his interest firmly planted in games and entertainment, said no. Steve Wozniak had that same year suggested that his then employer, Hewlett-Packard, develop a personal computer, with the same result. HP turned him down. With both Steves getting turn-downs from established companies, they teamed up to do it themselves and founded Apple Computer.

As for Bushnell, he became convinced it would take more resources than he had to keep going in the face of competition in the video game business and sold Atari to Warner Communications for $28 million in 1976. The video game culture that Pong and the Atari products had created around the country helped pave the way for microcomputers which were based on the same technology. Games were an important early application and dedicated game machines have continued to develop and succeed in the marketplace alongside personal computers.

Magazines Spread the Gospel of Microcomputing

Magazines would play an important role too in preaching the microcomputer gospel. One visitor to the MITS office back in 1975 was publisher Wayne Green, who brought with him the first issue of his new computer magazine, Byte. Green had purchased a $250,000 computer six years before to help him put out a magazine called 73 he’d been publishing for ham radio operators. But the computer system, according to Green, “was never able to do more than 10% of what was claimed.” Green thought about starting a magazine for computer buyers back then, but found there were no reasonable choices for a small business owner wanting a computer. The appearance of the Altair was the trigger that told him the time was right. When he arrived at the MITS office, he found the people there “staggering under a load of orders for their Altair computer” as he told them about his new magazine which would be a vehicle for selling computer products. He also went to Salt Lake City to see Sphere, a company that sold an all-in-one-case machine that didn’t last long, and then on to San Antonio to visit with Southwest Technical Products, a company associated with Don Lancaster, a popular contributor to electronics magazines, which also sold a computer kit based on the 6800.

Green made another stop as well, to see Ed Juge, who operated Ed Juge Electronics. Green knew Juge because Juge used to run ads in Green’s 73 Magazine, for ham radio operators. He told Juge that microcomputers were going to be huge and apparently convinced him because Juge sold his store and never looked back. He began writing programs and sold some to Green for his Instant Software and later worked for Tandy and became the official company spokesman for the TRS-80. Wayne Green had a lot to do with the success of the TRS-80, but always had a hostile relationship with Tandy. Ed Juge became a bridge between the two. He would later write a column for 80 Micro, even as Tandy threatened to fire any store manager that carried the magazine.

Wayne Green went back to the rural isolation of Peterborough, New Hampshire, where he established a small empire of computer publications and a software company that published and sold the software of many fledgling programmers. It was part of the non-Silicon Valley computer revolution that was about to sweep through the country, fueled by the hobbyists who wanted a computer of their own and joined by the small business owners who, like Green himself, wanted to be freed from time-sharing or having to buy expensive equipment they didn’t understand. Together, these two kinds of users would become the bleeding edge of the revolution.

Green said in an editorial in Desktop Computing, another magazine he started, that “The big revolution, as far as the smaller businessman is concerned, has been the evolution of the microcomputer. This invention has brought down the cost of practical business computing by almost a factor of ten.”

Green ended up losing Byte some years later in a rancorous dispute with his ex-wife Virginia, whose father had put up $20,000 to launch the magazine, which was put in her name because Wayne was having problems with the IRS. According to Jack Burnett, an Assistant Editor at Byte, Virginia had divorced Green, who then married wife number two, Lynn, who also left him and ran off with another woman (yes, another woman).

Green, beset with problems putting out his 73 ham radio magazine while holding off the IRS, asked Virginia to come back and help him with his magazine business. That was when they borrowed the money from her father and started Byte. Virginia found Wayne just as annoying the second time around and decided to leave again, taking the magazine with her. Although it was Wayne’s idea to start Byte and he had worked hard at making it a success, the courts ruled that the magazine belonged solely to Virginia because she was the source of the start-up money. Not one to wait around for a court to decide, she had simply split, taking with her the subscription list and editorial material. Wayne came to the office one day and found these important documents gone, and going to court did not get them back.

Virginia quickly sold Byte to McGraw-Hill. Under new ownership, Byte was recast for the computer professional, and Green, picking himself up from his loss, saw there was a need for a hobbyist-oriented magazine. He started Kilobaud and later 80 Microcomputing which was eventually called 80 Micro. Green says 80 Micro became the third largest magazine in the country.

The Early Days of the TRS-80

After the team from Tandy left the Warwick Hotel in New York, where they had given the world the TRS-80, they went to Boston to exhibit at a computer show. The Tandy group, which included Don French, set up their computer on a table without any fanfare at all and showed it to the people who drifted by looking at the wares of various small-time vendors, mostly selling expensive kit computers. French recalls being there alone and finding his booth “swamped” with people wanting to see the TRS-80. He said the press really picked up on the new machine at the show and there were a number of interviews and articles that followed.

Among those who stopped by the Tandy table that day were Dick and Jill Miller, who were seeking a computer for a volunteer organization which Dick headed. They were trying to get a government grant and had quoted a price of $5600 in the grant request to buy a computer. However, they had begun to feel they couldn’t get anything for that price that they could be sure would be reliable. Apple had just introduced their first model, but, as Miller tells it, “They weren’t a real company yet …all these things were being made in garages; what’s more they’re not being made, they’re being kitted — you have to put them together.” They had also learned that smaller disk drives were now available for microcomputers. Jill, a professional programmer, knew about disk drives, but the ones she used in her work were huge. Both knew having a disk drive would give them real capability and they were looking around the show for a reliable micro to which they could attach a disk drive.

Dick’s initial reaction to the seeing the TRS-80 sitting on a table at the computer show was: “I couldn’t believe it!” He says it was half the price of anything else, it was already put together, and it was offered by a respectable large company. It didn’t have a disk drive, although the Tandy guys had set up an empty hexagonal-shaped box that was supposed to look like a disk drive. They were telling onlookers that they would have a real disk drive available for their TRS-80 in the near future. Both Millers thought it looked like a great buy, but wondered if there was a catch. Dick came back the next day with a friend who knew about computers and both of them ended up ordering a TRS-80.

Don French left the Boston show for a trip to Japan and when he got back he found the Tandy switchboard paralyzed with phone calls. More than 15,000 calls had come in from people who wanted to buy a TRS-80. The company had produced only enough to have a few to show, not expecting to sell very many, and these were all hand-made by seven employees. Despite the deluge of orders, the bosses still didn’t believe the revolution was happening, and they dragged their feet gearing up to meet production.

Dick and Jill Miller got one (actually, two) of the first batch of TRS-80s to be delivered. But not without problems. They wanted one with 16K of memory, but weeks went by and they heard other people had gotten one, but they hadn’t. Dick Miller called Don French at Tandy and discovered the delay had to do with the extra memory they wanted. Miller told French he didn’t think they should be penalized for asking for extra memory and suggested Tandy ship a plain vanilla TRS-80. The next day, the Millers got a call from their local Radio Shack, with the message that the store had a TRS-80 for them. They picked it up and spent the night discovering what it could do. Miller said he was delighted to find it was well built and that everything worked. The next day the Millers got another call from a Radio Shack store. They had another TRS-80 for the Millers. French had expedited a delivery, but now their original order had come through. The manager said he had a huge backorder for TRS-80s and could easily sell the computer, but did the Millers want it? Dick says he looked at Jill and both quickly agreed. “We’ll take it,” he told the store manager.

The Millers set up their two TRS-80s in the living room and invited over a lot of friends, many from MIT and other Boston-area academic institutions. Everyone had fun writing little programs for it and by the next day, they had a cassette full of simple programs that worked. They did it all without the benefit of the great user manual that buyers would get once TRS-80s were in the stores. Miller says he got only 16 pages of cheaply copied instructions with those first two.

So did Miller ever use the computer for the organization he headed? Nope! They were turned down for the grant (the government said it would cost more to administer the grant than the Millers were asking for). Instead Dick and Jill Miller went into business demonstrating the computer to interested people and renting out their TRS-80s for $60 a week (10% of the cost to buy). Initially, Radio Shack store managers knew nothing about the TRS-80. Tandy was so unsure about this product, they insisted each store manager sell three of them before the store would get display models. Tandy management had no idea of what a big success they were about to have with their TRS-80.

IMSAI ad for the VDP-40, a follow-on to the ill-fated VDP-80, Byte, July, 1978

The Millers left their business card at Boston area Radio Shacks, offering to demonstrate the TRS-80 for interested potential buyers and giving the undecided a chance to rent one. Many stores, having no TRS-80s of their own or having one but knowing little about it, used the Millers’ services…until the Tandy Regional Manager found out about it and made the stores stop. When Dick Miller learned what had happened, he called the Regional Manager and told him, “Look, I help sell your computers. You should be helping me do it, not opposing what I do.” A long conversation convinced the manager that Miller was right. Soon Tandy offered the Millers a consulting contract and they began going around to Radio Shack stores in the Eastern states demonstrating the TRS-80 to store managers and sales persons. It was the beginning of a long odyssey for them making a living with microcomputers.

The Millers were not the first buyers of a TRS-80. Robert Rosen of New York City claims to have ordered one just two days after the introduction, prior to the demonstration in Boston. A Radio Shack employee at the time of the introduction, he loved his Model I and went on to buy a Color Computer as well and become one of the first operators of a Bulletin Board System (BBS). He left his job at Radio Shack and eventually operated five BBS’s which offered many of the same services as the internet which came later: email, downloads, and messages. He engaged in an early form of e-commerce, using the BBS’s to sell hardware and software. He mainly sold products for the Color Computer because, as he explains it, “I chose the CoCo because, as a one-man operation, I saw more potential in making money with it because RS didn’t pay much attention to it, thus creating a healthy third party market.” Rosen received an email from Steve Leininger in February of 2000 recognizing his “early purchase.” Rosen says he was told by former Tandy president Lew Kornfeld that he (Rosen) was the first TRS-80 buyer.

The TRS-80 was the single most expensive item Radio Shack had ever sold. But as computers went, it was, as Dick Miller had been quick to notice, a real bargain. It was not a kit and did not have to be connected to a TV set like the Apple but cost a mere $600. Buyers got a monitor, a keyboard, 4K of memory and the BASIC language built in. The monitor, which Steve Leininger had made out of an RCA black and white TV set, displayed 16 lines down and 64 characters across in all upper case.

The TRS-80’s Z80 microprocessor, which had built on Intel’s 8080 design, was two generations removed from the 8008 chip in Bill Gates’ Traf-O-Data and one generation better than the Altair. It was hot stuff.

One of the ways Leininger made the computer cheap was by using cassette tape for program and data storage. The Altair and other kit computers did not come with a mechanism for saving programs — kit builders had to buy a hardware interface for tape or disk drive separately — but TRS-80 buyers got an ordinary tape player, a familiar (and cheap) piece of equipment, for loading and saving programs. Although most buyers would know how to use a tape player, the process of loading software was somewhat different from playing music and not always reliable. Users were told to experiment with the volume settings on the tape player when they had problems loading or saving programs.

Reliable tape storage using digital methods had been around for many years for big systems. But use in small computers began, as so many microcomputer innovations did, with the Altair when Don Tarbell produced an audio cassette interface for the S-100 bus. Byte magazine proposed a sound standard (using the Tarbell hardware) in 1976 and a meeting in Kansas City produced a similar “standard” that was variously called the “Kansas City Standard” or the “Tarbell Standard.” Having a standard way of using sound would mean users with different computer systems could exchange data. In late 1975, ads appeared in Byte magazine for the Altair that offered a “audio cassette interface board” for $128 as a kit or $174 assembled. This is what many hobbyist bought to create a storage method for their kit computers, but Leininger had given the TRS-80 the same capability without spending the money. Using sound to record data was an idea that also worked in modems, to move data over phone lines.

An ad for Tarbell Electronics from the August 1978 Byte listing their tape and disk drive interface boards.

Don Tarbell, originator of the tape interface standard, had a company called Tarbell Electronics that sold both hardware and software products. Tarbell products were highly technical, aimed at the hobbyist market. Their specialty was controller boards for tape cassette and disk drives. Their ad in the February, 1980 issue of Byte lists “all our current major products.” Included on the list is “Cassette Interface Assembled and Checked Out” for $175 and “Cassette Interface Kit” for $120.00. They also sold “Tarbell Cassette BASIC on cassette including manual” for $48.00 and “Tarbell Disk BASIC on CP/M disk including manual” for $48.00. Their simple ad looks like typewriter output below large block upper case letters that say HI THERE! The hobbyists who bought these highly technical products did not need Madison Avenue slickness. That would come later.

Problems With Software on Cassette

Using tapes as the first medium for selling and exchanging software for the TRS-80 kept software prices low as well. Radio Shack sold a limited number of software titles on tape and two tape “magazines” sprang up to offer tapes by subscription. CLOAD and LOAD80 both offered a monthly tape full of ready-to-run programs. These were mostly small utilities or game programs written in BASIC. To get programs off a tape, you typed “CLOAD” and watched as a little blinking asterisk appeared (another Leininger innovation), letting you know the program was loading. When it stopped blinking, the computer said READY; the program was loaded. Generally, you could only put one program on a tape and loading programs was slow and unreliable.

The TRS-80 User Manual reflects the iffy quality of saving to tape when it advises “Many users make a second or even third recording of the tape, just to be sure they have a good recording.” The manual also suggests using Radio Shack’s special 10-minute tapes and reminding users not to record on the leader portion of the tape (“Advance the tape past the leader before recording a program.”)

In a 1979 review by Joseph A. Greenleaf in Personal Computing magazine of Electric Pencil, the first serious word processors for microcomputers, the author described his efforts to retrieve the program from the tape cassette:

Machine language tapes, at least in my system, have critical volume settings. The manual says to start at “6” on the CTR-41 recorder. It took quite some time, but I finally got it to run at “7.” You should mark the proper level on your volume control. The tone should be “high.”

You had to go through fiddling with the settings on your tape player each time you wanted to run the software and retrieve your data from the recalcitrant tape. Despite these drawbacks, Mr. Greenleaf gave word processing an enthusiastic endorsement.

This cassette player is similar to the one that came with the Model I TRS-80 as storage device.

The “Trash-80”

With its simple gray and black plastic case and entry into the world through the hobbyist Radio Shack chain, the TRS-80 was the butt of many jokes from computer professionals who thought a cheap computer sold by a schlock electronics chain couldn’t be a serious machine. Dick Miller says Tandy managers freely called the gray color “Mercedes Silver” in hopes it would add some class to their product, but others saw a cheap plastic case and soon dubbed the TRS-80 the “Trash-80.”

The TRS-80 was fairly non-intimidating. It had the best programming manual available, written by Dr. David Lien, who took a light touch, assuming that the readers would be innocent of any background in computers. That was a pretty fair assumption, but the people who drooled over the Model I at their local Radio Shack were mainly the same people whose hobbies ran to building things. In our case, we were already steady Radio Shack customers, buying parts for David’s electronics projects. Electronics hobbyist were lured away from their old activities, and readership declined for magazines like Popular Electronics, which actually changed its name in later years to Computers & Electronics trying to get its old readers back.

Radio Shack aggressively marketed its new machine. Even when they were way behind filling the orders they already had, Lew Kornfeld decided to do a road show and teach the world about these new small computers. Starting with Phoenix, a Tandy team visited major cities, booking hotels and halls, and demonstrated the capabilities of the TRS-80. People who ordered a computer based on these “computer blitzes” got priority for getting a machine. By adding nearly 400 people and 85,000 square feet of space, Tandy began to build TRS-80s much faster and soon every Radio Shack store had at least one to demonstrate, and individual stores began taking orders.

An early ad for TRS-80 on the back cover of the October, 1977 ROM magazine

The company also developed advertising for their new best-seller. An ad on the back cover of the October, 1977 ROM magazine showing a man and woman with a TRS-80 on their kitchen counter, read:

The first complete low-cost microcomputing system for home, business or education!

The TRS-80 is for people who want to use a computer now — without the delay, work and problems of building one. The system is fully wired and UL listed — ready for you to plug in and use! Program it to handle your personal finances, small business accounting, teaching functions, kitchen computations, innumerable games — and use Radio Shack’s expanding line of prepared programs on cassettes. The Z80-based system comes with 4K read/write memory and Radio Shack Level-1 BASIC stored in read-only memory. Memory expandable to 63K bytes (sic). Includes CPU, memory, keyboard, display, power supply, cassette data recorder, 300-page manual, 2-game cassette program. Designed and built in the USA by Radio Shack. Only $599.95.

You have to wonder why they showed the computer on a kitchen counter. It is reminiscent of a common answer in those early days to the question of what you could use a computer for. The reply would often be “You could use it to store recipes.” We never actually knew anyone who used their TRS-80 to store recipes. Two smaller pictures in the ad showed a business user behind a desk on which sits a TRS-80. He has one hand on the keyboard and writes with a pen on a large pad of paper with the other hand. The second small picture shows a lady at a blackboard, while a young boy sits at a TRS-80 and a girl stands by the blackboard. Leininger told us John Roach got his secretary to portray the teacher.

Radio Shack found themselves scrambling to build the machines to satisfy the deluge of orders. “Once we announced it,” Leininger says, “orders came in for the thing so quickly that we were backordered. I told Mr. Roach that we’d sell 50,000 of those in the first year and he said ‘We’ve never sold that many of anything that expensive.’”

The 50,000 number crops up in a number of places. Stan Veit has a story in his book, Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer (WorldComm Publishers, 1993), about a visit from Charles Tandy to Veit’s computer store in New York City. Veit was subsequently invited to fly back to Fort Worth in Tandy’s corporate jet, and he was shown the TRS-80 prior to its introduction. Charles Tandy asked Veit how much he thought the computer should sell for. Veit says “I really had no basis for comparison except possibly the SOL (I had not received an Apple II yet) and it sold for $1400 with a video monitor. Well, this machine is a lot simpler, so I should figure about $1000. But this is Radio Shack, so it must be cheaper. I’ll say $900.” When Veit was told the price would be $600, he reports telling Charles Tandy “you better build a hell of a lot of them.” When Tandy asked how many would be “enough,” Veit replied “50,000 would be enough.”

Both Charles Tandy and John Roach may have been skeptical about such a large number, but it turned out to be an underestimation. When the first anniversary of the product came, the company found they had sold many more than any prediction and had taken a whopping 250,000 orders for TRS-80s, most of them still undelivered. (Actually, we’ve seen various numbers in different sources, so we can’t verify this number, but they certainly sold considerably more than 50,000.) Don French said they received a number of threatening phone calls from people who demanded delivery of their TRS-80 right away.

While a success of such magnitude was awesome, Leininger says no one had time for euphoria. They were too busy trying to figure out how to cope with the orders and build all those computers. All of them were built in Texas directly by Tandy Corporation, which eventually moved from hand-building to factory methods. Lew Kornfeld is quoted in the book Tandy’s Money Machine as saying that during the September following the introduction, the company was only able to build 130 TRS-80s, while some sources say they took orders for 10,000 computers in that first month alone. He says that as orders piled up, they began requiring a 10% deposit just to get on the waiting list. Their workforce of people who built the computers went from 7 to 385 and still the backorders grew, as customers clamored for their TRS-80.

Nor did anyone at Tandy have time to worry about the fact that Apple had introduced the Apple II and Commodore had brought out the PET. The TRS-80 beat them both on price and had a built-in distribution channel through the Radio Shack stores. Their problem was building enough to satisfy demand.

Don French was put to work managing the first Tandy Computer Center in Fort Worth, a retail store devoted to selling microcomputers. He sold the TRS-80 and other machines as well. Part of their reason for having this store was to gain knowledge of the market.

Customer Reaction to the TRS-80

When the TRS-80 Model I first made its appearance at our local Detroit-area Radio Shack back in 1977, David found it an irresistible product and spent considerable time at the Radio Shack store reading the manual that came with it, typing simple commands on the keyboard, and wanting to buy one. Having the computer right there to see, touch, and use in the store was a great experience. This had a lot more impact than reading a description of a kit computer in a magazine. Because they sold only one computer and it was ready to use, there was no need for a salesman to pounce on customers and question them about their needs. Many of the store clerks didn’t know much about the TRS-80 anyhow, so most just let customers try it out. Serious business buyers might go to a Computerland or a Byte Shop to learn about the new microcomputers from a trained salesman, but Radio Shack customers just came in, picked up the manual, and began entering lines of BASIC.

Typical of the reaction to a TRS-80 is this quote from former owner George Philips: “I discovered the magic of computers in a Radio Shack. My brother and I typed in a small sample program [10 INPUT “WHAT IS YOUR NAME”; A$:PRINT “HELLO,“A$ ] and I was absolutely astounded at what it did. It seems silly in retrospect, but I’d never seen anything like it before. We managed to get all of the Lunar Lander program typed in and running before the store closed. Soon after, we discovered that our high school had one hidden away and it just went from there.”

Similar comments come from Mark D. Manes, who, in a web site devoted to the TRS-80, told about hanging out at his local Radio Shack when he was in high school so he could program the Model I they had on display. “The Radio Shack manager took pity on me,” he wrote, “and let me hang in there every Friday/Saturday night until closing. I sat there for hours.” He goes on to say “I used to live at the local Radio Shack and then the users group that met at Thomas Nelson Community College. I drove the user group crazy as I did not own a computer, yet I came spewing facts and data and had a boatload of questions.” This scene was repeated at Radio Shack stores and user group meetings all over America as people who wanted a computer discovered they could have one for $600.

As Radio Shack stores across the country put the TRS-80 on display, those people who, as Ed Roberts had described it “lusted after computers,” showed up to tap the keyboard and flip through the manual. These people saw something compelling in this machine. They were not thinking about the fortune they would make in software someday or how the business world would be transformed by small computers, but just the magic of a machine that obeyed your commands. Building a kit computer would cost more and there was no guarantee you’d get it together correctly. Then you’d have to figure out how to program it. The TRS-80 came put together and ready to program, with a wonderful manual that explained it all.

Of course, we bought one.

You didn’t get much software with the TRS-80, just two games and the BASIC in ROM. The idea of a ROM (Read Only Memory) has faded since computers began storing software on a hard drive. The successor to the ROM is the BIOS, the essential software that lets the computer boot up. The Model I had no separate operating system. BASIC was the operating system and the key to controlling the computer.

Fortunately, BASIC was easy to learn and you could quickly learn enough commands to get it to do something, even if it was just to print your name on the screen. Chapter One of the manual begins with a little section called Computer Etiquette. It says “In this chapter we’re going to start a conversation with the TRS-80 by teaching it a few simple social graces. At the same time, you’ll be learning the fundamentals of computer etiquette. You’ll even write, wonder of wonders, your first TRS-80 computer program.” It then goes on to show how to write a program that prints on the screen the words, “HELLO, I AM YOUR NEW TRS-80 MICROCOMPUTER.”

Level I BASIC had only 3 error messages. “WHAT?” came whenever a syntax error occurred, “HOW?” came whenever an illegal function (e.g. dividing by 0) occurred, and “SORRY” when available memory ran out.

The original Level I BASIC stored and retrieved numeric data to tape with the special commands PRINT# and INPUT#. This worked only with numbers, not words. Any words the user typed would be gone the next time you used the program and entered new data. The BASIC let you use only two “string” variables (called A$ and B$), which was very limiting in terms of the kinds of programs you could write. With the use of these two strings, you could write a game that would let the names of two game-players appear on the screen.

Learning how you make a computer do things occupied a lot of time for those who bought one. The early literature always said, in answer to the question about what you would actually DO with a computer, that its uses “were limited only by your imagination.” The lifeline to those uses was the BASIC language. If you had no talent as a programmer (or no imagination), but you could type program lines, you could get the computer to do things. Early computer magazines and books published program listings which users typed into their computer and saved on tape. We recall our niece and nephew visiting and spending hours entering a program for “Hunt the Wumpus.” The really committed user, of course, tried altering the listings in the magazines and many moved on to write their own programs from scratch.

The World in 1977

The microcomputer came into the world at a time of great technological innovation. Not only did the TRS-80 debut in 1977, but also the Commodore PET, designed by Chuck Peddle, who had worked for Motorola before he founded MOS Technology and created the 6502 chip used in the Apple II and Atari 800. Commodore bought out MOS Technologies and Peddle supposedly tried unsuccessfully to sell his chip to Radio Shack, but the Shack was already sold on the Z80. Apple Computer was incorporated and introduced the Apple II at the first-ever West Coast Computer Faire held in April. That year, these three low-cost microcomputers — the TRS-80, the PET, and the Apple II — all went on sale. Microsoft was just a handful of people in Albuquerque. Bill Gates recalled in an interview (in 1993 when he was given the Price-Waterhouse Lifetime Achievement Award) “I was the Sales Department and Contract Department. Everybody else here were programmers. We all wrote an immense amount of code. These were exciting years. The number of new machines coming out were pretty dramatic.” These machines would introduce thousands of people to computing and change many lives.

The Commodore PET, with built-in cassette player, came out in 1977, the same year as the TRS-80 Model I.

It was a time when we paid only one phone bill to one phone company, affectionately known as “Ma Bell.” It was the year Jimmy Carter walked down Pennsylvania Avenue to take his place as president and promised not to lie to us. It was the year Star Wars hit the theaters, with its half-machine villain, Darth Vader, and its breath-taking special effects. Audiences brought up on Star Trek episodes and The Six Million Dollar Man were primed for the power of the Star Wars heroic SciFi theme and went to see it over and over. One woman proudly declared on a radio talk show that she’d seen it 25 times.

But Luke Skywalker wasn’t the only movie hero that year. Burt Reynolds and Sally Field took on a collection of lawmen who were all buffoons next to the slick, handsome, CB-wielding, fast-driving “Bandit” who took us on a wild ride across the Southern states in Smoky and the Bandit. Played for laughs, this movie glamorized reckless driving while using colorful CB language.

In 1977, one of the most popular and talked-about TV shows of all time held the nation’s attention as America watched Alex Haley’s Roots mini-series. Eighty million people saw the final episode, as the story of Haley’s ancestors who were slaves in the “land of the free” unfolded each night on our TV. Alex Haley took slavery out of the history books and into 20th century homes, where it sparked new discussions of the meaning of freedom. That same year, people laughed at the exploits of Fonzie (aka Henry Winkler) on Happy Days and stayed up late on Saturday night to laugh at John Belushi as the Samurai Tailor on Saturday Night Live. Sonny and Cher were breaking up after starring together in a highly successful variety show, a format that was popular on TV that year.

One of the biggest record albums ever was released in 1977; it was Rumours from Fleetwood Mac. We bought the album and listened to it incessantly. Disco was popular, getting a big boost from the John Travolta hit movie, Saturday Night Fever. There were a few new musical wrinkles too, with punk and New Wave music filling the airwaves for the first time. If you bought the latest music in 1977, you were buying vinyl records. CDs had not been invented yet, so no one was thinking about CD ROMs. But from the beginning music and data shared a medium — cassette tape. The same tape player Radio Shack gave you with your Model I could be used to listen to Fleetwood Mac.

Two mythic figures died in 1977. In August, the king, Elvis Presley, was found dead of an apparent drug overdose at his Graceland mansion. America so mourned the loss of the king of rock and roll that years later serious-sounding people would claim he was not really dead; some said Elvis had been a federal agent, and saw conspiracies, but apparently the King had an agent badge because Richard Nixon had given him one when Elvis visited the White House. Nixon was as star struck as everyone else.

Another cultural icon, Charlie Chaplin, died of less suspicious causes at age 88. A Chaplin look-alike would later be used in the first ad campaign for the IBM PC, a tactic designed to make the PC look friendly and “un-computer-like.” Watching “Charlie” with his derby hat and cane sit on an old-fashioned wood chair and balance books on his foot made computing seem like a normal part of life. But in 1977, Charlie had not yet done his dance. IBM was still in its own world, in a seemingly impregnable position, so powerful, the government had pursued a legal case against them for being a monopoly in computer products and services, the very same charge it would later make against Gates’ Microsoft.

Americans were hooked on another activity that year too, thanks in part to Burt and Sally in Smoky and the Bandit, buying up CB radios and filling the air with the sounds of “breaker, breaker” and competing with each other for the most clever “handle.” The Radio Shack stores that displayed the TRS-80 Model I also had a big selection of CB equipment for their gadget-loving customers. Star Wars action figures were a big hit too. Kids wanted to be as brave as Luke Skywalker and as daring as Han Solo.

And the December 1977 issue of Playboy magazine featured an ad for Dingo boots, showing a young and smiling O.J. Simpson. The copy reads “Like O.J. Simpson, we mean what we say.”

In New York City, a devastating blackout reminded the country that we could not take it for granted that we would always have adequate power. It was a wake-up call for an industry and a nation. The Big Apple suffered another crisis that year too, with the horrifying Son of Sam murders dominating the headlines for months.

In the summer of 1977, NASA launched Voyager I and Voyager II to study Saturn and Jupiter. NASA used remote-control reprogramming to endow the Voyagers with greater capabilities than they possessed when they left the Earth. Eventually, between them, Voyager 1 and 2 would explore all the giant outer planets of our solar system, 48 of their moons, and the unique systems of rings and magnetic fields those planets possess. David remembers being fascinated with NASA’s use of computers, and writing them to ask the size of the picture files sent back to earth by Voyager. In the mail came an answering letter stating that each picture file was two megabytes, an impossibly huge size in those days that took hours to “download” from space. It was difficult to foresee that one day we could take a two megabyte digital picture of our cat and email it to someone across the continent and think nothing of it.

Keeping up with the Competition: The Late 70s

As the 70s ended, there was competition for the microcomputer customer’s business. The Apple II was a solid computer that went on to have a very long life, outlasting the TRS-80 line. The Commodore PET was a good machine and Commodore went on to sell the popular Commodore 64 and the VIC20 and finally, the very advanced Amiga. The Apple required users to connect to a TV set for a monitor, but the PET had a futuristic-looking monitor that was attached to the CPU. A number of companies got into making microcomputers, but programming done for one type of computer could generally not be used on another without a lot of work. It was easier to convert a program written in a higher level language like BASIC than to convert a program written in assembler, which is specific to a microprocessor. Companies that created software usually specialized in one system, so TRS-80 programmers were limited to TRS-80 owners as customers.

Despite the “Trash-80” jokes, the TRS-80 won over many computer enthusiasts, including publisher Wayne Green. In the June 1978 issue of Kilobaud magazine, Green states “I’ve had letters from hundreds of TRS-80 owners… and talked with dozens at the recent shows, but I haven’t had any negative comments yet on the system. Oh, everyone wants more memory and bigger BASIC, but they are amazed at what the 80 can do with what it has — and they are having a ball with it.” On the criticism of the cheap plastic case, Green adds “Yes, the case for the keyboard and CPU is plastic, but it is very attractive and it resists dings…”

Radio Shack finally gave users a great leap forward in capability when it began selling the Level II upgrade for the TRS-80 in the summer of 1978 (a full year after building the first TRS-80). This was a new ROM that included Gates’ BASIC, which gave programmers much better tools for programming serious software. Now that Tandy knew it had a huge success with the TRS-80, they were willing to pay Microsoft for the more-advanced BASIC.

Steve Leininger says he remembers Bill Gates coming to Fort Worth to talk to John Roach to make a deal. Gates was asking for $50,000 and royalties. When Roach heard the price, he blurted out “Horseshit!” Gates had rehearsed various scenarios with his father, a Seattle lawyer, in anticipation of the meeting with Roach. But they hadn’t expected that kind of crude response and Gates was just stunned and speechless. When the conversation got going again, Roach agreed to Gates’ price, but would not agree to any royalties.

In the Microsoft 25th anniversary book (Inside Out: Microsoft in Our Own Words, 2000, Warner Books), Gates himself confirms this story. He goes on to say he got $100,000 from Texas Instruments. “These prices may sound high,” Gates writes, “but they were really a steal. The fees we charged were way below what it would have cost a company like Radio Shack to create its own programming language, and they were able to include it with thousands of machines.”

Don French recalls talking with Bill Gates about using Microsoft BASIC, and says “in truth, Bill gave us a fantastic price, a one-time fee and we’d have rights to it” and he adds that Gates was “a good guy.” After French became disillusioned with Tandy and decided to leave, he says Gates offered him a job. This was while Microsoft was still in Albuquerque (to be near MITS, home of the Altair, their first customer), but French would have had to take a pay cut. However, he adds, “I would have got stock in his company.” French pauses as he remembers how he decided against it. No doubt he’s many times added up what that stock would have been worth had he taken the job with Microsoft.

French ended up leaving Tandy because he never got the Vice-Presidency and bonus that Charles Tandy had promised him. Charles Tandy died a month before he could deliver, and Lew Kornfeld told French “There’s no young punk going to be a Vice President of this company.” Seeing he could never collect on the promise, French resigned and started a company to create CP/M and MP/M for the TRS-80.

The famous Model I manual written by Dr. David Lien

Tandy also negotiated with Dr. David Lien, who had written the brilliant Level I manual. Ed Juge, Tandy spokesman during that period, remembers that Lien wanted to be paid what Roach considered way too much money to write the Level II manual. Although Lien’s original manual was a big hit with users (there were actually articles written about how great it was), Roach refused to meet his price and got someone else to write the Level II manual, which was well-written and organized, but lacked the finesse and uniquely friendly quality of the original.

Lien had been brought into the project by Don French who had once been Lien’s student at Grossmont College in San Diego. Lien was teaching at a community college when French approached him about writing instructions for the new microcomputer. Lien always felt his contribution was a major factor in the success of the TRS-80. Interestingly, he was the only person to be acknowledged by Radio Shack, his name appearing in the front of the Model I manual. Leininger and French were never mentioned in any Tandy literature as the actual creators of the TRS-80. They remained anonymous to the thousands of users who loved their creation. When asked if he felt he and Leininger had never received the credit they deserved, French was quick to agree, his voice rising with intensity. He and Leininger had gotten less recognition than David Lien, who went on to start his own publishing company, CompuSoft, and wrote his own book on using the Level II BASIC (Learning Level II by David A. Lien, published by Compusoft, 1979).

The Level II upgrade also created the famous keyboard “bounce” problem that plagued users. When you typed, you’d see “aaa” when you pressed the “a’ key, for instance. This was a consequence of the software not taking into consideration the sloppiness of the keyboard. When you pressed a key, it might make several connections and the software saw them all. Clever users devised software fixes for this problem and the word processor David later wrote had a built-in “debounce” routine.

The Exatron Stringy Floppy was an alternative to cassette tape.

Another idea surfaced to answer the frustrations of tape users, a way to make loading and saving more reliable than with a regular tape player, but cheaper than a disk drive. It was the Exatron Stringy Floppy, that came on the market for Model I users who had the Level II upgrade. This was a small special-purpose tape player that used continuous-loop tape cartridges and stored data digitally. The stringy floppy cost $249.50 and was available only from Exatron. It was less likely to lose data and it loaded programs much faster than a regular tape player. A back page ad from Exatron that appeared in 1982 in 80 Microcomputing magazine showed a tape player covered with cob webs and a huge headline that read “TIRED OF WAITING?” The text with the ad says “The ESF uses a miniature tape cartridge, about the size of a business card, called a wafer. The transport mechanism uses a direct drive motor with only one moving part. Designed to read and write digital data only, the ESF suffers from none of the drawbacks of cassettes — without the expense of disks.” The stringy floppy didn’t last long as a product; as the TRS-80 became capable of using a disk drive and the price of drives came down, most users traded their tape woes for disk drives.

The Exatron Stringy Floppy, with the Small System Software tape that had the operating software, and three of the “wafers” that held the saved files.

During 1978, Leininger worked on a hardware upgrade that would let users connect disk drives, a device they called an Expansion Interface. Leininger had made allowance for expansion through a bus on the back of the keyboard unit. At a cost of $300, the new unit gave the Model I space for an additional two banks of 16K RAM, an RS-232 card (the TRS-80’s only expansion slot), and included a parallel printer port and a floppy disk controller. It also included a control circuit to allow two tape cassette players to be hooked up at one time and controlled by the computer. The reason most people bought an Expansion Interface was so they could connect a disk drive. The Expansion Interface was a thin box that sat under the monitor and was connected to the rest of the CPU by a ribbon cable that didn’t always work. If the cable came loose and users were doing word processing, the words on the monitor would turn into gibberish; the computer might freeze or reboot. Radio Shack responded to the cable problems by adding a “buffered EI cable.” There were two other fixes during the life of the box. One used a “DIN” plug retrofitted to the keyboard with a mate on the EI box AND the buffered cable. The final fix solved the problem so only the original ribbon cable remained.

Leininger thought the Expansion Interface worked ok at first, but later memory chips worked faster and would pick up noise on the bus and misinterpret it. Ed Juge said the problem was matching the Expansion Interface with the keyboard. An Expansion Interface added later might not be a good match.

The Expansion Interface became a constant source of problems. One user, who had bought his Model I at the store in North Platte, Nebraska, had his system in for repair so often, he would have the store manager set it up each time it came back to see if it was working. If not, back it went to the repair center. He says he finally got so frustrated, he called Tandy headquarters and “after fighting my way through many layers of assistants, receptionists, etc, I found myself talking to (I swear it’s true) Charles Tandy! I told him the whole sad story, explained that I loved the machine, but I was at the end of my rope on the whole deal, and wondered what he thought I should do. He said he would look into it and see what was going on. I thought ‘Yeah - right’, but later that day I got a call from the repair center manager who apologized profusely for all the trouble, told me that they had gotten a new fix for the problem, and that my computer would be back and working right within a couple of days. I later got a letter of apology for the experience signed by Mr. Tandy.”

Despite the klugey nature of the Expansion Interface, it was popular with users who were eager to upgrade. While use of the tape cassette kept down the cost of the Model I system, serious users wanted a better method of loading and saving files. By buying the Level II upgrade and the Expansion Interface, the TRS-80 now had the technical capability to connect to a disk drive. Radio Shack had first pitched its product at the “home computer” market, but with enough add-ons, the lowly Model I became a favorite choice for small business. It advertised its TRS-80 with the slogan “Radio Shack: The biggest name in little computers.”

A Radio Shack ad in the October 1978 issue of Personal Computing listed five configurations of the Model I system. They were:

The 4K bare bones system at $599

The 16K system, same as above, but 16K of memory, for $899

The 4K/printer system, “the educator,” that had 4K RAM, but included a screen printer for $1198

The Level II, 16K/printer/disk system that included the screen printer, Expansion Interface, and one disk drive for $2385

The “amazing new 32K/Level II/2-disk/line printer system” that included two disk drives and a line printer for $3474.

It is doubtful that Radio Shack was actually delivering the disk drives at this time. The small print in the ad says “Get details and order now at Radio Shack stores and dealers…” The line printer was probably not ready either. The screen printer was a boxy device that printed the contents of the screen on waxy-feeling paper when you pressed three keys (JKL) on the keyboard. It was upper case, with no control over how the type looked. Tandy found itself scrambling to keep up with demand for a more robust system and got some of its products out the door before they were fully reliable. In this, they followed in the mistakes of earlier companies like MITS and IMSAI, whose products were notoriously unreliable, but Tandy Corporation was not going to go under if it didn’t get out its printers and disk drives. User demand for upgrades and unrelenting competition kept Tandy pushing out products, ready or not.

The TRS-80 was not the only game in town, just the most successful. The computer business was hot and there were other microcomputers by 1979. Perhaps in response to competition, Tandy lowered the price on the TRS-80 to $499 for Level I and $849 for Level II. An ad in the December 1979 Kilobaud Microcomputing magazine asked in big headlines, “Do TRS-80’s lower prices mean you get ‘cheaper’ computers? No Way!” The ad showed a picture of a Model I with cassette player. The picture featured the new Level II keyboard unit that included a calculator keypad. The ad states “Production costs drop and manufacturing efficiency rises when you deliver more than 100,000 TRS-80 Model I systems in less than two years. No other company — ever — has had customer acceptance on such a large scale.”

The Altair computers were dead by the end of 1978, discontinued by the company which had acquired the foundering MITS and its products, Pertec. Ed Roberts, who had created the Altair, decided he was not a businessman after all and eventually became a doctor. Later he practiced medicine in a small town in Georgia.

In 1978, Word Star went on sale for CP/M computers. It was an immensely popular word processor that held its market for a long time. It was also the year 3Com was founded. And in the Eastern halls of academia, a young Dan Bricklin had worked out the routines for VisiCalc, the “killer app” that would not be an instant hit, but whose sales would keep building as people came to understand the power of an electronic spreadsheet.

There were even clone TRS-80s, offering compatible machines for less money. LNW Research was one such company, making a TRS-80 compatible computer that could run CP/M. The LNW-80 improved on the Model I in a number of ways. It operated at a blazing 4MHz compared to the Model I’s 1.774 MHz and came with 48K of user memory (RAM) plus 16K of graphics RAM, and Microsoft BASIC. It incorporated the features of the Expansion Interface into one keyboard unit. Lobo Systems, which originally made disk drives, came out with the Max-80, a TRS-80 clone that could run CP/M. Lobo made its own Expansion Interface for the TRS-80 Model I as an alternative to the trouble-plagued Radio Shack product. Another clone machine that gave you Level II and 16K for only $645 was the PMC-80 from Personal Micro Computers, Inc. Their ad in the November 1980 issue of 80 Microcomputing says the PMC-80 is “100% software compatible with programs from Radio Shack and from the hundreds of other independent suppliers. The built-in cassette player reads standard Radio Shack programs for the TRS-80.” Another clone, the Phoenix, was sold as a kit.

Tandy Corporation felt from the beginning that the real money would come from the business community. Lew Kornfeld was quoted in the first issue of 80 Microcomputing with this thought: “..the hobbyist, while vocal and visible, is not the mainstream of the business.” Wanting to cash in on the growing interest in business computing, Tandy introduced the TRS-80 Model II in 1979. It was an all-in-one computer with a built-in eight inch drive, sold with TRSDOS, but could run the standard CP/M operating system. Still powered by a Z80, like the Model I, the Model II looked more respectable, but was expensive and never sold in the volume of the Model I/III/4 line.

However, its former owners look back at it with affection. Joseph T. Sinclair, author of a number of computer books, bought a Model II in 1981 and says he was among the first people anywhere to use a microcomputer to track real estate investments using software he and a friend wrote. He says he knows he was one of the first because “I was in a professional organization that put me in touch with other commercial real estate brokers all over the country. The program was quite good and was of great value to me and my clients. I feel like I was one of the digital pioneers in the real estate business.”

Another satisfied Model II user was prolific author Isaac Asimov, who wrote many of his best-sellers with a Model II.

The Model I, despite its huge popularity, did not have a long run. Tandy finally had to retire the Model I in 1981 because it did not meet the FCC requirements for radio frequency interference. Leininger says it was Texas Instruments (TI) that caused their problems with the FCC. Unlike Tandy, TI had lots of engineers to work on their entry into the microcomputer business. The TI engineers determined that a microcomputer could cause interference with other electronic devices such as radios and TVs. They reported Tandy (and their other competitors) to the FCC, which began looking into it. Leininger says the Model I may have caused some interference, but it wasn’t much and he thinks TI was more interested in knocking out competition than they were in protecting anyone’s TV reception.

But the Tandy managers figured eventually the FCC would decide against them, so they began putting together the all-in-one-case Model III, which had the same Z80 processor and, in theory, could run Model I software and would meet FCC requirements. They hoped to continue with the success they were having, and get rid of the problems associated with the Expansion Interface. The Model III reached the market late in 1980, while the Model I was still available and very popular. It had the same 64 character screen as the Model I, so existing programs would run on it. Radio Shack hoped to keep their users loyal as they considered buying a new computer, but recognized that microcomputer buyers were coming from new ranks. The early roots of personal computing had been with people interested in the machine itself, how it was put together; they didn’t mind the “modular” design of the Model I. But now buyers were becoming more interested in making the machine do something. Wayne Green, writing in the October 1980 issue of 80 Microcomputing magazine, stated it thus: “The new hobbyists are less interested in designing circuits than in writing programs and finding out better ways to use microcomputers.”

Tandy introduced the Color Computer and the Pocket Computer on the heels of the Model III. They were trying to provide something for everyone, but the revolution was moving at a swift pace. Intel introduced the 16 bit 80186 and quickly followed it with the 8088 chip in 1978, a microprocessor which used 16 bits internally with an 8 bit bus. IBM used the 8088 in the original IBM PC, calling it a 16-bit processor. Computer makers were going to have to run hard to keep up. Moore’s Law was beginning to work its magic.

The Model I Expansion Interface, showing the guts, including the buffered cable and DIN plug added later in an effort to reduce problems with this device. The RS-232 card is on the left, while the power supply is on the right.

2   The DOS Wars

Moving Up to Disk Drives

The original TRS-80 Model I had no operating system, only the BASIC language. If users could get their hands on a disk drive — and the demand for something better than tape storage was strong — they would have to learn to use something new: a Disk Operating System (DOS). And Tandy would have to have a DOS before it could fill the demand and sell disk drives to its users. The logical thing to do would have been to turn to the most popular operating system already in use on microcomputers: Gary Kildall’s CP/M. But there was a reason Radio Shack could not do this. CP/M used the same memory locations as the TRS-80 BASIC ROM (Read-Only Memory).

Since the original TRS-80 was designed to be an inexpensive, self-contained unit, it “booted up” in the BASIC language. BASIC was located in low memory since the CPU naturally started executing whatever code was at the zero memory location when powered up. If the Level I ROM was there, the computer printed the “Ready” message to the screen and waited for commands in BASIC. However, the TRS-80 Level II ROM first checked for an Expansion Interface and disk drive and, if they were found, accessed track zero of the floppy where it expected to find code to load the rest of a DOS. This chain of events is called “bootstrapping” because it resembles trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

This cover for Radio Shack’s computer catalog for 1982 shows its Model III with two floppy disk drives — users needed a DOS to use these drives.

Unlike the TRS-80, the earlier S-100 bus machines reserved low memory for an operating system (most ran CP/M) and loaded all of BASIC from disk into high memory. It was too late to change the way the TRS-80 used memory, so Tandy could not simply license C/PM. But C/PM could be rewritten to work with the TRS-80, and Don French, who quit Tandy when Charles Tandy died in 1978, started a company to do just that. His company, called FMG after the initials of his three cats, marketed a special version of CP/M for the TRS-80. However, that version could not run the considerable collection of CP/M software because of the difference in the memory allocations between the S-100 machines and the TRS-80. Applications in use on CP/M had to be altered and recompiled to run on French’s TRS-80 version. Some software companies did create versions for it, hoping to tap into the TRS-80 market. French himself worked with Microsoft to port their products to run on TRS-80 CP/M. “I spent a lot of time in Seattle getting that done,” he recalls.

French had known both Bill Gates and Gary Kildall from his days with Radio Shack. French had chosen to turn down a job offer from Bill Gates, which, had he taken it, could made him a Microsoft millionaire from the stock he would have received. When he finally left Radio Shack, full of dissatisfaction, he decided to cast his lot with Kildall and bet on CP/M. But most TRS-80 buyers did not use CP/M, which they had to pay for, and most CP/M software packages were fairly expensive. These factors tended to limit the role of C/PM in the TRS-80 Model I/III/4 world, just as other factors would relegate it to second fiddle in the IBM PC world.

Still, French did OK with his CP/M business, recalling it as “quite profitable” with heavy sales to colleges in particular.

Disk drives, using whatever operating system, could add a lot of utility to a microcomputer, but were an expensive add-on for TRS-80 owners. The original Model I only cost $600, and a disk drive, using single-sided, single-density disks, cost around $500. A disk drive required Level II BASIC ($100) and the Expansion Interface ($300), plus most users would also want the lower case modification and extra memory ($150 to $300 for 16K). Despite these costs, spending more to get the convenience and speed of disk drives was a worthwhile additional investment for many users.

For disk drive makers, the TRS-80 represented a new and possibly huge market for their product. As the first TRS-80 was taking shape in Fort Worth, a new company started by one of the giants of the industry, Al Shugart, was eyeing the opportunity at Tandy. Tandy had to buy disk drives from someone. Why not from Shugart?

The Quest for a DOS

Randy Cook was an experienced professional who was working full-time for Xerox, but had gotten his start in cutting-edge programming while at LaMar University in Beaumont Texas. While a student there, he’d created a payroll system on Control Data computers that interfaced with early hard drives, and his work had been good enough that NASA hired him to work on systems used for flight simulation. At NASA Cook wrote a real-time executive to replace an old punch card system. It worked with the NASA computers, both digital and analog, and let Apollo astronauts train on a “what if” basis using various emergency scenarios.

At NASA, Cook met representatives from Datapoint Corporation (at the time, known as Computer Terminal Corporation) who had a contract to design a programmable terminal. Datapoint hired Cook and he added logic to their dumb terminals using a 4-bit chip. But he wanted to reduce the size of the unit and felt the whole motherboard could be put on a chip. The company approached Texas Instruments to do the work, but they said it was impossible. Not ready to give up, they approached a young Silicon Valley company called Intel. There they got a more encouraging answer, and Intel went ahead and worked on a chip that would meet the specifications.

However, the resulting product was costly and slow. Intel was supposed to get their whole R&D amortized for one year through sales of the chip to Datapoint, but Datapoint decided it was too expensive and didn’t meet their requirements. So they opted not to use the part and to let Intel keep rights to the chip, which Intel marketed in 1972 as the 8008 (it found its way into the Mark 8 kit computer, which was sold as a teaching device even before the Altair). Cook had wanted the functionality that was later built into the 8080, but at the time Intel could not produce it. Datapoint’s rejection of the work was a blessing in disguise for Intel, which was free to continue its chip design work and find other customers, and those other customers, small start-ups instead of a large government project, were the leading edge of the computer revolution.

Cook left his job with Datapoint to go to Xerox, Advanced Products Division in Dallas, where he worked on Ethernet packet switching and a word processing machine that sold against Lanier and IBM. Xerox was gobbling up small companies and one of them was the disk drive company founded by Al Shugart and his partner, Finis Conner. Conner had been talking to Tandy about selling them his company’s mini-floppy drives for their TRS-80, but Conner knew Tandy did not have an operating system. At Xerox, he had been working with Randy Cook on a difficult problem they were having with the drives and realized Cook would be the ideal person to write an operating system for Tandy. Providing Tandy with a DOS was a way to get their business.

Cook recalls that he spent a week or so “getting calls from three entities trying to outbid and outmaneuver each other as to what they wanted and in all cases it was for me to write yet another DOS.” Cook’s work had heavily involved interfacing disk drives with computers, so he had the technical know-how to deliver a good product. He consulted with his bosses who let him negotiate his own contract.

“I agreed to a contract with Finis,” he recalls. “I was paid $10,000. For that ten grand, we negotiated back and forth. What I wanted was to retain ownership and he agreed to that. Tandy, in their communications with me, wanted to pay me directly. They wanted to own everything, but I said no, I think this is going somewhere, and I want to retain rights to it. Finis said it had to be royalty-free on their current computer. It was licensed for the Model I only, and that any enhancement I would have to handle myself through Tandy.” So, Randy Cook would create a DOS for Tandy, but Tandy would not own it. Tandy’s contract was with Finis Conner and gave them the right to duplicate the master and provide copies with sales of the TRS-80 Expansion Interface and disk drives.

Creating TRSDOS

Cook initially worked on the DOS by using a Z80 cross assembler he had written for his Datapoint machine and porting the code to the TRS-80 using a serial cable. He delivered what he thought of as preliminary versions to Tandy. Cook did not work onsite at Tandy and had no control over what they did. He was used to a different world, where professionals created software using a process of alpha and beta versions that were thoroughly tested by QA (Quality Assurance) teams. Tandy had no experience with developing or selling software, so they had no Quality Assurance or testing methods. Cook found they were giving out versions of the DOS that he had considered untested. The Model I was selling in big numbers and users were clamoring for the disk drives that would free them from slow and unreliable tape storage.

“One time it got out the door and it was two weeks later before I knew they’d sent out another 10,000 copies of what I was still testing,” Cook recalls.

Cook was dealing mainly with Van Chandler at Radio Shack. Chandler was a novice at software development, and it appeared that Radio Shack marketers were responding to pressure by sending out early versions to some users, a no-no in the professional systems world that Cook inhabited.

Chandler had come from Radio Shack’s own computer support group because they needed someone with technical expertise to oversee the development of products for the TRS-80. Cook says Chandler frequently came to his house to see how the work was going. On one occasion, while Chandler was at Cook’s house, he observed Cook running a large bulk eraser electromagnet around a disk to erase it before laying down a format on the disk. Chandler commented that Cook was doing it wrong. Chandler insisted that the proper way was to hold the diskette above the eraser, then pull the eraser down and release the button “otherwise, when you release the button, all the bits on the magnet will fall back on the floppy and you want them to fall on the floor.” Cook remembers this story as exemplifying the level of technical knowledge at Tandy at the time. Or it could be that Chandler had a very dry sense of humor, but Cook clearly doesn’t think so.

“The technical expertise was not there,” Cook says. “The only one who knew what he was doing was Steve (Leininger).”

The eager users who were snapping up disk drives as they became available knew nothing about the author of TRSDOS, but rumors soon spread through the user community that the Radio Shack DOS was buggy. The version most early buyers got was TRSDOS 2.0, which was originally shipped with 12 pages of cheaply copied documentation. Dick Miller, who, along with his wife, Jill, sold TRS-80 software as Miller Microcomputer Services, recalls that Radio Shack sent them a version 1.0 of TRSDOS in the spring of 1978 and that it didn’t work. It was quickly withdrawn and a 1.1 version appeared, but it also had serious problems. When the free space on the disk was used up, the next file would overwrite the directory, making the disk unreadable. The 2.0 version was stable, but these early copies that didn’t work put an immediate blemish on the reputation of TRSDOS.

Radio Shack never gave credit to its developers, but Cook found a way to let users know he was its author. In TRSDOS 2.1 and 2.2, if you held down the R and V keys (Randy Cook’s first two initials) immediately after keying BOOT/SYS.WHO at the TRSDOS prompt, a message popped up that said “RANDY COOK.” Actually, Cook had used a tool to automatically embed his name in numerous places. Later when Radio Shack found out about this subterfuge, they searched out all occurrences of RANDY COOK and changed them to TANDY CORP. The number of characters had to stay the same because Radio Shack did not have the source code and could not reassemble the DOS; they could only alter the characters that were already there. It is just a coincidence that RANDY COOK and TANDY CORP are the same length. According to Cook, there was a reason, besides letting users know his name, for doing this. Since Cook owned the code and the copyright, he was protecting his rights according to the limited legal decisions of the day as to software ownership, by embedding his name. It was also a common practice for programmers to put their names somewhere in the code, so Cook saw nothing strange or wrong in what he had done.

Don French told us he didn’t think it was the right thing for Cook to do but admitted that he and Steve Leininger had thought about embedding their initials in the Level I ROM.

According to someone who worked at Tandy at the time, the discovery of this message was the cause of major friction between Tandy managers and Cook, and Cook himself said the Radio Shack people were “livid” over it. Radio Shack did not acknowledge Cook’s ownership of TRSDOS and their First Edition manual, TRSDOS & Disk BASIC Reference Manual, has this Software Copyright Notice:

All TRSDOS and Disk BASIC software is copyrighted by Radio Shack. Radio Shack grants each TRSDOS user the privilege of making BACKUP diskettes of TRSDOS and DISK BASIC, provided such diskettes are solely for personal use.

Cook points out that in this notice Radio Shack was also trying to claim ownership of the BASIC, and this was clearly the property of Microsoft. Bill Gates had made a deal with John Roach to supply BASIC, but as with all of Microsoft’s agreements, Gates retained ownership for his company. “They put this big blanket out over all of us,” Cook says, referring to the infamous copyright notice. At that time, a copyright notice was mandatory to protect any work and the author of the notice obviously felt safer taking the broadest view of what was being protected. However, Cook saw these actions as a violation of his rights. He consulted with a lawyer, Gary Gilleman, who called Tandy on his behalf. Cook says after hearing from his attorney, the people at Radio Shack did not want to talk to him any more. Perhaps their lawyers told them not to. Ed Juge said Tandy, like most big companies, averaged a lawsuit a day against them and “had a whole floor full of lawyers.”

Despite the early bugs, TRSDOS had many innovations. Unlike CP/M, which was resident in memory once it was loaded, TRSDOS used overlays — parts of the code loaded from disk as needed and overwrote other parts of the memory containing code not needed for the current command. This made good use of limited memory, but also meant you had to have the DOS on a disk in a drive at all times so the overlays could load. If you had only one disk drive, then both the DOS and your application had to fit on that disk. The CP/M code was smaller than TRSDOS because it did less and relied more on external utility programs. Early disk drives were unreliable, so CP/M had been designed to load entirely into memory and remained there. TRSDOS, with its use of overlays, was unique, not just a rewrite of CP/M (a charge later leveled at MS-DOS). The DOS could run on a 16K system because of the overlays and still provide a host of features. Cook had learned the technique of using overlays in his days doing device drivers for Datapoint.

However, the advanced design features of TRSDOS could not overcome its poor reputation in the user community. Users found that a disk formatted on their drive often could not be read by someone else’s drive. Even software disks sold by Radio Shack sometimes could not be read by customers. The problem was compounded by the fact that a myriad of third party sellers had jumped into the drive business. Many of the third party drive sellers bought off-the-shelf drive mechanisms from manufactures like Tandon, but built the power supplies and cases themselves. These power supplies sometimes did not match Tandy specs. Drive rotation speeds varied. Cook had to redo his format routine to allow more “slop” in drive tolerances.

The impression that the original TRSDOS was “utter garbage” (as one web site devoted to the TRS-80 would later state) has echoed through the years. The work of Randy Cook, who had created software used by the Apollo astronauts, whose hand was in the design of the chip from which the Z80 descended, who was a pioneer in interfacing computers with disk drives, was dismissed by users who knew nothing of the story behind TRSDOS. The result of this poor reputation was that technically astute users began to fix and enhance TRSDOS. The DOS wars had began.

Alternatives to TRSDOS

The first attempt at remaking the DOS came from two programmers from Denver who started a company called Apparat. They offered their product, NewDos, for sale as an alternative to TRSDOS. Apparat specified that users had to have TRSDOS to legally buy NewDos, an acknowledgement that what they were selling was a reworked TRSDOS with some new utilities. The documentation they provided, badly reproduced copy from a dot matrix printer, covered only the modifications they had made. They thought this was a way around infringing on Radio Shack’s supposed copyright on TRSDOS. Dick Miller was the original East Coast distributor and gave this alternate DOS its name, NewDos. NewDos had many features that programmers liked. It had been built on the TRSDOS code and buyers soon discovered Randy Cook’s name still embedded in it.

NewDOS/80 was the first of the alternate operating systems for the TRS-80; this ad appeared in the February, 1981 issue of 80 Microcomputing.

Tandy did not react kindly to the news that someone had created an alternate DOS for the TRS-80. Tandy considered suing Apparat for what could have been an infringement on the TRSDOS copyright, but whose copyright was it? Cook says Tandy told him they would have to have him in on any lawsuit. This might have given Cook some leverage in getting Tandy to admit that he was the true copyright holder, but, according to Cook, before Tandy could sue, Apparat turned the tables and threatened to sue Tandy. They contacted Tandy and told them they had a list of bug fixes for TRSDOS and would give Tandy the fixes for a fee. Apparat claimed to own the bug fixes and said they would sue if Tandy attempted to change the code on their own to correct these errors in the DOS. A letter from Apparat’s attorney spelled out each bug and declared that each fix undertaken by Apparat was now the copyrighted work of Apparat!

Cook recalls several meetings at Tandy headquarters to discuss this situation. “I said, well, you know, this isn’t going to fly — fixing the system that I wrote. I’ll develop my own bug fixes.” But Tandy was actually afraid of Appart’s threat and told Cook they would probably have to deal with Apparat and purchase the bug fixes. Cook was furious that Tandy would give in to what he considered to be blackmail. He was left in a position where he could not fix his own program, but also could not take action against Apparat for copyright infringement since both he and Tandy claimed to hold the copyright to TRSDOS.

However, the Apparat threat may have been more bluff and bravado than real. The authors of NewDos undertook a complete rewrite of the code. They then released a new product called NewDos/80. It was complete with its own original and detailed user manual. NewDos/80 used new types of commands that were obscure to the uninitiated, but added a lot of power. It used a comma as a switch after commands to create custom meanings (parameters). It also had a command called PDRIVE that let you redirect just about everything, an early implementation of “device independence.”

Here are some actual NewDos/80 commands:

COPY,0,1,10/06/81,FMT,NDMW

DUMP,PROGFILE/CMD:0,5200H,63F3H,5530H

LCDVR,Y,Y

All the TRSDOS variants used parameters after some commands but none with the enthusiasm of NewDos/80. Commands like these would never appeal to users who just wanted to get on with their application, but the techie types of the sort who love command line UNIX delighted in controlling their computer with these obscure entries. Besides, NewDos was very reliable and solid. Apparat also sold hardware, including TRS-80 computers. While most Radio Shacks were owned by Tandy, there were some franchised dealers who could get TRS-80s and discount them to customizers. Apparat installed its own memory and Tandon disk drives in the computers it sold. They also sold NewDos/80 through their ads in 80 Micro. The price for NewDos/80 was listed in a 1982 ad as $149.00. Another ad in the same issue offered NewDos/80 for $139.95. This ad proclaims “Apparat’s long-awaited successor to NewDos is here! This is not an enhanced version of NewDos, but a completely new product.”

Down in sunny Florida, another drama was unfolding that would result in yet another alternate DOS. Three young men, whose friendship extended back to high school when they all bagged groceries at the local Win-Dixie, were excitedly learning all they could about the TRS-80 Model I and hanging out at the Boynton Beach Radio Shack. Steve Pagliarulo, who would prove to be one of the most talented of the self-taught Z80 programmers, had spent money he’d made from doing architectural drawings to buy a Model I, getting the Level II upgrade as soon as it became available. His buddies from school, Mark Lautenschlager and Todd Tollhurst, were also enthusiasts and the three of them spent long hours, sometimes all night, with the Model I learning all about TRSDOS and the TRS-80’s inner workings. Lautenschlager had made friends with the Radio Shack manager and when Radio Shack opened a Computer Center in nearby Hollywood, this same manager was put in charge. The Computer Center became Lautenschlager’s new hangout. One day when he was there, he met someone who would change the course of his life.

Larry Studdard was a middle-aged businessman who had a wholesale sheet metal business, but he was interested in the new microcomputers because the Burroughs computer he had did not do what he wanted. He wanted a program that would better calculate his sales, including taking into account the waste that resulted when the metal was cut. He began talking to Lautenschlager and saw in the 18-year old someone who could help him. Before long, Lautenschlager and his buddies were working on Studdard’s problem. They did such a good job, Studdard suggested going into business selling programs to other small operators like himself.

Lautenschlager, Pagliarulo, and Tollhurst were all attending Palm Beach Junior College and chafing under the computer science programs they were taking. Lautenschlager had convinced his Fortran teacher to let him write his programs with the TRS-80, but she didn’t see any future in microcomputers. After all, the big computer the college used could execute instructions so much faster. But to Lautenschlager, the TRS-80 gave him control over what it did and that was so much more important.

“This thing (the TRS-80) represented something that would change the world,” he says, as he recalled his feelings at the time. So when Larry Studdard, a self-proclaimed hillbilly metal dealer, gave this 18-year old the opportunity to go into business with the very computer his instructor scorned, he dropped out of college to join Studdard. Pagliarulo also dropped out and joined the company. Later, Tollhurst too came to work for the company they christened Micro Systems Software.

Lautenschlager credits Pagliarulo with the major programming talent at Micro Systems Software. As he describes it: “It became obvious right from the beginning that Steve Pagliarulo was a special talent... he just had a mind that worked that way. Everything about the computer just made perfect sense to him... this was a guy who could really write some amazing code.” They set to work on their first product, an inventory control system, working in a back room at Studdard’s sheet metal business, with paychecks supplied by Studdard. Pagliarulo and Studdard were the owners, with an understanding that Lautenschlager would get part ownership at some time down the road.

Fate intervened one day as Pagliarulo worked on a program and discovered that the variable length record feature in BASIC did not work. He traced the error not to BASIC, but to a bug in TRSDOS. He quickly wrote a patch for TRSDOS to fix the problem, but was curious as to what else was wrong with the DOS. He began disassembling it, finding more bugs. Because of their friendship with the manager at the Radio Shack Computer Center, the Micro Systems crew knew that Randy Cook was the author of TRSDOS and they had phone numbers for people at Tandy. One day, Pagliarulo called Fort Worth and asked to speak to Cook, with the intention of providing helpful information about how to fix the bugs in TRSDOS. It took many attempts before actually getting the TRSDOS author on the phone, but finally Steve Pagliarulo found himself talking to Randy Cook. The ensuing conversation was the springboard to a change in plans from selling business software to marketing an operating system.

According to Lautenschlager, Pagliarulo attempted to discuss the bugs with Cook, but got nowhere. Cook blew off Pagliarulo without a thank-you. Cook himself does not recall any such conversation and since he didn’t work in Dallas or directly for Radio Shack, he’s not sure this actually happened.

Pagliarulo, who Lautenschlager describes as a “New York Italian,” had a temper. He did not like the treatment he’d gotten and he was sure Cook’s DOS was full of bugs and that he, Steve Pagliarulo, was the guy to fix them. So he went home full of rage and determination and in one weekend of unrelenting hours at the keyboard, came back with the first version of DOSPlus. Since TRSDOS was at version 2.3, Pagliarulo called his DOS 3.0 as a way to show it was above the level of TRSDOS. This first version was Pagliarulo’s way of proving he could do bug-free programming and trump the Radio Shack product. He never intended it to be a program for sale.

Larry Studdard, the businessman, saw it differently. If his programmers were irritated with the bugs in TRSDOS, wouldn’t other people feel the same way?

So DOSPlus became a product, and Lautenschlager, the only member of the team who could write with any degree of skill, took the program back to the dorm room where he was living, having re-enrolled in college, and wrote a manual for it. Since Micro Systems Software did not have a good printer, Lautenschlager took the nineteen-page manual he’d written on disk to the Radio Shack Computer Center to use their printer. While it was printing, a man asked what it was. Lautenschlager told him it was a manual for an alternate DOS, to replace the buggy TRSDOS. The man asked the price and Lautenschlager made up a price — $99. The man reached into his wallet and gave Lautenschlager a $100 bill. He went off with a disk that Lautenschlager had quickly duplicated and with a manual printed on green-bar paper. That was the first sale of DOSPlus.

It was an auspicious beginning for a product that proved very successful. Many people did want a replacement for TRSDOS and they didn’t want to learn the obscure commands of NewDos/80. DOSPlus was the answer. Lautenschlager created the ads for DOSPlus that ran in 80 Micro and other publications, many of them clever and far more sophisticated than the competition. Micro Systems Software also got bundling deals with add-on providers, supplying DOSPlus with disk drives and an alternate Expansion Interface from LNW Research. The young men who had dropped out of Junior College to create software were soon driving around town in Lincoln Continentals, wearing expensive clothes, and having the time of their lives. Larry Studdard, who was a Zig Ziglar true believer, liked to motivate people with lavish perks. He never paid a lot, but the money that poured into Micro Systems Software was used for all the extras that appealed to the youthful crew that made DOSPlus a profitable product.

While others were selling what Randy Cook saw as rewritten versions of his original work, Cook was trying to make money on it himself. Radio Shack wanted extras out of Cook who naturally wanted to be paid for any additional work he did. He says he had a meeting with Roach in which Roach signed the only contract Cook ever had with Tandy. It was for use of the debugger “hooks” used in the Expansion Interface to get it to boot disk drives, and was to pay a royalty of 50 cents a copy for each Expansion Interface sold. “Not one penny did they ever pay,” says Cook.

At one point, Cook wanted $247,000.00 to do an expanded DOS for future models with the rights going to Tandy. Radio Shack said it wasn’t worth that. But Cook’s figure probably wasn’t out of line. When Apple sued Franklin Computers to protect the Apple II operating system, Apple put a value of $700,000.00 dollars on the development of Apple DOS.

“The situation was that I had a son who was dying of cancer — I’m dealing with that and I’m dealing with a full time job at Xerox. I just didn’t have the emotional drive… it was very stressful … I didn’t have what it took to get to an attorney and pursue it. I let a lot of things happen to me by not getting legal help,” Cook explains.

Cook’s son was sick for over three years, but eventually beat the disease. Because of the medical needs of his son, Cook says, he turned down Bill Gates’ offer to make Cook the head of Microsoft’s operating system efforts in Albuquerque because it would have meant moving away from excellent medical facilities his son needed.

Ed Juge told us Tandy eventually hired programmers to write a new TRSDOS from the ground up for the Model III. According to Juge, the programmers Radio Shack hired to rewrite the DOS worked from the program without access to the code; they reverse engineered the original TRSDOS, recreating the functionality without using the same code. The Model III TRSDOS needed to maintain some backward compatibility with the original so Model III owners could use the large body of software that had been created to run on Model I TRSDOS. Cook, who saw things differently from Tandy management, says the work was derivative from his original TRSDOS.

Van Chandler was replaced by George Robertson, who wanted to play hardball with everyone including Cook. Robertson told Cook that if Radio Shack programmers changed more than 10 or 15 percent of the code (Cook could not recall the exact percentage), then Cook’s copyright would no longer apply. He made it plain that Tandy was not going to pay Cook anything for Model III TRSDOS even if it was based on Cook’s original code. Cook and his lawyer researched the matter and found there was a case for what Robertson told Cook.

Randy Cook, wanting to hang onto his copyright but unable to take on a huge company like Tandy, released his own TRS-80 operating system in 1980 through his own company, Virtual Technology. He called it VTOS (Virtual Technology Operating System). It built on the work he’d done for TRSDOS 2.1 and allowed him to fix the bugs that Apparat had brought to his attention, but without using Apparat’s fixes. He had hoped that Radio Shack would pay him for the code and release it as a new version of TRSDOS, but negotiations broke down under the hard-nosed Robertson, and Cook decided his only option was to release VTOS as his own product.

Cook has a fascinating story about what happened to him one day when his lawyer, a computer hobbyist, suggested he come to a North Texas TRS-80 user group meeting in Dallas. The lawyer, Gary Gilleman, noted that one of the speakers at this meeting would be “Randy Cook” only it wasn’t the Randy Cook he had been working with. The lawyer told Cook “let me handle this” and the two went into the college auditorium where several thousand people were sitting, and tables along the side were filled with various TRS-80 products. Excitement built as “Randy Cook” got up to speak. The man spoke with authority, holding the crowd’s attention. Gilleman and the real Cook, sitting in the audience, asked the phony “Randy Cook” questions. As Cook described the incident in an email, “I toyed with him and asked a few questions for a while, sort of like a cat toying with a mouse just before it kills the mouse and eats it.” Gilleman went up to the front of the room and talked to the audience, who knew him because he had been one of the founders and had done the legal work to set up the group. He commented on the things “Randy Cook” had said, and noted that he was the lawyer for Randy Cook, whom he had known for some years, and ended with “… the man who just spoke, I have never seen before in my life.” The crowd was stunned. The imposter was escorted out.

Cook says “it was an interesting experience.” He had brought a trunk full of copies of VTOS, which he had just released for sale. The crowd spilled out to the parking lot where Cook and the lawyer began selling the copies from the car trunk, the first sales of VTOS, and Cook signed autographs for hours. They sold everything they had in the trunk, with checks, credit card slips and money piling up. It was an incredible way to make those first sales.

Despite having a lot of features, VTOS was never as popular as the other alternate DOS’s. Some users objected to a copy protection scheme that prevented copying the master disk. (You could make copies for use, but those copies could not themselves be copied.) A full page ad in the September 1980 issue of 80 Microcomputing says it would work with all manner of drives: mini-floppy, 8 inch, double density, 80 track, and Winchester (hard drive). It also offered faster loading time (up to 1400% faster) and it included a “spooler” so the user could run a program and print at the same time…an early form of multitasking. According to Tim Mann, former programmer for Logical Systems, Cook eventually stopped supporting VTOS and it was left to his distributor, Dennis Brent, to update it. Cook says he had a falling out with Brent over personal matters involving Cook’s divorce, among other things.

The Max-80 was a TRS-80 compatible computer made by Lobo. They hired Randy Cook to create a DOS for it that would run TRS-80 software.

During this time Cook was getting a lot of phone calls, some from customers around the world who had managed to locate him, and some from companies that wanted to do business with him. One of the companies that called was Lobo Drives. Cook talked to Roger Billings who wanted some of the functionality of VTOS so they could sell a clone Expansion Interface (the LX-80); they later made a complete TRS-80 clone computer called the Max-80. The Lobo people wanted Cook to provide the modified software they needed for the LX-80, since their disk controller wasn’t fully compatible with Radio Shack hardware. The working arrangement here ended up in misunderstanding as Lobo thought they had bought rights to VTOS 4.0 and Cook says they only bought the drivers they needed under an agreement that those drivers would belong exclusively to Lobo. However, Cook says Lobo started selling VTOS, which was not part of the agreement.

Cook also did business with Ricky Steele of ACS who wanted to provide VTOS along with hardware he was selling. Cook licensed the program to Steele, but his lawyer said he should protect himself somehow. VTOS had some copy protection built in, but Cook added more protection on the master copy he gave to ACS. He had what he calls a “postage meter” that counted how many copies had been made. He even allowed them to go over by 20%. Steele came to him one day and complained that they couldn’t make any more copies. Cook asked if they had any rejects. They hadn’t, so Cook told them they had exceeded their copy limit. The company was furious about this, but came back and asked to buy more copies. Cook put another limit on the copies, but soon was getting no payments. Steele told him “we figured out your little trick.” He had eliminated the write function from the drive that held the master copy so that it could not decrement Cook’s counter, and they were making illegal copies. Cook sued but the company went bankrupt and never paid.

Cook had further troubles. One day he went to see his lawyer to see how things were progressing on getting him something for the Model III TRSDOS, which he believed was based on his own original TRSDOS, and found the formerly modest office was being refitted with more elegant surroundings. Gilleman told him he had a new and plush client. It was Radio Shack, but Gilleman insisted he did not have a conflict of interest in representing both Cook and Tandy. Cook did not see it that way and called the lawyer a liar and stomped out of the office… feeling betrayed by just about everyone.

LDOS began as a product of disk drive maker Lobo; this ad ran in the July/August 1981 issue of 80US Journal.

Lobo and Cook parted company too, but Lobo still needed someone to finish the work. They contacted Bill Schroeder, a programmer whose company, Galactic Software, had done some custom work for Radio Shack. Schroeder brought in Roy Soltoff who was the programmer for another company, Misosys. Under the guidance of Schroeder and Soltoff, VTOS evolved into LDOS (Lobo Disk Operating System). Schroeder explained in an interview with 80US magazine in July 1981 that “Randy Cook, the author of VTOS 4.0, was originally working for Lobo, but failed to complete the project.” Starting with VTOS, Schroeder and Soltoff “tore it completely apart, created pure source code out of it, and began a massive modification project” (according to Schroeder). Soltoff did most of the programming and Schroeder documented the system in a huge manual in a three-ring binder. For the issue in which the Schroeder interview appeared, Lobo Drives took out a full-page color ad on the inside front cover. The ad has a big headline reading “Lobo’s New LDOS Puts Muscle in your TRS-80.” A color picture shows a gym locker room with cartoon guys with computer heads practicing weight lifting, taking showers and other macho activity.

Bill Schroeder was a successful businessman who originally bought his TRS-80 to help track his investments. He began writing software and found, as he puts it, that he had “an innate ability” at programming. He started out, like most of the other TRS-80 programmers, writing software he needed for himself. He soon was selling some of his programs to Tandy, including the first terminal program (for communicating over phone lines through a modem), and he started Galactic Software to sell what Tandy didn’t buy. He created and sold a mail list program and a data base program, among others. By the time Lobo contacted him, he was well known in the TRS-80 community. Galactic Software was doing well and had an office with four or five employees.

Schroeder applied his expertise to the Lobo project which he said included writing drivers for their Expansion Interface, and working with the rewritten operating system that had begun with VTOS and evolved into LDOS. The creation of the DOS for Lobo inspired him to found a new company to market LDOS. Logical Systems Inc. was a joint venture between Misosys (Roy Soltoff’s company, in Alexandria, VA), Galactic Software Ltd. (Schroeder’s company, in Mequon, WI), and Lobo Drives (in Goleta, CA). They came up with a company name that began with “L” that could substitute for Lobo. The intention was to improve LDOS and make money selling it to TRS-80 owners. Schroeder was the decision-maker, funding the company with his money, and Roy Soltoff was again the lead programmer. Logical Systems took over the same office space formerly used by Galactic and hired Galactic’s employees. Logical Systems also inherited what they regarded as the rights to VTOS from Lobo.

In this 1982 ad, LDOS claims to be number one and have “massive volume.”

The new LDOS offered some tantalizing features. It had great disk support, since it had been originally created for disk drive maker Lobo. With LDOS, users could connect up to eight drives, using five or eight inch floppies or a hard drive with as much as a 10 MB partition (of course, these features had also been in VTOS). They also offered a toll-free phone number and full time staff to answer questions. Schroeder and Soltoff were among the best financed and most successful of the TRS-80 programmers.

The same 1982 issue of 80 Microcomputing that offered the newly-created NewDos/80 also featured a full page ad for LDOS. Giant letters “LDOS” filled the upper part of the page and below it upper case words screamed out “WE ARE NOW NUMBER 1.” The price was $10 cheaper than NewDos/80. The ad said that “Our massive volume has allowed us to reduce our price to just $129” – reduced from $169. It is doubtful that LDOS actually sold in “massive volume” (there really was no massive volume in the TRS-80 world), although later its owners would make a deal with Tandy – one of the few independent software sellers to do so – that would make it the ultimate winner in the DOS wars.

Meanwhile, another DOS appeared in the TRS-80 arena, UltraDOS, introduced at a computer show in Chicago in October of 1980. Vernon Hester, our friend from the Detroit area TRS-80 users group, was the author of this DOS, released by Level IV Products and originally called Level IV DOS. It worked exclusively with single-density Model I disks. Like the other DOS writers, Vernon began by making changes to an existing DOS. He had tinkered so much with NewDOS that those who knew him began to request he give them his patched version. Finally he decided to do his own DOS. He emailed us that “The original UltraDOS (I still have a copy), booted and performed an AUTO LIST CR. CR was a text file that displayed ‘Modules of this DOS were copyrighted by Randolph Cook, 1978. Modifications and enhancements by Vernon B. Hester, 1980.’ Chuck Cheseldine did not like giving Randy Cook credit and insisted that I remove it. This was the impetus for me working around the clock…” to prepare for the Chicago show and ensure that UltraDOS was not like NewDos 2.1.

Vernon quickly established a reputation as a brilliant programmer. David remembers the first time he met Vernon at the local Detroit area users group. David had given a demonstration on the string function in BASIC. Vernon approached him after the demonstration and wanted to know how to renumber a BASIC program. David explained what he knew about line numbers and pointers in BASIC. We didn’t see Vernon for a few more meetings. Finally, he showed up with a program he’d written that did much more than renumbering; it could single-step through a BASIC program, monitor variables and move blocks of code around. It was called BOSS and it became his first commercial program, sold on tape for Level II BASIC.

After acquiring disk drives, Vernon began tinkering with NewDos, disassembling it and rewriting it. Initially, the method he used was called “zapping.” The word “zap” had filtered in from the CP/M world and referred to changing code directly on the disk by changing the hex numbers stored on the disk. You could zap anything: text, the directory, graphics, or code, but the fun was in zapping code to change the way the operating system worked. Vern started by using the SuperZAP program provided with NewDos. Along the way, he wrote a better one. Zap programs showed you the contents of the disk, a sector at a time, in hex numbers and in ASCII characters (text). You could move the cursor to the desired hex number and “zap it” to whatever you wanted. Many considered SuperZAP the ultimate ZAP program for the TRS-80. Later, many turned to a program created by another Detroit-area programmer, Kim Watt, which was part of his best-selling Super Utility. Vern’s first ZAP program was in BASIC, but later he wrote a version using assembler.

Early fixes to operating systems and programs were frequently sent to the customer as “zap sheets.” As frightening as this sounds, customers then were very curious about their systems and had learned about them from the ground up, so they could cope with doing zaps that someone had worked out for them. It’s hard to imagine anyone in the Windows era making low level changes to their operating system in this way, but it was common for TRS-80 users.

Hester worked with Kim Watt on something they called “FastDOS” because it booted in about a second. This project got far enough along to demonstrate at the Dearborn Computer Club but didn’t ever become a marketable product, partly because Watt left the area for Texas to team up with Powersoft and partly because Hester’s patron at Level IV, Chuck Cheseldine, did not approve of the collaboration. Watt himself became something of a legend in the TRS-80 world for authoring Super Utility, which incorporated his ZAP program as well as other utilities that let users repair files and do backups of “backup-proof” software, with support for all the DOS’s. Super Utility could repair various parts of the disk that might go bad, and could do a “format without erase” that sometimes got back lost data. Although Super Utility could back up software that had protection against backups, Super Utility itself could NOT be backed up. Buyers could order a second Super Utility disk from Watt’s Breeze Computing for $5.

The December 1982 edition of 80 Micro featured an interview with Vernon Hester in which columnist Paul Weiner wrote, “Kim Watt once told me what a luxury it was to work with Vernon Hester. He said you didn’t need a disassembler with Vernon around, because Vernon could read a page of op-codes (ZAP screen) as easily as mnemonics (assembler code). He also said ‘Vernon is the king of TRS-80 disk I/O. I know some people have attributed that honor to me, but Vernon is the real one.’” The column was in the form of a Q & A on disk I/O which was quite technical, but was clearly of interest to many readers who were eager to learn from the “king of TRS-80 Disk I/O.”

Vernon was always generous about sharing his knowledge with others and he was seldom if ever involved in feuds or arguments over who owned what. But he finally had some disagreements with Level IV about the marketing and direction of UltraDOS. They parted company with Hester not being sure who really owned it. The parting was friendly, Hester recalls. He remained friends with Chuck Cheseldine, the owner of Level IV.

Multidos, programmed by Vernon Hester who worked on it part-time, offered a lot for its low price.

Eventually, Vernon created another DOS – Multidos – and it was the only one that was directly read and write compatible with all the others (except for Model III TRSDOS, but even that could be read with a utility program). The name was suggested by Charlie Bulter of the The Alternate Source, another Michigan company that published a computer journal out of Lansing. Vernon released Multidos through his own company, Cosmopolitan Electronics, Inc. Vernon’s DOS could read disks created by any of the others, with Model III TRSDOS the only exception and it had become something of an orphan anyhow. The programmers Tandy had hired to redo Randy Cooks’ DOS had not produced a product that pleased the old users since it could not directly read files created on a Model I. It could only use Model I files through use of a Convert utility. New buyers who had never had a Model I did not have a problem with this, but plenty of old users did. All the alternate DOS writers elected to do Model III versions that were compatible with the existing Model I DOS’s. None could directly read Model III TRSDOS disks.

While Multidos couldn’t read or write directly to Model III, his VFU (Versatile File Utility) could copy files back and forth. Radio Shack finally introduced something called TRSDOS 2.7DD that was a backward port of their Model III TRSDOS to the Model I. The Model I was discontinued by then but Radio Shack needed a DOS to support the double density add-in kit they were selling for the Model I Expansion Interface. This let Model I users store twice as much data on a disk, the same capability you got with the Model III.

Slugging it Out in the Magazines

The DOS ads always reflected the war-like competition among the alternate DOS providers. The ads for DOSplus in 1981 were highly technical. The June issue of 80 Micro carried a two-column ad that began with a small print listing of DOSplus’ features. There were 31 numbered items on the list. Then it went on to list 29 features in the DOSPlus rewritten BASIC. A blue box with big type read “STEP ON THOSE DOS BUGS!! ORDER TODAY!!” The price at that time was only $99.00.

An early ad for DOSPLUS in 80 Microcomputing magazine, June of 1981

The intensity of the competition picked up as the DOS writers kept refining their product. An ad for DOSPlus that appeared in the Sep/Oct 1981 issue of 80US Journal offered $100 to anyone who could find a bug in DOSPlus (Can anyone imagine Microsoft making such an offer for their Windows products?). Their ad explained why DOSPlus was better than the rest and concluded “We have it all. Features galore AND error-free operation. If we’re wrong and you can prove it, we’ve got a brand new $100 bill for you.” Mark Lautenschlager says they only paid off on this once, although he felt they should have paid off more often. It was left to Steve Pagliarulo to decide which of the user reports were actually bugs and he took a conservative approach.

By March ’82, the DOSPlus ad in 80 Microcomputing (the same issue that had the screaming LDOS ad) proclaims “Our competitors have spent months and thousands of dollars trying to duplicate it and the best they could produce are bug-ridden patch jobs.” The price for DOSPlus in this ad had risen to $149.95 with the notation, “still the lowest priced DOS.”

But that wasn’t true. Not even close. Page 175 of the same magazine has Vernon’s Multidos ad, from his company, Cosmopolitan Electronics. His price? The ad reads: “Only $79.95 (watch the competition squirm!)” They must have squirmed when they not only saw his low price, but also the amazing ability of Multidos to work with just about any kind of disk or disk format. His ad explains it as follows: “Multidos will permit you to grab a formatted diskette, shove it into a track-compatible drive, and write to it — no matter if it is single density, double density, or DBLDOS density. This is possible because of Multiodos’ automatic density recognition which includes diskettes formatted by DBLDOS.”

DBLDOS was another DOS supplied by Percom with their Doubler board that turned single density drives into double density. The doubler, along with DBLDOS, cost $169.95 and users had to install the card themselves inside the Expansion Interface. Opening the Expansion Interface, of course, would void the 90-day Radio Shack warranty, but many users didn’t care. Percom’s ads said DBLDOS was “a TRSDOS-compatible disk operating system.” It didn’t last long because the DOS writers all scrambled to bring out versions that supported double density. DOSPlus was first to release a DOS version that could read and write in double density. NewDos also added the ability to read and write double density, but only by using cryptic commands. Later, Vernon Hester figured out how to automatically detect density and shared the information with Kim Watt. Soon all the DOS’s had density recognition and there was no role for DBLDOS.

The Percom Doubler let the TRS-80 format disks for twice the capacity of the standard single-density disk; it cost $220.

Percom also brought out yet another DOS called MicroDOS for the Model I, but it never gained much popularity.

The demand for more storage space continued to grow, so products and upgrades kept appearing to satisfy the demand. One of NewDos’ original claims to fame was that it let you format a disk with 40 tracks instead of the original 35 tracks. This let users put more data on a disk. Radio Shack supplied 35-track Shugart drives that could not format a disk for 40 tracks. This gave an edge to the independent drive makers whose drives could do 40 tracks.

One of the main functions of a DOS in those days was to format disks, and TRS-80 systems programmers had to deal with a variety of disk drive technologies. Disk drives had gone from 35 track, single-sided, single density, which could hold 80K, to 80 track double-sided, double density which could hold 720K. In the early days, there was something called a “flippy disk” which let you use both sides of a disk by formatting each side as a single-sided disk, without having to resort to punching additional holes in the disk jacket. Users wanting to save some money could buy standard floppy disks, then mail-order a custom hole punch device that guided them to correctly punch the sector-index hole and write-protect notch so a single-sided disk could be written to on both sides. The magnetic media in the jacket was coated on both sides, but the disk companies discouraged users from trying to convert the disks to double duty by claiming they only did quality control on one side. Users, however, found the hand-punched disks generally worked fine, and meant they could flip the disk over and get two disks for the price of one.

An ad in a 1979 Kilobaud proclaimed “Mini disk drives now $385. Over $100 less than Radio Shack’s.” Another ad in the same magazine offered Pertec drives that “give you 40 tracks of storage versus the 35 track Radio Shack drive. The Pertec drive also has the flippy disk feature. When you have filled one side of the diskette, flip it over and use the other side.”

The bottom of the keyboard unit, with its unique serial number. The screw hole in the upper left contained the notorious “seal” (a drop of epoxy). Radio Shack said if the seal was broken, it would not honor its warranty.

Ed Juge confirms that Tandy had so many orders for disk drives at this time, they were way behind in filling them. They paid little attention to the competition because they were selling everything they could make.

Users built up collections of single-sided and single-density disks they still wanted to use when higher density and 80 track drives appeared. A DOS had to let users format disks for newer drives, but also read older disks and even format disks for the older drives. Suppose you had a double-density drive but wanted to send a file to another user who had a single-density drive? How would you create a disk he could read?

Users who read 80 Micro were monthly shown a barrage of ads for NewDos/80, DOSplus, LDOS and Multidos. Most of the technically aware buyers used one of the alternate DOS’s. DOSPlus also introduced a version for the Model II. An ad for it in the September 1982 issue of 80 US Journal states “DOSPLUS II replaces your OEM DOS with an ultra-sophisticated operating system that is 5 or more times faster, more reliable and is totally compatible with all standard business oriented software…”

The DOS ads, which openly insulted and challenged competitors, did not look like any software ad that would appear in the later Windows era. The companies that created the early software frequently consisted of one programmer, with perhaps a few part-time workers to xerox documentation and ship product. The programmer may also have written the ads. Most of the ads were full of technical details and bold claims. Later, as the corporate world bought PCs and the software industry consolidated into much bigger companies, ads got more sophisticated but less informative as ad agencies rather than programmers wrote the ads.

By September of 1982, Micro Systems Software ran an ad that said DOSplus could “read 40 track disks in 80 track drives” and was no longer claiming to be the lowest price. The ad was interesting for another reason too — it was a kind of “image ad” to get attention, without all the technical information. The ad, which appeared on the inside cover of 80 Micro, showed a cartoon man behind prison bars. The headline below says “They shouldn’t have touched my DOSplus.” the text underneath reads:

I only left my keyboard for a few minutes…when I returned, I found Stamitz from accounting and Miss Sashay from the secretarial pool fondling my DOSPLUS 3.4. Now if I’ve told them once, I’ve told them a hundred times…use my coffee cup. Borrow my keys to the employee lounge. Bend my paper clips but, leave my DOSPLUS alone!! Did they listen? Noooo! Well, I guess I lost my head. Both Stamitz and Sashay are doing fine. They should be released from the hospital any day now. For me, it’s an entirely different story.

Signed,

0076697

Mark Lautenschlager of Micro Systems Software created this clever ad for DOSPLUS that ran in several magazines in 1982.

Multidos ads continued to stress the low price, but also made claims, not only for the compatibility it offered, but also for the revised BASIC, which Vernon called Super BASIC. One of his most memorable ads featured cartoon chicks around the main body of the ad. The chicks were all saying “Cheap, Cheap.” The same ad said “Others claim to have a NEW BASIC, but their cumbersome archaic code cannot measure up to the speed and size of SUPER-BASIC.”

Multidos was both powerful and easy to use. Its visual file utility called VFU anticipated the later Windows File Manager; it let you mark the files you wanted to copy or move. David remembers discussing with Vernon the need for something like this which freed the user from having to type the names of files and possibly mistyping a character. This was the first File Manager in which the user selected files instead of typing commands, a feature users later came to take for granted.

Vernon Hester came to be so respected in the Detroit area TRS-80 community that those attending meetings at which Vernon was present would hang on every word he said. Theresa once observed a hush fall over the meeting hall as David and Vernon greeted each other and every ear in the place strained to hear what these two programming whizzes were saying.

A former club president left this message at a TRS-80 web site, remembering Vernon:

Vernon was amazing. He wrote the fastest Basic Interpreter (Multibasic) [Ed. Note: actually, it was called SuperBASIC] — so fast that at one meeting, he was challenged by a fellow from a commercial company to “benchmark” Multibasic against the compiler. I believe it was a large FOR/NEXT loop using an integer. Before the executable loaded, Multibasic was done. The vendor was a bit embarrassed and impressed and they tried a few others tests - and Multibasic blew them all away. Vernon worked as a purchasing agent for Ford Motor Company and taught himself about computers and Z80 assembler. I was a software programmer, also working for Ford, and Vernon’s code was so elegant, compact and efficient as to put me to shame. It’s been some years now, but he was a total gentlemen, always willing to help and so engrossed that his wife often found him asleep at the keyboard.

(from Johnn Audritsch, former president of the local Detroit area TRS-80 user group)

Another programmer from the Detroit-area user group, Robert Doerr, remembered Vernon as “one of the most intelligent men I’ve ever met.” He added that Vernon was also a nice person, always willing to share programming ideas. “His concepts,” said Doerr, “were way ahead of their time.” Doerr was a teenager when he meant Hester and contributed a game program to be given away with Multidos as an extra the way solitaire would later be included with Windows.

Like many early software authors, Vernon Hester made up his own ads. Multidos was not only versatile, it was also cheap.

Vernon rented a small office near Ann Arbor when he started Cosmopolitan Electronics, which was basically just him. At one time, he hired another programmer to work on Multidos, but he was never satisfied with anyone else’s work. One time he complained to us about his employee that, “all he does is make print-outs of the code.” Brilliant himself, he could not tolerate the fact that it took other people some time to come up to speed. He also hired young girls to package up orders and answer the phone, but Cosmopolitan Electronics was never much more than Vernon’s hang-out. The entire time Vernon worked on Multidos, he also had a full-time job with Ford Motor Company. He worked such long hours, it eventually ruined his marriage. When he moved to an apartment following the divorce, he had very little furniture, but in the center of the living room was a table set up with his TRS-80. His business, like so many others of the era, was mainly about his own love affair with the machine, and he continued to work on TRS-80 programs long after the TRS-80 was commercially dead. Years after the TRS-80 was gone and mostly forgotten, he told us he couldn’t stop working on it and had created yet another version of Multidos.

Getting disk drives freed you from the agonies of trying to load programs from cassette tape, but it also left you with a problem: all those programs you still wanted to use that were on tapes. Most BASIC programs would still work if you loaded BASIC, then tried to load the program from tape, but machine language programs would not load at all. The Model I was designed to come up in BASIC and look in the beginning of memory (4000H) for a tape program. But disk-based systems started looking at a higher address (5700H). The result was that the tape programs would load over the DOS, clobbering the system. DOSPlus had a command called TAPE that attempted to deal with this. It let you load your tape program and alter it so you could save it to a disk and run it from disk. This involved a lot of moving of code and wouldn’t work with everything. NewDos/80 had LMOFFSET which would do roughly the same thing. Users spending the money for a disk drive understandably hoped to be finished with loading from tape, but still had to jump through hoops to get their old tape programs saved to a disk in usable form.

Hard Drives

Another new wrinkle was stirring up the DOS wars even more. Hard drives had appeared. These used something called “Winchester technology” to store data on a sealed medium rather than the floppy disks of the day. The first ones were not aimed at lowly TRS-80 users, but at the “business computers,” the successors to the Altair that followed the S-100 bus standard and ran CP/M.

An ad from Morrow Designs that appeared in the February, 1980 Byte offers a 26 megabyte hard disk for $4995. The ad copy begins “Suddenly, S-100 microcomputers can easily handle 100 million bytes. Because Morrow Design now offers the first 26 megabyte hard disk memory for S-100 systems — the DISCUS M26 Hard Disk System.” The price included the operating system, CP/M 2.0. The ad also had pictures of the guts of the hard drive and a lot of technical details, including the fact that the product “features the Shugart SA4008 Winchester-type sealed media hard disk drive, in a handsome metal cabinet with fan and power supply.”

Al Shugart was a microcomputer pioneer whose name is all over early disk drive technology. His first company was Shugart Associates; their early ads touting the Shugart disk drive use the slogan “If it isn’t Shugart, it isn’t minifloppy.” The term “minifloppy” referred to the smaller five and a quarter inch diskettes rather than the expensive eight inch disks then in common use. Shugart went on to build hard drives and founded Seagate, another disk drive company, where he remained until 1999 when he was forced to resign by other board members. Shugart, ever feisty, stated he would not make it appear as if he resigned willingly. Later he became a venture capitalist, providing seed money for new ideas. He also involved himself in a number of other ventures.

As early as 1980, hard drives were available, but at a high price. This ad for the Morrow hard drive was in the February 1980 issue of Byte magazine.

When hard drives came on the scene, Tandy ignored them since, at nearly $5000, they were not a feasible add-on for a $600 computer. But that would change. The evolution of the Model I to the Model III, the explosion of business software for this system and the growing awareness that you could run out of room on a floppy disk, even though the amount of data you could squeeze onto a floppy kept increasing. Floppy drives were beginning to seem slow and unreliable, just as tape had. All this fueled a demand for a bigger, faster storage device.

The first hard drive we ever saw was being used by Victor Andrews at Soft Sector Marketing. Victor was at first the exclusive distributor for the software we created. He represented other software as well, including some games and a mail list program called Postman. Victor advertised in 80 Micro and other magazines and received back “bingo cards” from his ads — names of people who used the reader request cards in the magazine to request more information about Victor’s products. As a result, he had accumulated a large mailing list. The list had grown beyond what would fit on a floppy disk, so Victor bought a five megabyte hard drive to hold the names. It was a black box, about the size of a toaster oven, that sat on a table connected to a Model III by a ribbon cable. A single-sided, single-layer DVD (typically used for storage in the late 1990s) could hold about 1000 times more data than that clunky machine storing Victor’s mail list.

But before Victor or anyone else with a TRS-80 could have a hard drive, there had to be a DOS that understood hard drives. Radio Shack never did update TRSDOS for hard drive use. Instead, they began to sell LDOS, whose authors had jumped on the hard drive bandwagon early and created a “hard disk version” of LDOS. DOSplus followed and teamed up with a hard drive maker, Tandon, to offer its hard disk version. Eventually Multidos also had a hard disk version, but only late in the game. When LDOS came out with a hard drive version, Vernon studied it so he could maintain compatibility. Hard drives were never a big item for TRS-80 owners, selling mainly to business owners like Victor who had a real need for them. None of the TRS-80 models ever came with a hard drive, nor was there any provision to install one internally; they were always external and had to be cabled to the TRS-80. Getting a hard drive meant you had to pick an operating system. Although you could “dual boot” between two different operating systems on a TRS-80 hard drive, it was not an easy thing to set up and most users didn’t bother. By contrast, changing operating systems in a floppy-only environment was just a matter of rebooting with a different operating system disk. Toward the end of the TRS-80 Model 4’s lifespan, a few independent dealers were squeezing hard drives inside the Model 4 case, but this was without any official Tandy blessing. Making computers with internal hard drives standard didn’t start until the IBM XT and its descendants appeared.

DOS Wars and the Model 4

The DOS wars continued through the Model III years and took a turn with the release of the Model 4 and 4P in 1983. Tandy had by this time realized its Model III TRSDOS was not popular and elected to take it no further. Perhaps it was a bit of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” but Tandy decided to buy itself a better DOS. They bought the rights to LDOS, the same DOS that had begun life as VTOS, a product of the same Randy Cook whose work they had previously rejected.

Micro Systems Software also tried to get the Tandy contract, with Lautenschlager and Studdard making many trips to Fort Worth to talk to Ed Juge and others at Tandy Center, hoping the company would buy rights to DOSPlus. When that didn’t happen, they still wanted to have a Model 4 DOSPLUS to sell to their customers who would be buying the new machine. Without a Model 4 product, there wouldn’t be much of a future for their company. But Pagliarulo wasn’t sure he wanted to create another version of DOSPLUS. He had created the first one because of the flaws in TRSDOS, but this new incarnation of TRSDOS wasn’t bad. So, as a compromise, Micro Systems released “6.0 Plus,” a collection of enhancements to BASIC and a suite of disk utilities, designed to run on and support TRSDOS 6.0. It cost $49.95, and the brisk sales of this finally convinced Pagliarulo that he should write an entire Model 4 version of DOSPLUS.

Although Model 4 DOSPLUS sold well, the people at Micro Systems felt cheated by Bill Schroeder who had somehow been able to pull off the deal with Tandy that they had hoped to get for themselves. The rivalry between Micro Systems Software and Logical Systems was thick and heavy.

Vernon Hester too created a Model 4 version of his Multidos, but it wasn’t compatible with the Tandy-supported Logical Systems DOS. He was late getting it out, and it did not sell many copies. His DOS was compatible with the Model 3, but supported the 80-character screen and other enhancements of the Model 4 hardware. The advantage was that it could run Model 3 programs, and software could be easily adapted to run on Model 4 Multidos with the 80 character screen.

The Triumph of Logical Systems Inc

In the Spring of 1983, Logical Systems, owner of LDOS, moved into a huge new headquarters, on a wave of prosperity from the Tandy contract. They received royalties for over 400,000 copies of TRSDOS 6.0, giving them the cash to make their new digs a state-of-the-art 10,000 square foot building on four acres in a suburb of Milwaukee. They threw a big bash to celebrate and invited such industry luminaries as Wayne Green, Bill Barden (a well-known author of books on computers), and Harv Pennington, who published a series of “mysteries” books for TRS-80 owners. They also invited the public. In the pages of the LDOS Quarterly, which they sent to their customers, they gave this description of their new building:

We have completely redone the interior of the building to meet our exact needs, and I believe we have the best designed software facility anywhere, bar none. We have a MITEL S-100 phone system which is a state of the art computer controlled phone system. For phones themselves, we use Panasonic KX-2202 feature phones. The building is completely wired for multiple phone paths to all locations, plus multi-path coaxial network system with complete cross connect and inter connect capabilities. If that is not enough, the entire building is wired for RS-232 networking with all cabling, for all systems, to a central control desk.

Logical Systems put their new headquarters on the cover of their April, 1983 newsletter.

They gave a glimpse of what they thought they’d be doing in future years by adding “LSI hopes to be involved very deeply in the concepts and real world implementations of office communications and data management. The office of the future may be at LSI today.” But none of that bright future was to happen. According to Tim Mann, who worked there at the time “… the company was nearly dead by 1987; they failed to find a new direction as Z-80 systems became outmoded.“

Even so, Logical Systems was possibly the most financially successful of the TRS-80 software sellers and certainly the most successful of the DOS companies because of its guaranteed sales through Tandy. But it was not a marriage made in heaven. Schroeder intensely disliked the person he had to deal with at Tandy, who he felt had little understanding of computer technology. He also clashed with the Model 4 buyer. This buyer had charge of the Tandy 2000, an MS-DOS machine, along with the Model 4. Schroeder felt this was an inherent conflict of interest. The buyer favored the MS-DOS machine and wished his users would all migrate off the Model 4 to the Tandy 2000 (later to the 1000).

Schroeder had many contacts at Tandy from his years as one of their contract software authors and tried to convince them that they should keep the Model 4 alive and find a real migration path by doing a Model 5. Schroeder thought there hadn’t been any intelligent planning at Tandy since Jon Shirley left to take a job at Microsoft. Shirley had been in charge of Merchandising & Marketing for computers. Don French, who left Tandy earlier, says that there were plans for a Model 5, but the plans were canceled. He feels that once IBM got into the game, it made no sense to continue the TRS-80 I/III/4 line. It seems that the developers and users were much more attached to their beloved Trash-80s than anyone at Tandy.

Because of their disagreements with the Radio Shack direction, the LSI programmers ended up insisting on dealing with only one person at Tandy, Frank Durda. Durda apparently didn’t have great relations with his superiors at Tandy either as he later stated at his web site that “at one point Tandy started intercepting Frank’s US Postal mail, just to see what was going on between Frank and LSI. Despite this and other nonsense, the arrangement kept bug fixes and new OS releases coming from LSI, such as TRSDOS 6.2.0 and eventually 6.3.0. “

By the mid-80s, the Tandy buyer was basically waiting for the Model 4, the last of the TRS-80 line, to die. But customers refused to let it go quietly and began asking about “the 1987 problem.” The LDOS programmers had decided to take an unused byte that Randy Cook had reserved for the future and use it for dating files, but this only allowed them to display dates up to the year 1987. As that year was approaching, a new version was needed to fix this limitation.

Logical Systems insisted on releasing its own new version and selling it direct to customers who wanted it, rather than having Tandy release it. By this time, they called it LS-DOS 6.3.0. LSI refused to give Tandy the code. Tandy wanted access to it because customers were afraid LSI would go out of business and there would be no one to support the DOS. Tandy thought they needed some insurance that they’d have a DOS. The programmers, still refusing to give Tandy the code, agreed to set up a trust that would have charge of the code and they named Frank Durda as the person to have the code. Durda’s web site says this was done “possibly to annoy the buyer at Tandy since Durda still worked for Tandy.” This account adds that, “Tandy blinked and then agreed, probably figuring they could threaten Frank with his job if they needed the code later on.”

The July 1984 issue of 80 Micro focused on the many operating systems for the TRS-80 family of computers — but the issue also featured the Tandy Model 2000.

But there were fewer and fewer customers who wanted the new release. Schroeder figured most of the buyers were people who had software they still needed to use and they bought the DOS to solve their date problem. If they had not bought the update, TRSDOS 6.0 would not have blown up, it would just display incorrect dates for files. Schroeder was annoyed when the Wall Street Journal picked up the story and implied that LSI had deliberately created a product that would screw up dates so they could sell an update. That was not true; they always knew they’d have to create new code to fix the date, but they had been up against a technical limitation. They had squeezed the year into a byte in the directory record where other bits were already being used for something else. That left only three bits to represent the date and that only took them up to the number seven (three bits can represent 0 to 7). That was the reason the date function only worked to 1987. These dates were those entered by the user at boot up. The TRS-80 never had an internal clock or calendar, as personal computers were later to have (there were third party add-ins). Entering 1988 caused the file date to revert to 1980.

A Shrinking Customer Base

By 1987, the population of active TRS-80 users was dwindling, but a few customers for Multidos and our own program, Lazy Writer, remained. An answering machine had replaced our staff and our office had shrunk to one small room. Vernon Hester, the skilled craftsman who took such pride in his work, followed the lead of Logical Systems and issued a last version of Multidos. In a flyer dated September 1987 and bearing the signature of David Welsh, a headline stated: “Dated files extended beyond 2000.” In an acknowledgement that this was Multidos’ last stand, the sentence under the headline read: “As the TRS-80 fades slowly into the mists of computer history, there’s not much new software and old sources of information and support are drying up fast. Those of us that remain interested in the TRS-80 Z80 machines do so mostly out of stubbornness.” The flyer offered an update to Multidos 2.1, featuring correct file dating, for only $19.95. A modest number of people ordered it, but this last Multidos was more about proving a point than about making money. Yes, the Trash-80 could think past 1987.

As Bill Schroeder saw that Tandy would not produce a successor to the Model 4, he had to face the limited life span of his products, just as we did. He pulled his staff together and they took three months to consider whether they could make the transition to the MS-DOS world. They looked at the products currently available and the cost to advertise in the PC magazines. Schroeder, the shrewd businessman, estimated it would take 10 million dollars to compete in that arena. Their main product was an operating system. Could they go up against Microsoft? Schroeder was sitting on a pile of money from the sales through Tandy; he could pocket the money and walk away or he could go forward and try to compete in the bigger, tougher world of the PC. Considering carefully what he knew about their prospects, he called in his staff and announced that he was closing down Logical Systems. Everyone could keep their salary until they found another job, but it was over. Schroeder couldn’t bring himself to risk the money he’d made with LDOS.

Roy Soltoff was not ready to give up and continued to operate Misosys, obtaining the rights to LDOS, even issuing an update in 1990 (LS-DOS 6.3.1), but eventually, he had to close his doors too. There was no place for TRS-80 products in the new decade of the 90s. Schroeder sold the fabulous building that housed Logical Systems, the place for which they’d had such high hopes.

In an interesting twist, Frank Durda, no longer with Tandy, discovered in 1997 that he had the only master copy of LDOS source code. The code had gone into a closet in Durda’s house in Fort Worth Texas at the time Tandy had wanted assurances they’d have access to the code. But Tandy had closed down its computer division in 1993, selling it to AST. Although Mysosys was still in business then, Tandy’s action ended the trust. When old users began asking for copies in the 1990s, Frank Durda went looking for the code, only to discover the version in his closet was all there was. Later he restored the code and made it available on a web site.

DOSPLUS was the only alternate DOS to have a Model II version, but it never sold well. This ad is from the September 1982 80US Journal.

Bill Schroeder has lived with his regrets ever since that day he told his staff he would take his money and shut down the company he’d so enjoyed operating. “This was the finest group of people I have ever worked with,” he told us in an interview. The work he and his team accomplished in those days was the best work he ever did. He has never stopped wondering what would have happened if he had decided the other way, and gone on and done a DOS clone for the PC machines.

Schroeder feels strongly that Tandy made a major mistake by not providing an upward migration for the Model 1/III/4 family to take advantage of the users they already had and the community of companies that had mature products for that market. He says Tandy had actually started work on a new computer based on a newer chip from Zilog that could have been the successor to the Model 4, but he says the person he disliked at Tandy killed the idea. This is the same person who once told him that double-sided disk drives would never work, even while Schroeder and many others were already using double-sided disk drives. He down-plays the role of John Roach, pointing out that he never met Roach, a strange fact considering Tandy was dependent on LSI for their operating system.

What if Tandy had continued the line? Schroeder walked away with money at a time when other software sellers were struggling to make ends meet, but he was left with the same sense of unfinished business and the same lingering feeling of failure that dogged the rest of us. The money wasn’t enough.

The IBM PC: CP/M or MS-DOS?

CP/M, which had a huge following and lots of good business software, was to fare no better than the TRS-80. In 1980, with Microsoft already established as the premier purveyor of language software, IBM sent emissaries to the Microsoft offices to see Bill Gates. The IBM people needed Microsoft BASIC and an operating system for the microcomputer they were developing and thought Gates could provide them with CP/M, the logical choice. Gates informed them he did not control CP/M and sent them to see Gary Kildall. What happened when the “suits” from IBM showed up at DRI’s casual shop is the stuff of legends. Some say Kildall’s wife Dorothy sent them away, offended by the long non-disclosure agreement they wanted her to sign. Some say Gary was out flying his airplane at the time (for relaxation, he did stunt flying in a biplane). Some say it was a culture clash between the gray flannel New Yorkers and the funky Californians.

Bill Godbout told the 2000 Vintage Computer Festival that Gary Kildall was with him when IBM came calling about licensing CP/M.

We learned of another version from Bill Godbout, an early computer parts dealer who operated out of an old hangar at the Oakland airport in the late 1970s. Godbout got started by buying up surplus components from Raytheon, which had contracts with NASA. The components worked, but did not meet the rigorous standards required for Raytheon’s government work. Godbout would remove all references to Raytheon on these parts and resell them to computer hobbyists. Also a pilot, he became friends with Kildall. According to a story Godbout told at the 2000 Vintage Computer Festival, Kildall had flown up to Oakland on that fateful day and was sitting in his airplane with Godbout, while the two discussed business. According to Godbout, it was Kildall’s practice to meet in the plane (“your plane or mine” was their little joke) where there were no phone calls or interruptions. Kildall’s wife, Dorothy, handled all of DRI’s contracts and was fully competent to negotiate with IBM, so Kildall was not skipping out on an important meeting. He was merely leaving the best qualified person — Dorothy — to handle the matter, as she had handled other contracts. He had complete confidence in her. So why didn’t she nail down the contract? Don French says Kildall told him it was because of the draconian non-disclosure agreement they wanted her to sign. She refused to sign and the IBM guys left empty-handed. They went back to see Gates.

Gates, not one to miss an opportunity, told IBM he could deliver them an operating system for their new PC, even though he had no such operating system. Instead, he bought the operating system developed by another small company, Seattle Computer Products, and sold a license to IBM for a mere $50,000. He was soon supplying MS-DOS to a host of hardware companies making clone machines. He wisely kept control of his software, licensing it and never giving anyone exclusive rights.

Despite the competition from IBM, the years 1980 though 1984 were strong years for TRS-80 sales. John Roach, Tandy CEO, was quoted in the media, saying about IBM entering the microcomputer business, “I don’t think it’s very significant.” While this quote is in some people’s “Top 20 dumb quotes” lists, it didn’t seem unreasonable at the time. With its hobbyist and small business following, the TRS-80 was a good seller. The IBM PC began life with a serious disadvantage — a lack of software. There was a board IBM PC owners could buy that turned the PC into a Z80 machine so it could run CP/M software. There was a similar board for the Apple. But IBM’s mascot “Charlie” (a Charlie Chaplin look-alike) would soon tap dance all over the TRS-80 as the number of software packages for the PC grew.

When the PC appeared with MS-DOS on it, Gary Kildall was furious, insisting it was a thinly-veiled rip-off of CP/M. An article in the Los Angeles Times quoted Kildall as having said, in regard to why he never sued Microsoft, “In those days everyone was imitating everyone else. That’s why I didn’t do anything about CP/M; it never occurred to me.” Kildall’s company, DRI, released CP/M-86 soon after IBM released MS-DOS 1.0; it had more features and better performance than MS-DOS. But CP/M-86 cost $240 while buyers got MS-DOS for only $60. Had DRI tried suing Microsoft for what they considered theft of their internal system calls, structure and user interface, they would have had to sue IBM as well as Microsoft, and IBM was a powerful player. When IBM asked Microsoft to develop a hard disk version of MS-DOS in 1982, Microsoft used the opportunity to completely rewrite MS-DOS. Version 2.0 no longer looked much like CP/M. DRI never sued.

In 1984, DRI came out with Concurrent CP/M, a single-user multi-tasking operating system. IBM ran some ads featuring Charlie that called Concurrent CP/M “the IBM PC operating system of the future.” But Microsoft established itself with the numerous clone makers, giving them licensing deals for selling their PCs with MS-DOS, while IBM sold Concurrent CP/M for $350. In 1988, DRI developed and marketed DRDOS as a substitute for MS-DOS, at the urging of some OEMs who could not get favorable deals with Microsoft or who wanted something better than MS-DOS. DRDOS was a better DOS, but Microsoft controlled the OEM channel, pressuring computer makers to license MS-DOS if they wanted to sell other software provided by Microsoft. Despite the advantage Microsoft had in the marketplace, DRDOS made $15 million in 1990 and $30 million in 1991, largely with sales to retail customers wanting a replacement for MS-DOS. Kildall did not sue Microsoft to open its OEM channel, but after he sold his company to Novell in 1991, Novell DID sue Microsoft over what they called monopolistic practices. In 1996, Novell sold its assets to Caldera, which inherited the lawsuit.

This 1983 Sybex book was 398 pages of information on CP/M.

Kildall’s company also developed the first graphical user interface for the PC, GEM, released in 1984. Apple threatened to sue over GEM, claiming it was a ripoff of their Macintosh interface. These threats of a lawsuit cost DRI a contract with IBM. DRI kept GEM alive by making some changes so it looked less like the Macintosh interface, and licensing it to application developers. An early desktop publishing program, Ventura Publisher, was bundled with GEM. High end graphic applications found it easier to give the user GEM or the early versions of Microsoft Windows than to write graphic routines from the ground up with only MS-DOS as the base. At first GEM was the more popular of the two but ultimately, GEM was also clobbered by Microsoft. The opportunity for other companies (such as LSI, had they elected to try it) to create a clone DOS like DRDOS evaporated with the rise of Windows. After Microsoft broke with the IBM OS/2 project and introduced the buggy but ground-breaking Windows 3.0, the game was over.

Gary Kildall’s destiny was to constantly do battle with Bill Gates and lose. Both Gates and Kildall were major contributors to computing, but the name of Bill Gates is known everywhere and Gary Kildall is largely forgotten. Kildall’s stock swap deal with Novell was supposedly worth $80 million, so he was not left penniless, but his products disappeared from the marketplace. He died in 1994 in a bizarre bar fight. At age 52, he walked into a bar wearing motorcycle leather and got into a fight with some real bikers. He died from the injuries. But his wars with Microsoft continued after his death. The lawsuit over DRDOS was finally settled in January, 2000. The settlement terms were not disclosed, but the judge had little sympathy for Microsoft, and industry analysts said it looked like a $200 million award for Caldera. What would the master programmer, Gary Kildall, have said? Perhaps he would have felt the same way Bill Schroeder felt when he folded LSI: that the money could never make up for losing out in the marketplace.

Tandy Abandons the TRS-80

The buzz in the computing world in 1983 was about the Intel processors; the 8088, used by the IBM PC, and the coming 80286. A book called IBM’s Personal Computer, published in 1983 by Que, states:

The most common configuration for new computers is to emulate the IBM Personal Computer by using an Intel 8088 processor and MS-DOS. One industry observer estimates that 70 percent of the new software being developed is being written for this combination.

The January 1984 issue of 80 Micro featured the Tandy 2000, their first MS-DOS computer, on its cover. Tandy had decided to go head to head with IBM. Ed Juge says they decided to discontinue the “Radio Shack“ label because it didn’t get much respect and they didn’t want this powerful new machine associated with the hobbyist market serviced by the old Radio Shack TRSDOS computers. The 80 Micro article on the new model called attention to the name change:

...  one of the most telltale changes is one of the most minor: the name. If you look closely at the front of the main unit, you’ll notice that the machine is called the Tandy Model 2000 Personal Computer. Radio Shack has been dropped from the label. This is, more than anything else, an indication of how much Tandy wants to alter its image as a company that makes computers for hobbyists…

But the business world wasn’t buying — at least not in large enough number to meet Radio Shack’s typical profit. Tandy MS-DOS computers never found the popularity or the loyalty of the TRS-80 Model I/III/4 line of computers. Tandy apparently thought they could make a splash in the business world, but they were no match for the gray-flannel, ivy-league image of IBM. The hobbyist market that made them a success was also their undoing.

This August 1984 cover with John Roach reflects the problems at Radio Shack competing with IBM and Apple.

The August 20, 1984 issue of InfoWorld featured a smiling John Roach on the cover. A large headline reads RADIO SHACK TACKLES ITS ‘SCHLOCK’ IMAGE. Inside, the article says “The name Radio Shack tends to conjure up visions of diodes, vacuum tubes, and cheap Japanese transistor radios.”

Tandy also goofed in not making a totally IBM-compatible computer. Ed Juge was quoted in 80 Micro saying “The world doesn’t need more IBM copies.” He also says in that article, about IBM, “They’re not known for making leading edge products.” Maybe not, but they had the clout, the contacts in the business world, and the reputation to be the winner.

As it turned out, the public DID want an IBM copy. The not-quite-compatible Tandy Model 2000 was too expensive and didn’t attract many buyers, despite the fact that it used the more powerful Intel 80186 microprocessor. There was a much-publicized shortage of the chips and that hurt sales. Roach always thought Tandy was in the hardware business and never understood that software is what makes the difference to buyers. By 1985, most people buying computers didn’t know a microchip from a potato chip.

Tandy was also competing with itself. By 1984, they had introduced the first laptop computer, the TRS-80 Model 100, designed by Bill Gates and Kay Nishi, a unique all-in-one small box with a liquid crystal display that sold for $800. Made in Japan by Kyocera, it had a built-in modem. For years, it was a big favorite of reporters, who carried it around and typed stories with it. In 1999, columnist Pete Waldmeir of the Detroit News wrote a column saying the News technical support people had insisted he finally give up his Model 100 (it was not Y2K compliant), which he was still using! Ed Juge also told us the same year that he had encountered many reporters still using Model 100s during the frequent traveling he was doing for his post-Tandy work. While Gates and Nishi designed the Model 100, Juge says it was Tandy people who asked for a built-in modem. The ability to type a story, then send it by modem, all from a small box that easily fits in a briefcase and runs on AA batteries, made the Model 100 very popular. Although not as powerful as today’s PDAs, it was way ahead of its time.

The TRS-80 Model 100 designed by Bill Gates and Kay Nishi.

For those needing a bigger portable, there was the best computer Tandy ever made (in the opinion of the authors), the Model 4P. This was a continuation of the Model I/III/4 family, running TRSDOS, but in a one-piece plus keyboard design featuring a full monitor. The keyboard slipped into a space underneath and a cover clipped on the monitor face. There was a handle for carrying. The Model 4P featured a 4-MHz Zilog Z80A CPU, 64KB RAM (expandable to 128KB in two banks), two 5.25-inch floppy drives, and 9-inch black and white screen.

These late products for the TRS-80 line were wonderful, unique products that were unlike anything else out there. They are classics, but the Tandy 2000, introduced with so much fanfare and anticipation, was soon forgotten. The Tandy 1000, a less costly machine based on the 8088 did much better, appealing to cost conscious buyers who earlier might have been attracted to the TRS-80.

The many operating systems that sustained the TRS-80 were based on the 8-bit Z80 microprocessor. There was no more market for them. CP/M had the same problem — it was an 8-bit operating system. MS-DOS took over the marketplace, but left behind were all the people who had spent good years of their lives refining software that ultimately worked very well but was technically a dead end. Tandy stopped selling its own branded computer in Radio Shack stores, no longer “the biggest name in little computers.” Could it have been different?

The DOS wars ended quietly, with customers just drifting away to the PC and MS-DOS.

3   David’s Story

PART ONE: Technology and Me

by David Welsh

Like many who came to program and love the TRS-80, I grew up fascinated with technology…especially with what was first referred to as “radio,” then as “electronics.” My early life differs in the particulars from other contributors to the microcomputer revolution but not so much, I suspect, in our curiosity about, and involvement, with technology. I recall one conversation with Vern Hester, author of Multidos, in which we discovered that, as a black kid growing up in Philadelphia, he did a lot of the same things and built some of the same electronic projects that I did as a white kid growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Below, I offer a look at a life — mine — that seemed to be waiting for the TRS-80 to come along. I was a sold customer before Tandy even knew the possibility of a personal computer existed.

My Post-War Childhood and How I came to Write TRS-80 Software

I was born on the day Nikola Tesla died, January 7, 1943. Tesla is credited with inventing radio even before Marconi, and described radar long before anyone was interested. Radar was helping win World War II in 1943, but people outside the military barely knew what it was or how it worked. Television was on hold because of the war. The vacuum tube was still the king of electronics.

My father worked in a defense plant before I was born but he didn’t like it, so he went back to working for a bakery in Grand Rapids. Baking wasn’t high in the priorities of the defense department and one child wasn’t enough to keep him on the home front so he was drafted, leaving my mother with the burden of caring for me. My mother moved in with my father’s parents, which is how I came to be so well acquainted with my grandmother’s radio. My mother worked for a photographer “tinting” pictures (a job that I had to explain to my daughter). While she was at work, I was in the care of my grandmother. My grandmother was very nice to me. She taught me how to spell the word “candy,” which was the last word I actually learned to spell without pain and suffering and the only word that I’ve always been confident about spelling correctly.

My grandmother was rarely far from three things she considered essential to the proper enjoyment of life: a cigarette, a bottle of beer, and her radio. Each morning we would listen to a series of programs that were not to be missed. I remember Don McNeil and the Breakfast Club, but her favorite was Arthur Godfrey. She revealed to me that she had actually met him once in Florida. That’s how I learned that there were people making the sounds that somehow came out of the radio.

My grandmother’s radio was a marvel at the time. It would run on AC (Alternating Current), DC (Direct Current) or on batteries. That meant we could plug it into the wall or take it with us to the cottage, which didn’t have electricity, or rather had it only some of the time. It was portable in the same sense that my favorite TRS-80 computer, the Model 4P, would later be portable – if you really wanted to move it, you could.

The radio had two batteries, an “A” battery that heated the filaments of the tubes and a “B” battery that supplied the high voltage needed for the tubes to actually do anything about amplifying radio waves and converting them to sound.

In 1943, tubes were high tech. Lots of effort was going into improving them so they would work better, and making them smaller so the equipment that used them could be lighter and consume less power. For consumer devices like my grandmother’s radio, this was not an urgent task, however. Tubes were more than equal to the job of reproducing the voice of Arthur Godfrey.

The tube is a simple device that any third grader who is interested can understand. Thomas Edison made the first tube when he was trying to improve the light bulb. He was trying to find out why the glass of the light bulb would darken with use. He put a metal plate in a bulb with a connector so that he could attach a meter to it. He found that a current flowed when he connected the meter between the filament and the plate. There were electrons flowing from the filament. Edison called this the Edison effect, published his discovery, and forgot about it.

Sir John Ambrose Fleming, born 1849 in England, experimented with this effect and noticed that the current could be made to flow only one way. If a battery is attached to the plate so that the plate is on the positive side of the battery and the other pole of the battery is attached to the filament, the current flows, but if the plate is connected to the negative side of the battery and the positive to the filament, you get nothing. This is just what you need to straighten out radio waves so the variations in their signals can be put to good use. Lee Deforest discovered that a bunch of thin wires placed between the filament and the plate could be used to regulate the flow of current between the filament and plate by varying a small voltage on the of wires or “grid” of the tube. That allowed amplification. That allowed Arthur Godfrey.

By 1943, this was all settled. The tubes in my grandmother’s radio all had a filament in the center (surrounded by a sleeve of metal, the cathode, that radiated electrons better than the bare filament), a mesh of thin wire supported on posts that surrounded the filament (the grid) and an outer sleeve of solid metal that surrounded all else (the plate). All of this was inside a glass tube that held a vacuum. (OK, so I’m leaving out some other grids and additional features meant to improve performance inside the tube, but hey, at this point I’m only a baby. What would I know about the fine points, right?)

In England in 1943, the British were trying to decode German messages. To do that, they built a computing machine they named Colossus. What you need for a device like that is something that can switch from one state to another and be connected to switches like itself to do math and execute programs. At that time there were two choices: relays and tubes. A relay is an electromechanical device that uses an electromagnet to close or open a switch. Using many relays connected together in clever ways, you can compute and decode WWII German secret messages, but relays are slow and when you are trying to make lots of them work fast, some of them will stick. There is a limit to how fast you can make the relays go. Tubes, on the other hand, can go very fast. It takes two tubes to switch one bit of data, even more to make a reliable circuit for switching “bits”. My grandmother’s radio had five tubes. For a computer, you needed thousands of tubes. Although my grandmother didn’t know about Colossus or any of the other early computers, by the end of the war, there were real computers in the world. As for me, I was about to master my tricycle, an important piece of transportation technology for a three year old.

My father went through basic training in Arkansas and my mother and I went to see him there. I remember almost nothing about the trip except I have a clear picture of soldiers drilling in the hot sun and I can remember going up the stairs at my grandmother’s house while calling out, “Hup! two, three, four!”

My mother told me about the long train trip from Detroit and how some colored (that was the term in those days) soldiers on the train took an interest in me and sang me to sleep. She also told me how we made a recording while we were there. Apparently, the Army had machines at the base that soldiers could use to make recordings to send home to their families. I don’t remember making the recording but I do remember playing the record years later when I was a wise old man of four or five. I can’t remember what I said on the record but I do remember that the record started at the center of the disk and played outward rather than starting on the outside and working in as most conventional records do.

The whole process of making and playing the record was “analog.” Sounds directed to the microphone cause tiny electric currents that vibrate in step with the sound. These currents went to tubes, which amplified them until they were strong enough to drive a cutting head on the recorder. The result was a physical record, in plastic (or maybe a hard wax), of the sounds made by my parents and me. The small phonograph that I played the record on may not have even had an amplifier. I think it just used the mechanical energy created by the needle traveling the grooves to move a diaphragm that reproduced the voices…more or less.

My Dad finished basic training and was slated to be shipped out to fight the Japanese. But there was a problem. He was a Canadian citizen. My Grandmother had been Canadian when she married Mr. Prangley, also a Canadian, and gave birth to my Dad. The marriage didn’t last long. My grandmother divorced Mr. Prangley, came to the USA (by moving across the Detroit River) and married Mr. Welsh. She became an American citizen but somehow forgot to mention my Dad to the US authorities. He grew up in Detroit and suburbs not knowing he was a Canadian. When the government discovered this oversight, they made him cross the river to Windsor Canada so he could re-enter the US as an immigrant.

The government could draft resident aliens, but could not send them overseas. When my Dad reminded the Army of this little inconvenience, they quickly fixed the citizenship problem and shipped him off to fight the Japanese. Fortunately for him and us, the Japanese heard he was coming and surrendered. My Dad ended up on Okinawa, which my mother told me was in the Philippines. Geography was not one of my mother’s strong points.

While my Dad was in Okinawa, he heard that my uncle Dean, my mother’s brother, was also on the island. My Dad went looking for him and found him on the other side of the island making use of an outdoor latrine. Dean Fuller had been on duty with the Signal Corp., serving in India, and had been transferred to Okinawa to serve out the rest of his hitch. In civilian life, Dean was a telephone lineman and later an engineer for Bell Telephone. In the Army, he worked with radio equipment. After the war, when I was in the second grade, he gave me his Army training manual for radio, which finished the job of teaching me to read and taught me the basics of radio. We called him “Mean Dean” sometimes, but he was not mean at all except when playing table tennis (Ping Pong).

My father’s Army career was cut short when a crane operator missed a signal and my father’s hand was caught between some chains and a giant truck tire. He was shipped back to the States where he spent some time in an Army hospital. The doctors wanted to take his finger off but he wouldn’t let them. He continued to have full use of the finger, even though it was a little shorter than it was before the accident. My Dad came home when I was four. We moved to Grand Rapids Michigan where my Dad went back to the bakery business. My grandfather, Walter Welsh, died. My Grandmother and her radio moved “up north” to her cottage on Lake Mecosta to stay.

Discovering Radio

One of the items that we acquired or took with us when we moved to Grand Rapids was a console radio that came close to dominating the living room. It was taller than I was, made of wood with a cloth speaker grill covering much of the bottom two thirds, with knobs and a large, illuminated dial for station selection at the top. The center of the dial had an “electric tuning eye” that was a special tube that glowed green. When you tuned in a station, the darker green areas on each side of the indicator would move toward each other to show maximum signal strength. This marvelous device – the radio that is – would not only get “The Green Hornet,” “Jack Benny,” and other sources of education and culture, but it would also receive police calls and other two-way radio communication. I’m not sure if it got short wave. If you got around behind it, you could see the glowing tubes and the big speaker cone that took up so much room and provided a sound that was predominately mellow base.

When you turned the radio on, it would take awhile to warm up. You could tell it was warming up because you could hear the 60 cycles per second power line hum that was a normal part of its operation. (Nowadays it would be called a 60-Hertz hum, but you won’t hear it unless something is wrong with your equipment. The reason for the hum was that when the radio was made, permanent magnets that were strong enough and cheap enough to put in a radio speaker were not available so the magnet in the speaker was an electromagnet – a coil of wire – and part of the power supply filter. This trick worked but resulted in the hum – especially as components aged.)

My father’s new boss had an even more remarkable radio. It would get FM. This was a type of radio that only rich people could listen to and, since there were only two stations in Grand Rapids, it wasn’t clear why they wanted to. I think that both the living room radio and my father’s boss’s radio were pre-war products.

My mother got a “modern” radio about that time. It was small and its case was made of plastic but it could get all the AM stations fine. She had it in the kitchen where she could hear her “soaps.” Later, I got scarlet fever or something and the radio moved into the room of the sick child and somehow never moved out again.

At four and a half, I was introduced to the Grand Rapids Public School system. Kindergarten was like a bad dream. I’d mostly been in the company of adults until then and that suited me fine. Nothing as intelligent as Arthur Godfrey went on in kindergarten. I was told, falsely, that the first grade would be better. While in the first grade, I had my first experience with bucking the system. I refused to do any of the work on the grounds that it was stupid. I spent my time “day dreaming,” a malady considered worse than scarlet fever and one that the school system was determined to stamp out.

I learned, however, that you can not go on strike in the first grade and get away with it. They have awesome power. They “put me back” into the first grade the next year. They told me and the class that myself and another boy would be staying in the first grade to “help the new first graders.” That’s when I realized that people who are part of institutions have no problem lying (especially to children) if it will make their life easier.

Fortunately for me, my mother tired of my father’s long working hours at the bakery, where he had risen to manager. My father had taken a Dale Carnegie course in sales, using the GI Bill to pay for it, and was interested in putting it to use. He quit the bakery job and went to work selling Cool Vents, an aluminum awning product, door-to-door. It was a commission job and it didn’t produce much money at first…or at last…so he moved on to be a manufacturer’s representative (sales person) for a truck body manufacturer, Ovens Body Company (funny name, in view of the fact that he’d come from a bakery job).

During this time, our finances were not going so well. The fact that my mother gave birth to my sister (on my mother’s birthday) didn’t help the financial picture. So we moved out of Grand Rapids to cheaper housing just outside the city (due to post-war housing conditions, a new house). This was an improvement for me because I was sent to Huff School, a county school where the first through the eighth grade was housed in four rooms. I was still in the first grade but it was a very different first grade. Our room also held the kindergarten, which was learning to read and was already doing better than the city kids were in the first grade I’d left. The first grade at Huff, under Mrs. Atkinson, was practically at the college level, or so it seemed. I had to scramble to catch up, but I could no longer complain that the curriculum was stupid.

In the second or third grade, I became a member of the Cub Scouts of America. From my Cub Scout days, I can remember some truly miserable camping trips and a project to build a crystal set radio. This involved making a tuning coil from a Quaker Oats carton, adding an antenna, a variable condenser, “crystal,” which was a piece of galena crystal in a lead mount, and an earphone. The crystal required a “cat’s whisker” which was a piece of wire arranged so the tip of the wire could be placed against the galena in such a way that it made a natural semiconductor. When crystal sets were first used, the term “semiconductor” was unknown. By the time I was building my “crystal set,” the transistor had been invented, but was still a technical curiosity – a promising device for the future.

The crystal in my crystal set did what the early diode tubes did; it turned the high frequency radio waves into direct current that could make sounds in the earphone. When I was doing my crystal radio, people were building giant tube-based computers… each faster and more giant than the last. I didn’t know much about that.

The crystal radio led to my first business venture. I built several crystal radios with the idea of selling them door-to-door as emergency radios. After all, they didn’t require any power so you could use them when power was out. A tornado had recently torn up a Grand Rapids subdivision. The scouts had helped clean up, so I was disaster minded. Business was not that good, but I managed to get back my investment in parts.

The crystal set project came at about the same time that my uncle Dean decided to favor me with a bunch of old radio parts and his army radio-training manual. I studied that manual from cover to cover. It took several times through before I felt I knew the subject and was ready to join the US Army Signal Corp.

Not only did the Cub Scouts fire my interest in electronics, it showed me that it could be a route to acceptance and fame among my peers. That happened when I demonstrated that the same earphones that I used for the crystal set could be used to tap the den mother’s telephone.

As I progressed through Huff School, I could literally see demographics at work. The class ahead of me was small. My class was bigger. The class behind me was bursting. The school had to add four rooms to keep up. By the fourth grade, the new section was ready and my class got one of the new rooms.

One of the features of the new rooms was a better heating system. Instead of the old passive steam radiators, we had fancy new steam radiators that had a built-in fan to circulate the heat better. Air entered from the bottom and was blown through the heating pipes and shot out the top. It occurred to me that a spitball (a wadded up piece of paper actually, I wasn’t into spit) could follow the same path. I tried it and it succeeded beyond my fondest hopes. The paper shot through the system and out into the room. It was very satisfying.

I was happy to make this one short demonstration while the teacher was out of the room and quit, but legions of imitators were not. Soon spitballs were flying everywhere. The new launch system provided by the school had a better success rate than NASA (which wouldn’t launch anything until years later). I even pleaded for a stop to, or at least moderation of, this activity. Unfortunately, it was too popular. When the teacher returned, inquiries were made and I was credited as the instigator of the activity. I argued that this was unfair. I merely demonstrated the possibility – strictly in the spirit of scientific inquiry – and was not one of the irresponsible jerks who carried it to extreme. That didn’t wash with the teacher however and I was the only one punished.

I learned that people who run institutions can react unkindly and irrationally to novelty and innovation at the same time that they tolerate large amounts of “normal” misbehavior.

Or they can be completely seduced and defeated by it. A year later, we had a kind of show-and-tell on the same day that we had a substitute teacher. Judged on the whole, Huff students were a well behaved bunch, but substitutes are fair game everywhere. I brought two table-model radios to school. One of them I had modified so that it would transmit to the other radio. It was a crude modification – I just put a carbon microphone from a telephone headset into the circuit of the local oscillator, the little transmitter built into every AM radio of the time, and attached an antenna to it. It worked like a dream. When it came my turn to demonstrate my project, I suggested that the absent regular teacher had intended that each student get a chance to “broadcast” through the radios. The bunch of liars I went to school with quickly backed me. We shot the rest of the day playing “radio broadcaster.”

While the attempts to educate me at Huff school were awkward and spotty at best, the Army Radio manual had challenged me into becoming a fluent reader and I discovered the Grand Rapids Public Library. As soon as I was old enough to cope with the bus system, I was making regular trips to the library where I attacked the shelves section by section. I read everything in the science fiction section, the humor section, the collection of books on UFOs and the occult, then I discovered the science and technical section where I covered astronomy, physics, aviation, rockets, space travel, and, of course, electronics. Biography was a big interest. Especially Thomas Edison.

During summer vacation between the seventh and eight grades, I raided the library every few days; bringing home as many books as I could carry. I wouldn’t read them all, but I skimmed them and read the ones that were the most interesting. I figure that what I read that summer got me through high school and the first year or two of college because it probably wasn’t what I learned in class — where I still had a tendency to “day dream,” according to my teachers.

By this time, computers were becoming an everyday fact of life in big business and at universities but nobody I knew had seen one or could explain how they worked. The library was of some help on this subject, but the books they had on computers tended to be too general or too technical.

About the time I was tapping my den mother’s phone; I started reading Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics. Popular Electronics was a “must read.” The first issue I remember had a circuit for making train whistle sounds. I’d taken over a part of the basement where I kept my radio parts. At first, these were parts discarded by my Uncle Dean. I added parts from dumps and from radios that people were throwing out.

My father traveled three or four days out of the week. Sometimes he went to Detroit and took me with him. On one of these trips, he took me to Silverstein’s Surplus Store. Outside the store, they had a World War II Army Duck, a big tracked amphibious vehicle. Going there was, for me, better than going to Disneyland (which hadn’t been built yet). One whole glorious wing of the store was devoted to electronic parts and gadgets, all dirt cheap.

On later trips, my father just dropped me off for the afternoon. Toward the end of the fifties, circuit boards started to turn up. These were sold for ten cents each so naturally I bought some. They were fascinating, but hard to do anything with. Unlike the old radios I collected, they were not easy to diagram or figure out. They had transistors on them and the small parts were soldered on to the printed circuit board leaving no “leads” on the components. Transistors don’t like heat. Attempts to remove them from the board would probably ruin the part. On the other hand, it wasn’t clear what these circuits were supposed to do. I suppose I knew that I was looking at the future and the end of easily-understood, easily-built, hand-wired electronics.

While growing up in my electronics lab, I “invented” the transformer and later the Darlington direct coupled transistor amplifier circuit (unfortunately, probably after Darlington). I played with photovoltaic cells and phototubes, proximity detectors, theremin circuits, and various short-range radio transmitters. I could draw a schematic diagram by the end of the second grade. I could easily understand the relationships between different parts of an electronic circuit but I didn’t have the math to figure out what the values for a given part should be. It didn’t worry me. I didn’t always have an ideal choice of parts anyway, so I tried different parts that I had until the circuit worked or I ran out of parts to try. Most circuits will work, more or less, with a wide range of values. My sense of the relationships between the parts and their values was excellent even if I had no way to be precise about it.

One of my projects got me in trouble. One book my uncle gave me was a collection of electronic projects. Unfortunately it had been written before television was widespread and included a project for a one-tube “super regenerative” short-wave receiver. I was hot to build it. Short-wave receivers cost a lot of money but here was one that I could build from “spare parts” (all my parts were spare). I used a different but similar tube, wound my own coil by guess, and substituted parts I had for parts that I didn’t have for just about every other part in the diagram. It worked! I was delighted. Better yet, I was receiving London! This wasn’t the band I was supposed to be getting but who cared. It was wonderful. Then my mother complained that one of the two television channels that we could receive in Grand Rapids had turned into a negative picture (black in the light areas and white in the black areas). She wanted to know, urgently, if it was anything I was doing. I unplugged my radio, but the bad reception continued.

“It’s not me!” I shouted from the basement.

I forgot that:

1.  A super-regenerative receiver can act as a transmitter.

2.  A super-regenerative receiver that lacks careful design and construction can broadcast on many frequencies (harmonics).

3.  That tubes stay hot for a while even when power is removed and DC power supplies with large capacitors store power and continue to supply power for several seconds after the power is disconnected.

4.  Television wasn’t around back when the author wrote about this circuit.

After ruining more of my mother’s television viewing, I realized what the problem was. The next day, classmates who lived up to a mile from my house complained about TV interference.

My parents were fairly tolerant of my electronic adventures. There were some things that bothered them though. For example when I discovered that tinsel – the stuff that people use to decorate Christmas trees — could be made to explode in a most satisfying fashion when placed across the household AC electric line. In those days, tinsel was made from thin strips of aluminum foil. When the current passed through a length of tinsel, a massive overload caused the tinsel to vaporize with a loud crack. It happened so fast that the fuse for that line, being slower acting, didn’t blow. There was probably an interesting spike on the lines of all our neighbors as well, but in those days, there wasn’t any equipment – like a computer for example – such a spike could harm.

Discovering Photography

About the third grade, I became fascinated by photography. When I was even younger, my mother would give me photo paper that would darken in the sun. You could put things on it and make a negative print or you could put a negative on it and get a positive print. Since these contact prints weren’t “fixed,” they would darken with more exposure to light.

I eventually acquired a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera with flash. This was a box camera, but updated in plastic splendor and with a twin reflex waist level viewer. You could set the shutter so that it would stay open for as long as you held it down. The instruction booklet called this a time exposure (on most complex cameras, this is called a “bulb” setting). The camera was not only capable of taking double exposures, but almost guaranteed getting them as there was no warning if you forgot to carefully advance the film each time.

Not only did I have a camera but I also got a darkroom kit to go with it. My parents bought that for me for Christmas, or rather my father did. My parents had had a darkroom in the basement of one of their previous homes and my mother had worked for a photographer, so they knew a little about darkrooms. Except they knew different things: my Dad knew they were fun and my mother knew that they were messy. They were both right.

The problem was that I didn’t have a darkroom. I had a darkroom kit. The bathroom was to serve as the darkroom. My dad and I set up the chemical trays, the safelight, and small contact printer in the bathroom and made pictures but there was a problem: my mother.

She didn’t like the bathroom tied up for hours (only one bathroom in those days). She didn’t like the chemical smells. She thought we might spill something and cause damage to the fixtures. I think it was the second session when the cheap plastic tongs proved unequal to the task of moving a print from one tray to the next. The print, wet with developer or stop-bath, ended on the wall. My dad had to paint the wall to remove the stain. My mother was most annoying when she was right.

After exhausting the wisdom of the library on how to take better pictures with your camera and how to do tricks with time exposures and double exposures, I lost interest in photography. I still dragged out the Hawkeye to record family events occasionally, but I didn’t do any more serious photography until college.

Life in Small Town USA

During the eighth grade, we left Grand Rapids for Gobles, Michigan. My mother’s branch of the family lived there. Her mother and father lived in a cottage on Lake Mills, a small lake near Gobles. My mother’s sister married one of the owner’s of the local lumberyard. My uncle Dick, my mother’s oldest brother, lived on a small farm not far from town with his wife and two daughters and worked as an engineer for Checker Motors (makers of Checker Taxi Cabs) in the nearest real city, Kalamazoo. My uncle Bruce, my mother’s youngest brother, had married a local girl and settled there too. All during my childhood, the cottage on Lake Mills was like a second home in the summer. We would make the hour drive down from Grand Rapids to Lake Mills many weekends in the summer and nearly every holiday. My parents were not always thrilled to be going but I can’t remember ever resisting, even though “car sick” was my middle name in those days.

The reason that we moved there was because my uncle Bruce and my uncle Jim, the lumberyard owner, decided to build a whole new modern subdivision in Gobles and were having a little trouble filling it. They offered my parents a beautiful ranch style house at a bargain price. My Dad was by now a manufacturer’s representative for Polar Hardware and had three states as his territory. He figured he could service them from Gobles as well as he could from Grand Rapids. So we packed up our stuff, including my old radios and electronic parts, and moved to the new place.

Gobles was very different from Grand Rapids. The school was a “consolidated school” which meant that it was bigger than Huff School and that kids were bussed to it from all the surrounding farms and communities, many with even fewer residents than the 700 people who lived in Gobles. These kids had known each other since before birth and I was the new, geeky city kid who didn’t swear (actually, the Boy Scouts of America had taught me how to swear and how to swim but I didn’t put these skills to really good use until we moved to Gobles). I was the outcast for about a year, and then another new kid moved in. He became the despised new city kid and I became one of the gang.

During my period of internal exile in Gobles, I dug deeper into electronics. By then transistors were becoming available at reasonable prices. There were even power transistors. Using these new power transistors and a junk transformer, I built a multivibrator circuit that boosted flashlight battery voltage to high enough levels to give a person a shock. At Huff, I had once been the victim of a gag book that had a title that was something like “Shocking Sex Stories.” The “book” was covered with foil and when the victim opened it, he found it was shocking indeed – by virtue of a vibrating reed, a small transformer, and flashlight battery built into the book and connected to the foil cover. My circuit was a high-tech way of accomplishing the same thing.

One of my tormentors was a tough kid, leather jacketed, who made me his special hobby. One day during lunch, I was assembling the parts for my new shock circuit (Version 1.0) and Rex (not his real name) was nearby.

“Here, hold this,” I told Rex, giving him one lead of the transformer output. Curious, he dutifully held the lead while I connected some more parts together.

“Hold this one too’” I told him. He took the other output lead. Then I connected the battery and he jumped back about four feet. I half expected him to pound me into the ground but he was impressed with my new way to torment classmates and wanted me to explain it to him. After that, he didn’t bother me.

My grades suffered in Gobles. I maintained a D average through the tenth grade. Getting “A” s and “B” s on tests and not turning in any homework accomplished this. My education suffered in other ways. I read everything of interest in the small Gobles library in a month or so. The school library had only one feature worth noting. For some reason, it had every copy of the Reader’s Digest back to the beginning of the magazine. Out of boredom, a fellow scholar and I went through the indexes for every year finding articles relating to sex. Before 1940, we only found two – both about VD. After 1950, there was at least one an issue, it seemed.

During my second year in Gobles, things were looking up all around. I was no longer an outcast. I got a paper route, which meant I was wealthy beyond imagining. My uncle Bruce learned to fly and bought an airplane. It was a Taylorcraft, a two seat, fabric-covered aircraft with a cruise speed of 85 miles per hour. The Taylorcraft was much like a Piper Cub, in fact they were inspired by the same design, but the seats were side by side while Cub seating is tandem. My uncle got his private pilot’s license and began studying for his commercial and then his instructor’s license. While he was doing that, I rode along whenever I could. I loved to fly and began to take lessons informally before I could take driver training. When Bruce finally got his instructor’s license, I washed and gassed airplanes for him on weekends at the local field in exchange for official lessons. I got in about nine hours and was almost ready to solo before we moved back to Grand Rapids.

During the Gobles years, I began reading more about computers. There were some very good articles about binary arithmetic and binary addition circuits in one of the magazines. It must have been Popular Electronics but I can’t be sure. My math class grades were not impressive, but I could count in binary; a skill that did not impress my teachers as much as I thought it should.

During the same period, my uncle Walt, my father’s brother who lived in Mecosta, Michigan where my grandmother was living, was acquiring used pinball machines. I’m not sure why he was doing this but he had more of them than he wanted so he sold or gave some of them to me. During math class, I was drawing circuit diagrams for pinball machine relay powered binary adders. If only my parents had understood the need to fill the basement with pinball machine parts….

My paper route provided money for other electronic projects. My link to the civilized world (Chicago) was the Allied Radio parts catalog (In 1970, Radio Shack bought, then in 1974 sold, Allied). Not only did Allied sell every part you could want, they sold kits for everything. One of my first purchases was a ten watt high-fidelity audio amplifier kit. Soon after getting the paper route, I sent away for it. Kits were easier to build than the Popular Electronics projects because all the parts came with it and there were step-by-step instructions. Also, somebody had verified that circuits actually worked and you didn’t have to wait for the next issue to see if there were any corrections to the circuit. Big diagrams showed how each part should look when the kit was finished.

The circuit diagram and booklet cover for the 10-watt amplifier.

Still, you could go wrong. The amplifier I built worked but if you turned it up, the sound became distorted. I hadn’t much experience with good audio equipment so I wasn’t sure if this performance was normal. I sure didn’t think I was getting my money’s worth. After a week, I discovered that I had soldered a resistor to the wrong pin of a tube socket. Correcting the mistake made a big difference in the sound. That amplifier stayed with me through most of college where it was finally stolen.

Allied also carried a stereo tape deck which I wanted badly. At eighty dollars, it was the least expensive tape deck available. The trouble was it was a bare deck. No electronics came with it. I had the amplifier but I had to modify it to drive the recording head and build a bias oscillator needed for the record head and a preamplifier for playback. My uncle Dick had a Voice of Music tape recorder that came with a circuit diagram. I borrowed the diagram and built a bias oscillator that was an exact copy of the V-M unit. My deck was not a V-M deck, but I figured the heads would be close enough. There was a preamp circuit available for the amplifier and there was even space for it on the chassis. This preamp was designed for magnetic phonograph cartridges, but the principle was the same. I bought the deck and, after some troubleshooting, I could record and playback. The compensation curves were off, but that was only apparent when tapes made on my deck were played on someone else’s deck. That didn’t happen often because none of my peers had a deck. I couldn’t take advantage of the stereo feature because I didn’t have a second amplifier.

Before we moved to Gobles, my father met Web Stein, a patternmaker, and small odd-lot manufacturer in Grand Rapids. Stein was a better patternmaker than he was a businessman, so sometimes his clients would end up going broke on him and leaving him with oddball items that they had ordered but wouldn’t be paying for. That’s how I came to sell the Kitchen Helper, a jar-opening device, door to door for a while.

One of Stein’s clients stuck him with a ton of conveyor belt parts that were intended for a new type of vending machine that had been dubbed “The Mechanical Store.” The idea was that they would build a series of walk-in coolers that would contain milk, bread, and other products sitting on these conveyor belts. The customers would come by in droves inserting coins, causing the conveyors to advance and dispense product and profits alike.

My father, Mr. Stein, and Bob Ovens (my father’s former employer), and some other investors took over the idea and started a company to make and sell mechanical stores. My Dad’s end of it was to sell them. One of the few long trips of my youth was to St. Petersburg, Florida where my Dad’s first customer was setting up shop. I was aware that some unkind people, because of the high population of retirees, called St. Petersburg “the city of the living dead.” I thought it was a fascinating place. I took my first airplane ride there, even before my adventures with my uncle.

The five-dollar ride consisted of a takeoff, 30 seconds out of the landing pattern, then landing. The pilot was silent the whole time except for once pointing out the window and yelling, “Tampa Airport.” The other memorable thing about St. Pete was the separate drinking fountains, separate bathrooms labeled “White,” and “Colored.” What a waste!

While we lived in Gobles, my grandmother on my father’s side died: too many cigarettes and too much beer. My family ended up with her dog, Fancypants. I got grandma’s, by now old, portable radio and my father came into a little money. The mechanical stores had turned out to be hard to sell and less than trouble-free. My Dad thought he could turn things around if he built one and ran it himself —as a test case— so he took the money he inherited from his mother and used it to build his own mechanical store. Most of the construction was done in our basement except for final assembly. A coin box, a panel of switches, relays, and flippers with micro switches had to be installed and I was enlisted as installer. Compared to the stuff I had built for myself, these were simple circuits. The idea was: when a customer wanted to make a purchase, they pressed the button corresponding to the item they wanted, and then inserted the right amount of coins. That started the conveyor belt that held the item. A flipper attached to a micro switch detected when the item had been vended and the another flipper detected that the next item was in position to vend. (I think there was a provision for detecting that the belt was empty as well.)

The purpose of this store was to test the machine, troubleshoot problems, and make a little money. My Dad made a deal with a party storeowner in Kalamazoo to put the thing on his lot and keep it stocked. We soon found a number of problems. Sometimes the device would “jackpot” when a flipper or relay would stick. The belt would keep going and vend its whole contents to some lucky customer. That it was capable of this was a bad design flaw but “fine tuning” and regular maintenance got things under control.

Bad User Interfaces Predate Microcomputers

Another problem was the user interface: most of the world’s vending machines are “post select.” The customer puts in the money, and then makes a selection to complete the sale. The mechanical store was “pre select.” The customer had to select before putting in the money.

People didn’t understand this. Customers got bread when they wanted milk and chips when they wanted bread. The root problem was that groceries are not high profit items so the whole thing was costly for the volumes it was doing. (The investors in Webvan and PeaPod, early internet grocery stores, faced a similar problem.) Eventually my father sold his mechanical store and the company faded away. The store was a precursor of all the bad user interfaces and premature technology we are all still dealing with in the PC age.

Technology Starts to Get Interesting

On October 4, 1957, the Russians launched sputnik, the first satellite. I knew what this meant because of my library reading about space and rockets. Most of Gobles was unimpressed however. My uncle Jim said, “So what.” I explained to him the relationship between the ability to launch satellites and the ability to destroy a US city 30 minutes from launch.

By 1957, computers had made a lot of progress. I knew that from my reading but I still had not seen an actual computer in person. Computers were becoming smaller and more reliable because they were now using transistor circuit boards instead of tubes.

I remember reading somewhere that a computer built with tubes that had as much computing power as the human brain would have to be as big as the Empire State Building and would need the output of Niagara Falls to power and cool it, but that a transistorized computer would only need to be house-sized. I think whoever made that estimate didn’t really understand the computing power of the human brain.

Computers were staples in movies and science fiction. In fiction, computers were either huge mechanical brains that had the answer to everything or they were in the form of robots that were very human-like — except maybe too literal. In the movie, Forbidden Planet, Robbie the Robot was a good example of Hollywood’s better artificial intelligence fantasies. Robbie, as a piece of future technology was believable and appealing. He did have a tendency to make noises while he was thinking – something that would only be true if his brain was part mechanical. Hollywood probably thought that the audience had never seen anything closer to a computer than a business calculator, which were then mechanical and made mechanical sounds when in use.

The more advanced “computer” in that movie was the Krell knowledge machine. It was controlled by thought and had a “holographic” 3D display. Unfortunately, it could also create monsters from the “id” using the primitive subconscious thoughts of the user (just as some would later think the Internet could do).

At the end of my tenth grade year, my father had had enough of the bad phone service in Gobles. We joked about there being only one line to the outside world. Also, Gobles lay in a “lake effect” snow belt that guaranteed impassable roads for at least two weeks of the winter. Allegan, which was only 15 miles north of Gobles, would be snow-free or have a few inches on the ground but Gobles would be buried. My parents were not in love with the school system…or small town life in general. My mother and her sister had fallen out, over a titanic argument about the Easter Bunny, of all things, and it was threatening to turn into one of those dark family feuds lasting decades. So, we moved back to Grand Rapids.

Coming of Age in Grand Rapids

I transferred to Creston High School in Grand Rapids. Creston was about ten times the size of Gobles High but I already knew students there because that’s where graduates of Huff Elementary ended up. Gerald Peterson, a friend from Huff advised me to get the less boring honors classes. He especially recommended honors English because the honors English class became the journalism class in the senior year and the journalism class put out the Creston Echo, the school newspaper.

I took my “D” average to the Creston Assistant Principal and asked her to put me in the honors classes. Fortunately, she didn’t check my transcripts or maybe she had some standardized test scores on me and was willing to take a chance. I got the classes I asked for, including Honors English.

Miss Lewis taught Honors English. I immediately fell in love with her. My love life up to that time had been mostly in my imagination. My relationship with Miss Lewis was no different in that respect. The closest thing I had had to a sexual relationship up to that point was some necking on a church sponsored hayride in the ninth grade. The girl, it turned out, was a seventh grader (although mature for her age). Mortified that she was so young, I avoided her after that. My friend, who was a tenth grader, did not see any problem with the girl’s age and took up where I left off. About that time my acne got worse and that was the end of my love life in Gobles, except for one girl whom I did not like but who liked me for some reason. When you feel generally rejected, being chased by the wrong person only seems to make it worse.

Creston High was pretty much the same in the love life department but there was Miss Lewis to fantasize about. I actually followed her downtown on the bus one time. We got to be good friends during my two years at Creston. I was only slightly devastated when she announced, during my senior year, that she was getting married.

Her English class was not like any other class. When most teachers say they want you to think for yourself – the few that would even say that – they mean that you should figure out what they think you should be thinking and feed it back to them. We couldn’t figure out what Miss Lewis wanted. Whatever you came up with, she would challenge. After a while, a raised eyebrow would send you scrambling to support an unsupported assertion or backtracking from some unthinking prejudice. She wasn’t universally loved. One student had her parents complain to the principal about her unorthodox teaching. I thought her methods were great. Just think, a class in which you wanted to stay awake the entire time.

The point of Honors English was to cram the English literature that the school system thought required a year into half a year so the second half could be spent on journalism, also taught by Miss Lewis, who was faculty advisor to the school newspaper, the Creston Echo. During Journalism I, we learned how to write for the paper and layout pages. I liked to write, but I hadn’t had any outlet before. I had submitted a few stories to the Gobles High School student paper and been published, but the Gobles paper was just a mimeographed sheet that didn’t much resemble a real newspaper while the Creston Echo was set in type, complete with photographs, and printed by a professional print shop.

“Word Processing” in the Late Fifties

In my senior year, Miss Lewis switched the Echo to a printer who used the then state-of-the-art offset printing process, also referred to as “cold type.” We weren’t sure about the change. In the previous “hot type” process, a linotype machine made lead slugs containing the words and these were locked into a printer’s form. Columns of type and headlines were guaranteed to be straight using this system. In the offset process, type was produced using a Varitype machine, a fancy kind of electric typewriter with a carbon black ribbon.

These columns were next pasted down with headlines and any other line art and photographed with a big process camera. The process was cleaner and more flexible than traditional hot type, but we had seen other school newspapers done with this process and the results showed the “flexibility” of offset by having columns that were pasted up crooked, headlines askew, and other defects . Miss Lewis assured us that would not happen to the Echo because the printer would do the final paste up.

Most printers in those days were men but this print shop employed a lady Varitype Operator. On the Web, I found a Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) description of the occupation “Varitype Operator:”

Varitype Operator

203.382-026

Operates one or variety of electrically powered typewriting machines equipped with changeable type fonts to typeset master copies, such as stencils, direct plates, photo-offsets, and tracings, for reproduction of copies having printed appearance: Plans layout of page elements (illustrations, headlines, and text) from rough draft or specifications, using knowledge of design. Pastes up preprinted type and reproduction proofs on master layout, using paste and brush. Determines size and style of type, horizontal and vertical spacing, and margins, using knowledge of typesetting. Calculates anticipated dimensions of photo-offset copy to be enlarged or reduced, using arithmetic percentages. Attaches fonts to type holder. Attaches gear to platen to control spacing between lines. Moves lever to control spacing between characters. Sets stops to control right margin. Changes style and size of type by pressing type-change key and turning font from reserve to typing position. May draw decorative or illustrative designs on copy. May lay out and rule forms and charts, using drafting tools. GOE: 07.06.02 STRENGTH: S GED: R3 M2 L3 SVP: 5 DLU: 77

I’m not sure that the young lady did all those things but she did set our copy using the Varitype machine (manufactured by Varitype Corporation of course). The magic things this machine could do that a typewriter couldn’t do was to change typefaces (remember, this was before the IBM Selectric) and justification. Full right and left justification of text was what set printed material apart from mimeographed material. To justify text on the Varitype machine, you had to type it twice; once to get the measure of the line and once to actually produce the line on coated high gloss paper. If you made a mistake, you had to start the column again or you had to produce a corrected version of the line that then had to very carefully be pasted over the line with the mistake. Varitype operators had to have a high accuracy rate to survive.

A decade later, some of my college friends used offset printing methods to produce a counterculture newspaper, The Metro. They bought a Varitype machine so they could compose the paper themselves. Their machine was not much different from the one that composed the Creston Echo in the late Fifties. During the year or two they owned the machine, the printing industry discovered cheap computer typesetting and the Varitype machine became a garage sale item. The computer typesetting machines that killed the Varitype were primitive. The operator typed the copy onto punched tape that was fed into a machine about twice the size of a refrigerator that flashed the type onto photographic paper. The paper was then sent through a quick developing machine, dried, then pasted up. But that technology was not available to the Creston Echo.

During my senior year, I was feature editor of the Echo, which involved managing, writing for, and laying out the feature page, which was also the editorial page. To lay out the paper, you counted words in stories and calculated how many “column inches” the story would take up in a given typeface. Photographs, if any, would have to be “sized” to fit in the space. The prints we got from the photographers were eight by ten inches. By doing a ratio calculation you could find the depth of the picture when sized to fit horizontally into one, two, or three columns of the newspaper (a half column or column and a half cut wasn’t done much since it made extra work for the Varitype Operator). Another way to do the same thing was by laying a ruler on the diagonal of the picture then carefully sliding the picture out from under the ruler. Where the ruler hit the column mark was where the bottom corner of the resized picture would be in the layout.

As one of the page editors, I frequently ended up going to the printer’s with the paper. If a page editor didn’t figure the layout right, somebody had to make adjustments at the shop. The Varitype Operator could change the line spacing and character spacing to fill more or less space with copy but you could only get away with so much of that. More likely, the editor or editors at the shop had to write a subhead or a short paragraph or cut something from a story to make it fit.

My experience on the paper filled gaps in my education that I wasn’t aware I had. I learned more about people and institutions and working as part of a group. I had never willingly done anything before that which depended on more than one additional person.

Also, Miss Lewis introduced me to classical music. I told her I didn’t care for classical music because it had no rhythm.

“Oh?” There was that raised eyebrow. “Have you listened to Bolero?”

That was a piece that college kids with a sex life had probably heard of, but not me. Soon I was checking classical records out of the Grand Rapids public library every weekend.

I found out she was a Christian Scientist, which was a shock. How could a person who was so logical believe such nonsense? I was baptized and therefore nominally a Christian – our family had tried Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian – but I decided at age 15 that I was an atheist. That seemed too lonely, so I backed off to agnostic after a week or two with occasional backsliding into Christianity. Thinking that there might be something to Christian Science if Miss Lewis could embrace it, I again went to the Grand Rapids Public library and took out nearly every book on the subject. As Miss Lewis taught me, I took out both the pro books and the con books and ended up well informed but unconverted.

I taught Miss Lewis chess. We played some very slow games in the Echo staff room as time permitted. Sometimes the rate dropped to one move a day. By the third game, she was giving me all kinds of grief on the board. Miss Lewis was the one who got me thinking that I might make my living as a writer instead of as bush pilot, which was the only other career I had considered. For some reason she thought that college might be useful for a writer, so I started to think about that. Miss Lewis demonstrated that a person could be smart and know nothing about electronics.

Electronics was still my hobby during my time at Creston and I put it to good use building a two-transistor radio that would fit in a plastic tube that I saved from toothbrush packaging. It would fill an earphone with local AM stations. At night, I got stations as far away as New Orleans. The nice part is that the whole thing fit into my pocket and could be used during boring classes at school.

I built a speaker cabinet that, although exceedingly ugly, produced good base. And I built a second amplifier and cabinet so I could have stereo. Stereo was the hottest thing among high fidelity hobbyists. My grandfather had stereo built-in at his cottage on Lake Mill, but there wasn’t much you could play in stereo at first. He had a good collection of samples, demo tapes and novelty recordings where the listener is treated to ping pong ball sounds, trains going by, marching bands moving past and the like. Stereo wasn’t really noticed until stereo records started to appear. My turntable was too old and the tone arm was too heavy to accommodate the new stereo cartridges so I had counter balancing weights taped to the back of the tone arm. The sound was not really high fidelity, but it was stereo.

My duties on the Echo included an occasional news story that involved photography. I was interested in getting the picture to fill the space I had planned for it in the paper and I admit that I was insensitive to pictures…as many word-oriented people are. If I needed more room for words, I cropped the picture a little tighter. If I needed to fill more space, I ran more of the picture. I didn’t think it mattered much if the picture suffered some from being poorly cropped.

I was still interested in the photographic process, however, so sometimes I hung around the lab when the pictures were being developed. The photographers also worked for the yearbook. In fact, the yearbook used many more pictures and was more concerned with the visual than the newspaper. Naturally, the photographers thought of themselves as being attached to the yearbook staff while they thought of us as an annoyance. Still, I was able to get along with them. Because of my brief second grade adventures in the darkroom, I understood the process.

One of the photographers during my junior year was Bill Vanloo. Bill was a senior. His father was an engineer and it was clear that his sons were going to go to college and becomes engineers of some kind too. Bill had a good camera, a Minolta SLR 35mm. I didn’t really get to know Bill much at Creston but we became friends when I moved on to Grand Rapids Junior College. (Bill would eventually end up in Silicon Valley working for a small start up: Sun Micro Systems.)

My parents had mixed feelings about my decision to go to Grand Rapids JC. They wondered what I would do for a living. Neither of them went to college. My father’s only higher education was those Dale Carnegie courses he took with the help of the GI Bill and he took them so he could become a better salesman. My mother attended some art courses after high school but I think marrying my father was a higher priority than art.

During the summer after I graduated, I needed a job to help pay for my extended education. My Dad found me a three-day gig helping load and unload industrial materials from the back of a truck. I was in pain the whole three days and came to a quick decision that the college thing had to work out because I didn’t like making a living with my muscles. The other money-making operation I had going that summer was freelance book review-writing for a downtown weekly Grand Rapids newspaper. I was paid hardly enough to cover bus fare, but I did get a byline. Like my Echo stories, I hammered these out on a typewriter using my best almost touch-typing skills. First drafts were easy. Final drafts were hard and frustrating. I wanted to give my editor “clean copy,” but that meant typing accurately…an impossible task. There were no correcting typewriters and if liquid paper correction fluid existed, I didn’t know about it.

At first I was happy to be published at all and didn’t notice that the editor was crazy. After a while, I started reading his editorials. He advocated pressing the button and wiping out Russia while we still could. This was during the endless cold war era when stupidity was the order of the day in international politics and fear of nuclear destruction was just a normal part of growing up. But advocating the destruction of millions in a pre-emptive strike seemed a bit harsh even in those times. I decided to end my career as book reviewer.

Since I was now college bound, I had to pick out the college. That was an easy choice, since my grades weren’t stellar (although the last two years looked decent: I could argue improvement), and there was no money. Grand Rapids Junior College was cheap because the Grand Rapids School System subsidized it. JC would let anyone in but you had to make certain grades to stay in. They called this policy “selective retention.” That phrase reminded me of “Selective Service,” the draft, which was another incentive to make the college thing work out.

I visited the campus and found that there was a school newspaper called the Junior Collegiate. It had a newspaper office, which the staff used as both an organizational and personal headquarters. An ideal setup, so I signed up that day.

My JC counselor explained the rules of “selective retention” and demonstrated how scores on the college entrance exam that made me very bright compared to my high school peers only qualified me as a slightly above average mortal when compared with college kids and other people who can speak in complete sentences. She suggested I do some actual studying if I wanted to stay at JC.

Junior College offered science and electronics courses, but I only signed up for science courses that I had to take. I wanted to be a writer, not repair TVs or design circuits. There were no computer classes at JC. Anyway, I didn’t think I had the math background and didn’t think I wanted to acquire it. I thought that the science courses I had in high school were dull, misinformed, or incompetently taught.

The photo lab was an extension of the newspaper staff. I was a writer for the newspaper, so I was automatically a member of the “photo lab,” which was both a physical darkroom and a club or “activity” sanctioned by the school. A couple of features of this organization attracted me. The school paid for the supplies, including film. You could use it any time and nobody seemed to care if the pictures were being made for school use or personal work. They did like you to buy your own photo paper, which was expensive, if you planned to do personal work but nobody was keeping close track. Anyway, the school had some war surplus paper from the forties – only slightly fogged – that you could experiment with if you couldn’t afford paper.

I didn’t have a camera and the school’s camera was a Kodak Pony, which was “limited,” to put it kindly. One of the upper classmen, Dan Humphrey, went to New York over the summer with the Pony and produced a bunch of surreal images full of blur, double exposures, and thin negatives that resulted in dark and contrasty prints that were never-the-less much admired in certain circles. Dan joked that he was a follower of the “dark and fuzzy” school of photography. We were never sure if these images were the result of art talent, the limitations of the Pony, or Dan’s technical incompetence… probably all three.

I didn’t like the Pony, but I didn’t have to use it for long. My Dad’s uncle Merrill, with whom my Dad and I stayed when visiting Detroit, gave me a Mercury half frame camera. This pre-war American-made camera would be a collector’s item if I still had it and if I hadn’t “modified it” to make it possible to take the lens out so I could experiment with other “lenses” and extend the focal length for close-ups. While I had it, I took “dark and fuzzy” pictures too…in great quantity, since it was a “half frame” camera that made a smaller negative than a standard 35mm camera and therefore would take twice as many pictures on a roll of film. The pictures were dark and fuzzy because exposure and focus were both a matter of guessing. Besides, the hot style in photography was photojournalism done by “available light” – meaning using no flash in low light situations. A steady hand was needed to get any picture at all by available light.

My romance with the Mercury ended when I borrowed a Leica camera from Bill Vanloo – he had traded his Minolta for it. Why Bill was so foolish as to lend it to me, I’ll never know but it sealed the fate of the Mercury. The Leica M2 had a light meter that sat on top of the camera and coupled with the shutter speed control. By setting the film speed and matching the needle to a lens opening, you automatically set the correct shutter speed. It had rangefinder focusing too. The pictures seemed so sharp you could cut yourself on them. They looked especially sharp to me because I was nearsighted, but didn’t wear glasses. That meant that I could see the detail on the 35mm negative without glasses, but real life beyond three feet was a blur.

I couldn’t afford a Leica, but the local camera store had a Baldessa, which had all the same features as the Leica except for the quality workmanship, razor sharp interchangeable lens, and the very high price. I bought the camera on credit. The trouble was, I had no source of income except my parents. I got a job at the local electronic organ shop, which happened to be owned by the father of the husband of the newly married Miss Lewis. …OK, she got me the job. The shop sold the Lowrey brand organ.

An electronic organ was possibly the most complicated and expensive piece of electronic equipment that you could buy for a home at that time. Lots of tubes and some very tricky circuitry allow the user to simulate, more-or-less, the sound of a number of different instruments. My job involved sweeping the floor, however, so the closest I got to the circuits was a glance at an organ that had its back off.

The Baldessa was not ever counted among the great European cameras but I was learning to take interesting pictures with it when tragedy struck by way of Dan Humphrey of the aforementioned dark and fuzzy school of photography. Dan borrowed the camera long enough to drop it, which wasn’t very long as I remember.

Unlike the Pony, which was tough, if nothing else, the Baldessa crumpled and died from this little impact with the ground and had to be sent to New York to be repaired. Dr. Swets, the newspaper advisor, agreed that the newspaper would pay half the repair because Dan was taking pictures for the newspaper at the time of the drop. Somehow, the newspaper got billed for half of the repair and also gave half of the cost to Dan so the paper ended up paying for all of it.

In the meantime, I was without a camera. By this time, Dan had broken up with Ruth Shoals, and I had fallen madly in love with her with about the same results as being in love with Miss Lewis. I can inject my love life in here because it won’t take up much space…one date with one of the editors of the high school paper in my senior year when she was on the rebound (her name was Pat) and one date with Ruth with no encouragement. Things wouldn’t get much better until I got to Wayne State. Anyway, Dan had found a new girl friend, Judy Krebbs. Judy’s family had a camera that they loaned to Dan who loaned it to me to tide me over during the Baldessa repair.

The camera was an Argus C-44. It had an interchangeable lens system and a leaf shutter that, unlike most leaf shutters, was behind the lens and not part of the lens. That meant it was huge and made a sound reminiscent of small-arms fire when activated in a quiet room. I wanted a better camera, and, as the Baldessa repair was threatening to take longer than our college career, Judy wanted her camera back. By this time, I was well acquainted with the camera stores and the people who worked there. My camera salesperson friend, Norm, lent me an Honor camera, which was a copy of an earlier model Leica. I was showing a fellow student how the lens unscrewed. Unfortunately, I was doing this on the stairway at JC and dropped the lens. The result was a bent lens flange. My solution was to buy the lens and camera body. The lens still worked fine, but I didn’t like the Honor body. It had a separate viewfinder and range-finder that made you shift back and forth constantly to compose and shoot. I negotiated for a Cannon body that had the two in one window. About the time I acquired this new camera and new debt, I lost the gig at the organ shop. This encouraged me to turn pro with the camera.

Since I was getting film free and the use of the lab free, buying only paper and an occasional can of developer, I could sell to students cheaply and make a profit. There was later some unhappiness about this on the part of the college.

Me at Grand Rapids Junior College

The first year at JC was the best. Many of my friends were sophomores who graduated at the end of that year and left for U of M or Michigan State including Bill Vanloo, Dan Humphrey, and Ruth Shoals. (I’m leaving out some friends here, and even friends who influenced my development as a photographer, but this narrative is about technology and the TRS-80, right? I intend to get to that.) The summer of that year, I got a job at Montgomery Ward’s department store working for two weeks moving items out of the air-conditioned store to a tent outside where it was hot and uncomfortable and therefore ideal for a sale, according to the twisted logic of retailing. On this job, I learned that the guys unloading the truck, who were members of the Teamsters Union, were getting three times as much as I was for essentially the same work. The most interesting thing that happened was when we were ordered to load a bunch of lamps on a cart. We lowly part-time workers felt the lamps would not make it to the tent intact. The boss thought they would. The wind caught the lamps, proving the boss wrong with a crashing of sale lamps that surely lowered their price even more.

After the sale, they kept me on in “display.” I liked that job a lot. There was little heavy lifting, I worked in a different part of the store everyday, and the other guys working in display were easy going. The display department was headquartered in the mannequin storage room, which was as close as I was getting to naked women at the time. Management discovered that I knew something about cameras, however, so they moved me to the camera department. In the camera department, I got a one half percent commission, which raised my wages up to about a dollar twenty-five an hour during a good week.

At some point around this time, I acquired a car, which I needed to get to the job, which was on the other side of town. Or I needed the job to pay for the car – I forget which. The car got used for two dates during the period that I owned it, eliminating the comforting theory that lack of an automobile was the primary cause of my miserable love life.

Another result of the job was I started taking night classes at JC, which turned out to be better than day classes. The Dean of the night school knew how to get the best people from private Grand Rapids colleges that would have been too expensive for us JC kids to attend.

With college, a job, photography, and a car; my interest in electronics waned. I didn’t have time. Besides, I was belatedly trying to figure out girls. Popular Electronics dropped off my reading list, since it was not helpful in understanding girls. Computers were even further from my mind. JC didn’t have such a thing. The cash registers at Wards were electromechanical.

The hottest cameras sold by Wards were the “automatic” models. These cameras were aimed at customers who were ready for something better than a box camera but didn’t want to learn photography just to take pictures. These models had a selenium photovoltaic cell that controlled the lens opening. That was high tech then. Serious cameras had manual shutter speeds and lens settings. Their biggest concession to automation was the “coupled meter” such as the one on my Baldessa (which had returned repaired that spring and was promptly sold). With a coupled meter, when you changed one setting – say the shutter—the meter markings would shift to show the correct F stop at that light level. I could pick up and demonstrate any non-automatic camera the first time I saw it, but I had to read the manuals of all the “easy “ cameras because they all had a different “user interface.”

Just after Christmas, I got a note in my paycheck thanking me for my help over the holiday season and wishing me well. My career at Wards was over. I enrolled in more classes at JC and rejoined the newspaper staff and the photo lab, making a few bucks with my camera. I sold the car to buy a Leica M2 with the coveted Dual Range Summicron 50mm lens. With this new camera, I could now take great pictures. Except, the burden of living up to the new camera was too great. The first three rolls were not worth developing. Soon, I was taking good pictures again, but I had learned that while tools are nice, they don’t mean much without human talent. At the end of the second year at JC, I still didn’t have enough credits to graduate.

That summer I was sent up to Mecosta Michigan where my uncle Walt, my Dad’s brother, was trying to make a paying proposition out of Round Lake Resort. The idea was that I’d get out of my parents hair, help my uncle out, and make a little money for next year’s school. My uncle had many ideas, which all seemed to involve moving heavy things around with me as one of the movers. Actually, most of the heavy work came at first, when we built the lakefront store to service the boaters on Round Lake with gas and groceries. There are two other lakes, Mecosta and Blue Lake, which connect to Round Lake so business was expected to be good. Round Lake Resort was created, or rather had grown, on my Uncle’s father-in-law’s homesteaded property. At first, it was just a few trailers and a sideline to the farm across the road from the lake. By the Sixties, farming wasn’t paying much and trailer homes were getting to be popular. Hence the major expansion.

In addition to Round Lake and the farming area, the family owned about a square mile or so of forest and stream. My Uncle had a World War II era Jeep that was perfect for roaming the wooded land owned by my Uncle’s father-in-law. A stream ran through the property and there was a small lake back there. The stream had been dammed ages ago, first by beavers, then by my Uncle’s father-in-law. Years later, my wife Theresa lost her wedding ring back in these woods while we were doing things for which a high expectation of privacy is usually considered desirable. But that summer, cutting trails with the jeep was the main attraction.

Round Lake was a country place where people had country roots. In the city, you knew people as friends and acquaintances for a long time, sometimes, without knowing much about their family. The folks at Round Lake automatically traced out, in conversation, the family tree and current relatives of every person mentioned. No one outside of the immediate family circle (where it was assumed everyone knew the history in detail) escaped this treatment except for the trailer people and other transients from the big cities of Detroit, Lansing and Grand Rapids. Even some of them got this conversational review if they had persistent local connections. This habit made for long dinner table conversations.

But by the early Sixties, Mecosta was less isolated and more technically advanced than it was when I’d gone there to stay with my grandmother. The plumbing was mostly indoors, TV was available from Grand Rapids, Cadillac and, I think, Mount Pleasant. With my little Granco FM tuner, I could get more FM stations than I could in Grand Rapids. Around this time, the phone company put in a dial phone system. When my grandmother was alive, she could just pick up the phone and say, “Get Walt for me,” and the operator would hunt down my uncle by calling all the places she knew he might be. But progress finally ended that. The horror of phone trees wouldn’t come until years later though.

One thing lacking was a darkroom. I’d brought my Leica but I didn’t own any darkroom equipment. My uncle was paying me, so I used some of the money for a developing tank for the 35mm film used by the Leica. My shooting in those days was on black and white film, mostly Tri-X. I couldn’t afford color and wasn’t interested. With a developing tank and a few chemicals, I could develop film at night, but I had no way to make prints.

A few trays were all that was needed to develop print paper. A light bulb, switched on and off by hand, and a glass sheet allowed me to make “contact sheets” of what I was shooting, but I lacked an enlarger.

What is an enlarger, after all, but a lens, a negative holder, a light source, and a housing to hold it all together? I found something in my Uncle’s collection of junk — I think it might have been the gate from an old filmstrip projector — which I modified to be the negative holder. Some coffee cans and a light socket made up the housing. The Leica Summicron doubled as the enlarging lens. The lens had a built-in focusing capability if you didn’t care about varying the size of the pictures that much. (Enlargers generally need a lot more variation in focal distance from the negative than cameras because they work over short distances.) This cobbled together enlarger had a few drawbacks. The “modern” enlargers I used at school had a condenser lens that focused light evenly through the negative. My arrangement used milky plastic pieces to diffuse the light to evenly light the negative. This made for longer exposures and less contrasty prints. The coffee can got hot fast and tended to melt the plastic. I had to focus quickly, and then wait for everything to cool down. Negatives sometimes popped out of focus from being heated, but I was able to make nice enlargements with this homemade enlarger when I was quick enough. Later, I bought some ground glass to substitute for the plastic.

I think I also built an electronic timer to regulate print exposure. I know I built one while I was a student at Wayne State University and I may be confusing this period with that. Exposure times with the homemade enlarger tended to be long so I might have just used my wristwatch.

Twenty-four Channels of Personal Communication

The other piece of technology that took up some spare time at Round Lake was my Uncle’s Citizen’s Band (CB) radio. It was 1962. CB radio wasn’t yet the huge fad that it later became. Equipment was expensive and the FCC had not yet given up on policing the band. There were rules that supposedly restricted you to talking only to your own units. You could not call “CQ” on the band, inviting anyone out there to respond as “Hams” could. People got around this by announcing that their station was on the air…numerous times a day. Local CB owners would chat. Occasionally, a mobile unit would answer. As on the Ham bands, most conversations were about equipment, your location, and reception. Although we were violating FCC regs in spirit, compared to what CB later became, we were a well-mannered and civilized group. CB would later be discovered by the masses and became a big profit generator for Radio Shack. Some say that Radio Shack’s interest in doing a personal computer was to have a replacement product when CB sales saturated and began to decline.

My uncle had a couple of “walkie-talkies” that operated on the CB band between each other and the base station. These worked well when we were back in the woods with the jeep. The base station still used tubes, but the handsets were transistorized marvels.

When summer ended, I went back to Grand Rapids Junior College to finish up. I was in my third year of two years of college because I wasn’t taking a full load while I was working. By then, I’d decided that I wanted to make my living as a photographer rather than a writer. Typing was such a pain and I always made errors. Second drafts seemed to have almost as many errors as the first. Photography was done in a sort of trance-like state. I usually knew when I was getting good pictures and, anyway, when the film was shot the job was over…no retyping. I’d also decided that to make a living in either photography or writing, I needed to be in a bigger town than Grand Rapids. The University of Michigan seemed too expensive and Ann Arbor seemed too small. Michigan State University seemed even worse. Wayne State University was immediately appealing, however. It had a good student newspaper that had its own old utilitarian offices housed over a print shop which, oddly, didn’t print the newspaper. The place reminded me of the cozy offices of the Junior College paper. I felt at home. Besides, WSU was as far from my parents as I could get in the state university system without freezing up north somewhere.

I was still interested in journalism, but at JC I had a very good sociology teacher from Calvin College — one of the night school people — who got me interested in sociology as a major. I applied to Wayne State and was accepted, but JC was on a semester system and WSU used quarters. Consequently, I had some time between the end of my JC career and my start at WSU. I was living at home at the time. My mother and I were fighting a fair amount of the time. In our family, these fights were about politics and religion. In high school, I had fallen under the influence of conservative Republicans. I read anticommunist books and Bill Buckley. Grand Rapids, seemed to be populated only with Republicans and conservative Republicans. Meeting a Democrat was almost as unlikely as meeting a cannibal. At JC, I’d met some actual liberal Democrats. These friends and my own maturing thinking was moving me gradually left, which in Grand Rapids meant toward the center. My mother, meanwhile, was listening to the Rev. Karl Macintyre and moving right. (In our family, we rarely fought over petty matters. We struggled over the fate of the World.) I think both my mother and I were looking forward to my leaving and Detroit seemed far enough.

But, because of the differences in schedules, I was stuck in Grand Rapids for several months. I didn’t want to get a job and I didn’t want to hang around the house so I started my freelance journalism career by pitching the Grand Rapids Press Sunday Magazine on several stories I thought they’d like. The editor there gave me the go-ahead on the stories that I pursued with a lot more energy than was warranted by the twenty dollars a page I would make for doing both words and pictures. To the extent that they published everything I did for them, I was successful, but I probably made more money as a stock boy for Montgomery Ward than I did in my short Grand Rapids career as a freelance photojournalist. It gave me some sample work, however, that I used to ensure a paid spot on the Wayne State Collegiate student paper. I got ten dollars a week as assistant photo editor.

College Years in Detroit

The newspaper had a well-equipped photo lab. After my make-shift lab at my uncle’s place up north and a brief stint using a 4H club lab at a freezing farm house outside Grand Rapids, the WSU newspaper lab seemed state of the art. The enlarger had a mechanical auto focus arrangement that meant you didn’t have to refocus every time you changed the size of the picture. Precision (mechanical) timers controlled the enlarger exposures and timed film development. The lab even had a print meter that measured the light from the enlarger. It wasn’t actually a “meter.” It used a potentiometer (like the fast disappearing volume control knob on radios and sound equipment) to balance the resistance of a cadmium sulfide photocell. When you got the first print right, you placed the meter under the enlarger light at a spot where there was an important tone in the picture and turned the knob until the neon light indicator extinguished. Then, measuring a similar spot on the next negative, you stopped down the enlarger light until the neon light again extinguished. That was supposed to give you the same gray value on each print for the metered spot. It took keen judgment on the part of the photographer as to which spots to measure, but it helped get good prints under production conditions. That was important because we made our own engravings. We used a machine that used two rotating cylinders; one held the photographic print under a transparent plastic sheet and the other held a rotating plastic blank into which the picture was burned by a hot needle as a photocell scanned the rotating print. It was strictly analog with the signal from the phototube passing directly to the cutting head There was no storage involved. Sometimes this process worked right.

One of my early assignments was to photograph the Systems Analysts at the university’s computer building. This was where I first saw an actual computer. It filled a very large two-story room with featureless racks of equipment. There were a number of operators, programmers, and maintenance people. The Systems Analysts had a lofty office at the second floor level overlooking the whole complex. To hear them tell it, the whole place was run by them and the rest of the people were just minions. The computer was impressive but so clearly outside my budget that it was in the same category as the moon rocket NASA was trying to build down in Florida. I knew that electronic parts were shrinking but I didn’t foresee that, in my life time, people would be carrying more computing power in their pocket than existed in that whole building.

My Break in Photojournalism

I was on a tight budget at WSU. The token ten dollars a week from the college paper was not enough to pay for tuition, books, rent, and food. I think I had saved some money and my parents came through with an occasional check. And I had a camera and access to a lab so there was the possibility of selling photographs to pick up extra cash. But my financial worries would disappear for a while due to a stroke of luck.

Detroit had two major newspapers, the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press. The Detroit Times had closed its doors just before I came to Detroit. I had hoped to do some freelance photography for the Detroit papers as I had for the Grand Rapids Press. But Detroit is a strong union town and when the contracts at the News and Free Press were up, the unions went out on strike. There goes any chance of summer work I thought.

But I was wrong! The business manager of the university paper was convinced that the strike would be a long one and that would create a vacuum that we could fill with a temporary newspaper. He bounced this off several staff members. At first, we thought he was nuts. “Why not start a major TV network while we’re at it?” I asked. But the sales manager called several people asking if they would be interested in placing ads in this as yet non-existent paper. They were eager to hear more.

“What’s the name of this paper?” one asked.

Thinking fast, the sales manager said, “The Detroit Daily Press.”

Michael Dworkin, the staffer who came up with the idea also had relatives who had a little money. The notion of the Detroit Daily Press quickly grew from a kind of expanded college paper to an attempt at a major big city daily. We got office space on Woodward Avenue, the main drag though Detroit, in the aging Garfield Building across from Vern’s Bar, a campus hangout that became a press hangout that summer. I think Vern’s made enough money off our trade to expand and move to better quarters.

I was nominally the Photo Editor. I outfitted the darkroom, which was a small room that happened to have plumbing. I hired a freelancer, Don Cutter, who showed up at a time when we needed staff quickly. Don was in his forties and came complete with colorful stories about his Texas childhood, his World War II Air Force stories, and his Pathe News and UPI (United Press International) Alaska stories. He proved to be a solid news photographer and he was in and out of my life for a long time thereafter. Years later, Theresa and I got to listen to some of his favorite stories as told by his wife, Mildred. Her versions of his photographic exploits were often different and a lot less glamorous.

After the first issue hit the streets, Free Press personnel started showing up offering their services. Ed Haun, second generation Free Press photographer, worked for the Detroit Daily Press. He killed six flies in the photo lab that summer and pasted them on a sheet of paper with the caption, “Six in one blow!” (I’m not sure six was the number, but it was an impressive number.)

The Detroit Daily Press did not use a single computer. The type was set every day the old fashioned way, in lead on linotype machines. The highest tech newsgathering equipment we had was a television set and a couple of teletype machines. The teletypes were Model 15s that hadn’t changed much since the forties. About 16 years later, I would get the job of interfacing a Model 15 teletype that a friend had acquired as junk to a TRS-80 Model I, Level II computer, but in 1964, they were just interesting, if noisy, remote typewriters that brought us the Reuter’s news feed. (We couldn’t get AP or UPI because they had tight contracts with the News and Free Press.) I remember those days sometimes when I check the news on Yahoo, provided by Reuters.

The Detroit Daily Press provided a good salary during the summer. In the fall, I went back to classes and only worked the weekends, but I still got my full salary. The reason for that was that when the enterprise started, I was promised a percentage of profits. When I was away visiting my parents in Grand Rapids, somebody decided to cut my percentage and substitute a salary. I learned about this during a phone call from Grand Rapids. They justified the cut because they could get more experienced people from the Free Press. When I got back to Detroit, I discovered that I and one other Wayne State original had suffered this kind of switch and cut. The others were getting a salary and their original deal. The other fellow and I raised hell about this and, in my case, I got to go back to classes at WSU while drawing my full pay. This deal worked well for me because the strike lasted longer than anyone thought it would, so I was financed well into the fall. At the end, I did get a lump sum of $2500.00 that represented my reduced percentage of the profits.

Meeting Theresa

At Wayne State I crossed some kind of invisible barrier that allowed me to actually get somewhere with women. I’m not sure what made the difference, but I actually had dates. That process was not complete when I met my future wife, Theresa. My first date with Theresa was arranged by Judy, a girl that I had gone out with a few times and who was trying to find me a replacement, probably so I’d stop bothering her. Theresa came up to the newspaper room to look into working for the paper. For some reason, nothing came of her newspaper career there, but she was in the building long enough for Judy to introduce her to me and suggest that I take her out. This was when I still had money from the Detroit Daily Press and when I was Photo Editor of the paper, which paid $15.00 a week, and, by virtue of that exalted position, the possessor of free tickets to the Bonstelle Theater where the University Theater Department put on a full schedule of performances. The theater department gave the newspaper staff free tickets, which encouraged lavish coverage of the theater department’s productions. I asked Theresa if she was interested in going to the Bonstelle and she was.

Theresa and me on a rare dress-up date.

We went on about six dates, the best of which was when we crashed the homecoming dance. It was entirely accidental. We were wandering downtown Detroit and turned up at Cobo Hall where we discovered the dance. We crashed the dance on the strength of my press card. I was a terrible dancer, but Theresa could follow, so it worked out pretty well. I liked Theresa because she was a girl and she could be counted on for a surprising off center comment on just about anything. She seemed to say whatever came into her head. Spontaneous. She was also very nearsighted and not inclined to wear glasses (later, she got contacts). I saved her from certain death in heavy traffic on a number of occasions. I don’t know how she survived when I wasn’t around.

At about the sixth date, Theresa discovered I wasn’t actually paying for the tickets; that I got them free. For some reason this made a difference to her at the time and I think she had other interests. She suddenly became unavailable and I stopped calling.

About eight months passed. I was covering a sit-in for the college paper. Theresa happened into the lobby that was being sat in upon.

“What’s going on?” she asked me.

“The Young Socialists have invited a guy from the communist party to speak and the University is trying to block the invitation,” I explained.

“Oh,” she said and sat down in defense of free speech.

She told me she had moved off campus and gave me the new phone number. I called her and suggested we go to the Michigan State Fair; in her car, since by then she had one and I didn’t. She picked me up at my apartment on Cass in her very second hand 1960 model Plymouth Valiant and drove us to the Fairgrounds at Woodward and Eight Mile Road, the northern edge of Detroit. After wandering the Fair for a while, I said, “I know where there’s a real Fair. The Canadian National Exhibition is going on in Toronto.”

I don’t remember how I knew that or why I mentioned it. I think it was just a humorous, impossible suggestion like, “Wouldn’t it be fun to walk to Chicago sometime?” When I make suggestions like that, they are not meant to be taken seriously.

But Theresa was interested. I explained that it would take four or five hours on the 401, Canada’s then new, and just about only, expressway. We’d go in her car of course.

We stopped at her apartment on the east side of Detroit and my apartment on Cass Avenue at Wayne State to gather up the 38 dollars that we had between us, then we headed for the Ambassador Bridge that would take us to Canada and the 401.

I had hitchhiked to Toronto before and stayed at the YMCA. It was the only thing I could afford and I figured there must be a YWCA as well. There was. But both Y’s were full so we ended up sleeping in the Valiant.

At the Exhibition, I had my first encounter with a computer terminal. It was connected to some university across town and running a program that presented you with a command line on the screen. I typed in some wisecracks to which the computer responded with the equivalent of “Does Not Compute.” The experience was remarkably like my first encounters with the TRS-80. Here was a keyboard and a video screen. You type on the keyboard and the words appear on the video screen. You press “Enter” and the machine responds. Definitely interesting.

We came back from Toronto close to broke. Theresa was afraid we’d have to spend her treasured Kennedy half-dollar to pay the bridge toll. At one point she was vowing to stay in Canada rather than give it up. We made it across the bridge without that sacrifice however. She told me later that she spent the half-dollar a week after we got back.

The Valiant died on her shortly after the trip. She sold it for junk when it proved too expensive to fix. Our relationship didn’t last any longer than the car. She moved on to other men and I to other women.

Well the other woman was Judy. (Not the one who introduced me to Theresa.) For about a month we had an intense and blissful relationship. Then we spent another month hurting each other before we called it quits. During the blissful part, Judy was taking computer-programming classes at a business school with a view to getting a better job than her filing gig at the University. But she had a problem. She didn’t know the first thing about electricity or what was going on inside the computer. Strictly speaking, she didn’t need to know any of that to program a computer but not knowing it bothered her.

She felt that others in the class understood these things and she should too. She realized she had a boyfriend who understood electricity as well as he understood breathing so she asked me to teach her. Her knowledge was way less than basic. I soon concluded there were better ways we could spend our time together. I suggested to her that she had fallen victim to cultural stereotypes that cause girls to miss what many boys get almost by osmosis from helping their Dad work on the car or rewiring the rec room.

She had tried reading books on the subject but they baffled her. There were no “Dummy” books then. The books she was reading were all aimed at adults who already were well acquainted with the subject. I went to the kid’s section of the Detroit Public Library and checked out titles like A Boy’s First Book of Electricity.

“These books are easy reads,” I told her, “and they make no assumptions about what you already know. After you read these, you can read any book you like on the subject.” She did read them and she said it helped.

That spring – still licking my wounds from the Judy romance – I ran into Theresa again. We were both sadder but wiser. This time we stuck together. I was both intrigued and appalled by her spontaneity or recklessness (depending on how you looked at it). I started taking her more seriously when I started reading some of her writing. She was not, at that time, a journalistic writer. I considered myself more expert in that area, having switched from photography back to writing and editing at the college newspaper. But her fiction impressed me. It was interesting and insightful with surprising little twists. Soon I realized I was in love again. I remember feeling almost depressed at the realization. The highs are nice but the experience with Judy was too fresh too forget about the lows.

I took this picture of Theresa on the trip to Toronto.

Theresa was not sure she was wild about me. She had a job working for Social Services that paid what to me seemed to be an astronomical amount for someone not yet degreed. I had reached my senior year with a big hole in my transcript under the heading of language. I was a veteran of French and Italian with equally disastrous results. It was a mental block. I learned more Spanish on a two-week trip to Mexico than I learned French or Italian in either class or both of them combined.

One day Judy, the girl who had introduced me to Theresa, dropped into my life again long enough to point out that I couldn’t graduate in the college of Liberal Arts without taking and mastering a language, and the university wasn’t counting Pig Latin. She proposed a solution: switch to the College of Education. After all, she reasoned, the degree counts. No one would care where it came from and you could always get work as a substitute teacher.

I made the switch, but I really didn’t like the College of Education, though I had some very good classes there…and some horrible ones.

While Theresa was making good money working for the State of Michigan, I was subsisting on an occasional check from my parents and a photo sale now and then. Two of my friends were getting married and leaving Detroit. They had this car that they wanted to give me. I didn’t need a car and I didn’t have the money to pay expenses that go with a car but Theresa had both the need and the cash. Of course, I was envisioning a role here as her driver.

About the second time out in the car, we got into an argument over something while waiting at a stop sign. An impatient driver behind us honked his horn and I reacted by pulling out into the cross street in time to be hit by another car. The damage wasn’t serious, but the car was old, not worth fixing, so that was the end of the car, but not the end of problems over the car. The insurance agent claimed that the insurance didn’t cover us because I was driving. That wasn’t true, but it took years and many letters to the Insurance Commission to prove it. Meanwhile AAA was suing us on behalf of the other driver whose car we had injured.

When Theresa got the papers for the lawsuit, she was in tears.

“I can’t face this alone,” she said. “Let’s get married.”

“OK,” I said. We had talked about it before, but I guess that was the proposal.

I was tired of college and tired of being poor so I got a job at an advertising agency, W.B. Doner. I was not making as much as Theresa but I was gainfully employed as a Photostat Operator. My job was to sit “on call” in the Photostat room and wait until someone requested a Photostat. The Photostat machine was a big camera that held a roll of Photostat paper and was attached to a copy board. You placed the art work on the copy board, focused, and pulled a string that opened the shutter for a second or two. Then you cranked the exposed paper into the developing tray that was also attached to the camera. The developing tray was more or less light tight, but to finish the job you had to switch off the lights and transfer the paper to a fixer bath. The Photostats were then washed and dried just like photographs…except they were negatives. To make a positive you photographed the negative, which made another Photostat that was positive. The Photostat process was designed for documents and was naturally high contrast. That was fine when the artists were resizing type to fit different layouts but sometimes they wanted photos enlarged. That required “flashing” the paper with white light to reduce the contrast. I quickly mastered the Photostat machine. I was a photographer after all and this was photography…sort of.

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Me and the Photostat machine at W. B. Doner.

I wasn’t really going to college anymore so I had no darkroom. I set one up in my closet. I bought an enlarger, and, polishing off my electronic skills, built an electronic timer. Electronic darkroom timers had been around for a long time. They tended to be expensive so mechanical timers were what most darkrooms had. Truthfully, there is no advantage to an electronic timer over a mechanical one for timing enlarger exposures. I just wanted to make one and save a few bucks. I found there were now plenty of cheap transistors with which to build this device. The principal is simple, you charge a capacitor then let it discharge through a variable resistor until the voltage falls below that needed to keep a relay closed. The relay controls the enlarger bulb and enhance the exposure time. The transistor is just a simple amplifier that powers the relay so the relay can be a cheap insensitive one instead of an expensive sensitive one.

W.B. Doner moved while I worked there. I was given the assignment of designing the new darkroom/Photostat room because I was the only one there with any background in photography. In the new digs, they had room for a small studio. They hired another WSU veteran, Dick Hirneisen, to do in-house movie production and shoot some stills. He was more interested in the movie end so when he discovered I knew something about photography, he had me doing shots of bottles and small products in the studio. I was still getting $85.00 a week even though I was doing a lot more than Photostats. One of the nice things about the Photostat job was that you could sit and read when no one needed a stat. My reading time disappeared with this new arrangement.

Since I was now married, $85.00 a week was looking pretty thin. Theresa was making better money, but she wanted to finish school and move on from her job as a state social worker. So I applied for and got a job at the Daily Tribune in Royal Oak, thus becoming one of the few people to leave advertising for journalism with a raise in pay.

Shortly before I applied for the Tribune job, Theresa and I held a wedding reception that turned into a riot. We had married in front of a judge so family attendance at the wedding was limited. To smooth feelings we held a belated reception in our apartment on West Chicago Boulevard in Detroit. Most of the relatives were coming by a route that took them by Twelfth Street, where the 1967 Detroit riot was getting ready to erupt. Our guests were not in the middle of it, but they could see the action further down Twelfth Street. Nobody knew what was going on.

By the end of the reception, the news reached us that there was a riot and it was spreading throughout the city. Our friends, Dan Hall and his wife, Elsa, didn’t want to leave. Dan was already working for the Tribune as a reporter and didn’t want to miss a story. Elsa wasn’t sure she wanted to travel the streets of Detroit during a riot with darkness approaching, so they stayed the night. Dan wrote his first story to be picked up by the wire services. I took some pictures with a little half frame Olympus camera that was all I had left after a break-in at my previous campus apartment. During the next few days, I helped other people take pictures without getting any myself.

David and Theresa Welsh on their wedding day, June 3, 1967.

When I started work at the Tribune, we were still living on West Chicago. I worked the late shift on the Trib. This was mostly a driving job in which I beat to death our newly acquired used Ford Fairlane racing between assignments with barely enough time at each place to snap some kind of picture, then on to the next. Occasionally, they gave me a good assignment with the time to do the kind of photojournalistic coverage that I was interested in doing, but mostly, I was a driver.

Making prints at the Tribune was a rush job as well. The point wasn’t to get a perfect print. It was to get the prints done fast. Often, I would have to print the rolls that the other two photographers had shot during the day but hadn’t had a chance to print. Dick Hunt, who ended up having a long career at the Tribune, showed me the Tribune technique for quick printing. You squint a little and stop down the lens until you start to lose sight of the details in the dark parts of the negative, then you expose at a fixed time that you always use. This is just like using an exposure meter but you use your eye instead of a meter. While it’s possible to learn to judge negative exposures fairly well using this method, I thought I could do better with a meter. So I built one. I think that the first one I built and used at the Tribune just used a CSD photocell similar to the one in the commercial meter I’d used at the Wayne State paper. I used a transistor amplifier and a meter, but the principle was the same. Stop down the lens until the meter centers and you have the exposure for that area of the photo that will match the shade you got in your calibration print. By 1968, you could get a part called an op-amp. This was an “integrated circuit” that would make any kind of high-gain DC amplifier you could want. You could “program” its characteristics with the value of the resistors you used with it. It used a number of transistors on a chip to do this. I started experimenting with this, using it to make improved versions of the enlarger meter. Around the same time, decade binary counter chips started to show up at Radio Shack. There wasn’t any circuit information with them. I bought one anyway but never got around to doing anything with it.

This was the psychedelic era and “light organs” began to appear. These devices used various electronic circuits to flash colored lights in time to music. I made one of these by putting together a bunch of transistors in a fairly unstable flip-flop circuit chain. The flip-flop is a basic computer circuit, of course, but aside from responding to the music in a binary fashion, the circuit wasn’t doing any computation. Because it was unstable, it made interesting and mostly random effects depending on the music fed into it. Recently, I tried the “visualization” feature of the Winamp MP3 player and was reminded of my light organ.

Popular Electronics was beginning to cover digital electronics and I was a regular reader again.

While I was at the Tribune, my cousin Sandy got married. Her husband was a grad student at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where they were living. On one visit, he offered to show me the computer that he worked with in the Psychology Lab. This proved to be a box about the size of four refrigerators. A tape reader/teletype was connected to it. There was a CRT vector graphics unit that could be used to display output from the computer. There was no keyboard, other than the one attached to the paper tape reader/punch. At the CRT were some switches that they had rigged to communicate with the computer. The big thing he wanted to show us was a program called “Spacewar.” He loaded the paper tape into the computer memory. On the CRT, there appeared two spaceships and the Sun. You could control the spaceships with the switches: turning them, firing their rockets, and firing their guns. The spaceships behaved like real spaceships would. If you weren’t careful, the Sun’s gravity attracted your spaceship to a presumed flaming demise (presumed because you didn’t see any flames). One button combination let you duck into hyperspace and appear somewhere else. That was the first time I saw a computer do something that creative and interesting. He told me the computer was relatively cheap at about $100,000, not counting the paper tape reader, CRT and the switches.

My stint at the Tribune lasted about two years. I had dropped out of WSU but Theresa finished her degree. She quit the Department of Social Services. I was looking for better employment at other newspapers. Then The Tribune fired me. The reason given was that I was pursuing political activity on the job. That was not true. Someone had sent out literature for the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and I think they thought it was me. Anyway, I was no longer wanted at the Tribune. We were facing a financial crisis, since Theresa wasn’t working and unemployment didn’t pay that well.

Here I am with camera during the days of the Royal Oak Daily Tribune.

To save money, we moved back into Detroit to an apartment that my old friend Don Cutter owned. Part of the attraction was that Don had a photo lab in the building that I could use. There was also an unused storefront. The windows were boarded or bricked up and it was theoretically available as studio space, although Don stored so much surplus equipment in there I don’t think we ever actually used it. While we were there, I did some work for Don that didn’t pay very well but taught me more photographic survival skills. Don would do anything photographic to make a buck. He liked to shoot news or public relations jobs. He liked to do movie work and had some equipment and experience but couldn’t get into the union. When nothing more exciting offered itself, he and Mildred would book high school yearbook photography. He would also “kidnap.” That was the photography term for going door to door with an offer to photograph the kids for free – promising one eight by ten print. The idea was that once you had the kids on film, no mother could resist buying extra pictures and copies for grandmother. I learned to kidnap from Don and it was part of my backup strategy for lean times along with shooting bowling leagues and weddings.

I started looking for a photojournalistic job. Many of the places at which I showed my portfolio liked my work but weren’t hiring. However they did have freelance work. I started to take these freelance jobs. These assignments were better, artistically, than most of the assignments at the Tribune. And they paid well, if you could get a steady stream of work.

Theresa, meanwhile, had visions of poverty and starvation so she took a job with the Michigan Employment Security Commission as an employment counselor. At one point, I was still collecting unemployment while my wife worked for the same agency.

Gradually, I acquired more clients and was looking increasingly more self-employed than unemployed. I had a lab, supplied by my landlord, but I lacked equipment. Cameras had to be bought, but there were some things I could make: electronic flash units, flash trips, and meters for example.

Living in Don’s place had some advantages, but it was in a high-crime area and near the Wayne Soap Company, a rendering plant that smelled like a rendering plant. The cement company rained gray powder on us whenever the wind was right. Don kept a gun to deter crime (we were only broken into once). Theresa was as nervous about the gun as she was about potential criminals.

After the second time Theresa’s car was stolen, we started looking for affordable greener pastures. My high school classmate, Bill Vanloo, was by now married but still working on his doctorate in computer science. He and his wife, Peg, moved to a low income co-op in Romulus, a suburb west of Detroit. Peg got a teaching job in the local area while Bill commuted to University of Michigan. Romulus is near Metro Airport, about half way to the Ann Arbor campus. I think they mentioned their co-op housing solution to us and we ended up moving there too. Theresa transferred from the MESC office in Detroit to one in the suburb of Inkster. I figured my clients wouldn’t care where I was located as long as I could do their assignments.

There was one problem. I lost the Cutter darkroom. The townhouse had a basement with laundry tubs and the windows were easy to block. My friend Walter Lubienski had a professional grade enlarger he was willing to sell and I had some equipment from my days before living in the Cutter’s building. I needed a good timer to control the enlarger. Naturally, I built it.

My first pass at it was to use a 555 timer IC. The 555 had all the circuitry needed for a very precise analog timer on the chip. The relay didn’t have to be expensive because the timer IC turned fully on at the start of the timing cycle and fully off at the end. The principle was the same as the transistor/relay timers I’d built before. The charge in a capacitor ran out through a resistor like the sand in an hourglass as before, but the 555 decided when enough had run out to declare the end of the timing cycle. In truth, this timer was as precise as would be needed by most photographers, but it had some small flaws. There was some variation in time according to how much voltage the power supply was delivering. I used a battery. As the battery wore down, the time shortened a little. There was no precise way to know exactly how long the timing cycle was at any given setting of the variable resistor. You had to calibrate it against something, marking the seconds off by trial and error.

Enter the Altair

Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics were both publishing more articles about computers and their spin-off, digital integrated circuits (IC). Then one day in 1975 the Altair Computer appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics. It was not the first computer project I’d seen in an electronics magazine, but, like Bill Gates, I was struck by the realization that this was an important product that would change the future. Naturally, I wanted one, but given the state of our finances, I didn’t think that we could afford to buy something that cost $600.00 and did absolutely nothing useful. One of the ads for the computer said it had enough power to control the lighting system of the city of Chicago; so, in theory, it might be useful for controlling my darkroom.

But there were cheaper ways to do that. The IC revolution that produced the microprocessor also produced small digital ICs designed to do certain jobs at the circuit level of computing machines. These parts were developed for “heavy iron” mainframe computers but filtered down to electronic cash register systems, computer terminals, and other small systems. They were building block parts and, by the time the Altair appeared, they were widely available to electronic hobbyist like me. Most hobbyists who didn’t work in the computer industry learned how to work with these parts from reading Popular Electronics and Don Lancaster’s book, TTL Cookbook. (TTL is Transistor-Transistor Logic, a type of logic ciricuit.) I still have my dog-eared copy some place.

TTL ICs provided decade counters, seven segment readout drivers, AND gates and OR gates, which, when intelligently connected together, could do wonderful things.

Not satisfied with the 555 timer circuit, I built a digital timer that used the 60 cycle AC line frequency as a time base. It was built in a Radio Shack project box and hand wired (I never did seem to be able to make a decent printed circuit board). It had a selector switch and three sets of rotary decade switches. Each switch set could be set to a time and the three-position selector switch could select any of the switch sets. A rocker switch selected a 9.9 second or 99 second range. Another rocker switch turned off the safelights and turned on the enlarger lights for focusing. Yet another rocker switch started the timing cycle, but a remote button on the base of the enlarger could also do that. A capacitor wired across the trigger switch insured that the timing cycle would be delayed a half second to give the operator time to position his or her hands for a “dodge” or “burn” exposure.

Having three selectable times made it easy to set different times for dodging and burning negatives and to expose color paper through three different primary color filters. The timer had a digital readout composed of seven segment LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) that counted up to the selected time in glowing red – a safe color for a darkroom.

To compliment the timer, I made a digital version of my light meter that gave me a numerical reading of how much light was falling on the photocell. I never calibrated the numbers to any real-world system, but they were repeatable and could be related to time and enlarger F-stops through experience. This home-built equipment was better than any I could afford to buy and, in some ways, better than any made at the time. I’d come a long way from my coffee can enlarger days.

Another little convenience in our Romulus darkroom was a device to detect when prints had sufficiently washed. It worked because the water conducted electricity better when it was full of fixer salts. I also had an electric water shutoff valve that would turn off the wash water after a predetermined time or when the water overflow sensor on the floor detected a flood.

One of our clients was the Muscular Dystrophy Association. We did publicity photography for them and photographed the local portion of their telethon every year. The telethon pictures were used for publicity and given to each contributor who appeared on the local segment of the telethon. That meant that we had to print hundreds of enlarged proof prints and then hundreds of prints ordered from the proofs. To get the proofs done quickly, I set up a photocell that looked down on the enlarger easel and regulated the frequency of a 555 timer IC. With a slight modification of my enlarger timer, the 555 produced the cycles the counter in the timer was counting instead of the 60-cycle (60 Hertz) AC line. The brighter the light on the enlarger, the faster the “time” ran; resulting in a short exposure. A thick negative caused the 555 to run slower and increase exposure time. With the right tinkering and if the negatives were reasonably consistent, this automatic print meter did a good job, allowing us to expose one print after another without manual adjustment and then develop them in a batch. I say “our” and “us” referring to this processing because Theresa was the one doing much of this printing – especially later on.

We bought a Besler Negatrans: a 35mm negative holder that moved a negative strip through the enlarger using two rubber belts on each side. To move to the next frame, you turned a knob on the bottom of the device. I got my brother-in-law, Dale Wood, to attach an electric motor to the Negatrans, then built a circuit using – that’s right – a 555 timer IC to time the motor. If you had the timer adjusted just right, the negative would quickly and automatically advance to the next frame.

At first, Theresa or I would write the frame number on the back of each proof print. Later, I wired some TTL ICs as a counter, but with the seven segment readouts wired backwards so that the numbers would appear as a mirror image. By now, these displays were available in colors that would darken photographic print paper. My idea was that the number would advance by one each time and photographically print an identifying number on the border of each proof print. I built the led readouts into the easel so that each print could be automatically numbered.

When this set-up was working correctly, it was very efficient. The improved Negatrans sometimes malfunctioned because the drag on the motor varied. The same “on time” didn’t always produce a perfect load of the next frame. Much later, after I got the TRS-80, I used it to correct this problem. I made a little circuit to detect the edge of the negative frame using a phototransistor I installed inside the Negatrans. The TRS-80 program substituted for the timer and, through the cassette port, detected the edge of the negative frame. Using both timing and edge detection, accuracy improved. The cassette port also triggered the Negatrans to advance to the next frame when we pressed the spacebar. Using the computer in this way is like using a forklift to bring in the groceries, but in that later period, TRS-80 owners were all trying to find novel ways to put the computer to work.

But when the Altair first appeared, there didn’t seem to be much you couldn’t do cheaper and better with a 555 and a handful of TTL ICs.

We lived in Romulus for several years. During that time, my photo business increased to the point that it looked like it might support us. Theresa was burnt out at counseling the unemployed. We made a trip to Mexico where we learned how cheap it was to live there if you had US currency. The wheels began to turn in our heads. We decided Theresa would quit her job. We’d take the money from her retirement fund and “retire” to Mexico where I would take great artistic pictures and she would write. We would become famous and wealthy or die in poverty in Mexico.

The plan had a few flaws, but we were set to do it when one of my clients, on hearing the plan, said, “No, don’t do that. I have lots of work coming up for you. Stay here and I’ll make you a star.” Or words to that effect.

The client was Mel Smith who was putting together an HMO, using mostly black doctors, in Detroit. This was a pioneering effort because most people hadn’t even heard of HMOs. Michigan HMO Plans was one of the first. We were persuaded to stay.

While the HMO work didn’t make us rich, we did get work from them and I made contacts through them that brought business for years after. Theresa quit her job and started writing freelance articles for magazines.

We Take Up Flying

One day we were going past the pretentiously named Westland National Airport when I spotted a sign advertising cheap airplane rides. I immediately talked Theresa into going up for a ride. The ride was short, much like my first ride in Florida. The privately owned airport and flying school hoped that some riders would want flying lessons. It worked on me. If I couldn’t go and possibly starve to death being an artist in Mexico, I would finish learning to fly.

Theresa could see I was serious.

“You’re not going to learn to fly without me,” she proclaimed. So we both signed up. Since there were two of us flying, we decided to buy a plane, a Cessna 150 “straight back.”

This plane was a green and white two-seater with a cruise speed of about 100 miles an hour – in the absence of a head wind – practical transportation for a couple with no children and who weren’t in a hurry.

From about 1972 to 1982, we were airplane owners and fliers. We traded the Cessna for a Piper Tripacer, a plane that cruises at 125 mph and is equipped with a back seat.

The electronics in both our planes were primitive. No GPS. No moving map display. How did we get by?

The Cessna had a transistor “NARCO Escort” radio that couldn’t seem to receive much beyond five miles. The Piper had a tube set (a NARCO Mark-12) that worked much better. During the time we had the Cessna, we had “radio work” done several times, which didn’t seem to improve the reception much or for long. The tube set in the Piper defied theory and in practice was absolutely reliable.

Theresa and I flew to see our friends, Dan and Elsa Hall, in Rochester, New York and Bill and Peg Vanloo in Poughkeepsie. We reunited with Dan and Judy Humphrey in Ohio. We flew to most of the islands in the Great Lakes that have runways, including uninhabited and beautiful South Fox. We visited airports around the Midwest where Theresa wrote “Airport of the Month” stories for an aviation magazine and I took pictures. These activities netted us a little money and such fringe benefits as a ride in the cockpit of one of the last Ford Trimotor “airliners” in service (flying to Put-in-Bay in Lake Erie) and one of the best free meals I ever had: at the Huntsville Alabama airport.

We flew to the Mexican border but didn’t want the hassle of taking the plane into Mexico. We left the plane tied down at the Laredo Texas airport and went on using Mexican transportation.

I flew to California without Theresa. That was the longest trip the plane made. All flight planning in those days was done by hand or on a slide-rule-like device called the EB-6. Computing ground speed could be done with trigonometry, but what we were taught in ground school was how to draw “wind triangles.” These carefully measured vector drawings solved for course and wind speed by graphing it out on paper. Later, when we got the TRS-80, I wrote a program that computed these wind triangles and did other modest flight planning chores on the computer. These were not complicated programs — the wind triangle program easily ported to the Radio Shack TRS-80 pocket computer — but to make them work, I needed the Trig functions that I hadn’t learned in school. I got them from a little book called Pilot Math (I think) that showed how to do these problems on a scientific calculator. It was a simple matter to translate the formulas into Level II BASIC while remaining ignorant of the finer points of Trig.

3   David’s Story

PART TWO: Being an Entrepreneur

Finally, My Own Computer

Between the time that the Altair appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics and our acquisition of the TRS-80, I was watching the personal computer scene develop through reading Popular Electronics and occasionally picking up one of the early computer magazines. I was fascinated by the idea that people could get one of these things and program it themselves, but I couldn’t justify buying one on that basis alone. The photo business was doing a little better each year, but $600.00 was enough to buy a good camera or other major piece of photo equipment. The computer would have to do something to earn its keep. By this time, I had seen a word processing machine at a local law office and I had of course read the Don Lancaster article on the TV Typewriter. It was obvious that if you could type and display words on a TV screen, you could probably devise a way to edit and correct those words and send them to a printer.

The TV typewriter

In pursuit of word processing, Theresa and I visited a suburban Detroit computer shop run by Rick Inatome. Rick later went public with his Inacomp Corporation and made a ton of money, then went on to become a prominent venture capitalist, but at that time he had only one small store and one employee. The employee showed us the terminal and computer and explained that we would need at least 8K of memory to be able to load BASIC and do word processing.

“What about the word processing program?” I asked.

“The best one is the one I’m in the process of writing,” he explained.

The total cost was going to be somewhere the other side of $8,000 and I don’t think we’d talked about a printer yet. Since this was more than we paid for our airplane, we decided to pass.

The co-op townhouse where we lived was close to Westland National Airport and served us for a few years, but Bill and Peg VanLoo moved to New York after Bill got a job with IBM. Romulus was a little too far from most of my clients, and Theresa wanted a house and a yard of her own. Being self-employed in those days was being unemployed as far as mortgage lenders were concerned. After we tried to buy a house in Detroit and were turned down by FHA for a mortgage, we discovered land contracts. These are deals between seller and buyer, and they were widely used within the city of Detroit, but not in better suburban areas. We became homeowners by buying a house in an old neighborhood in Detroit on a land contract deal, totally bypassing the organizations who thought we couldn’t make monthly payments. Only the paychecks of factory workers could be counted on for mortgage payments, according to these institutions. This was before the near-death experience of Chrysler Corporation and before the rise of self-employed professionals and extensive use of auto industry contract workers.

The night we moved in, some of our stuff was stolen out of the garage.

“It’s the Detroit version of the Welcome Wagon,” I told Theresa.

Our house was in a good neighborhood. The way you could tell it was a good neighborhood was that the crooks waited until you left before breaking in rather than breaking in while you were home. On our left was the Santos family, a father and his sons and a large bulldog named Butch. The father was a member of the Zulu Motorcycle Club, but he was past his prime and mostly a good neighbor.

Butch, it turned out, was an excellent neighbor. He was very intelligent and endowed with a good memory. Once you were introduced, he would remember that you were on the “A” list and never bother you, while he presented a menacing appearance to strangers. In fact, he liked to walk with Theresa. Not that Butch ever actually walked with anyone, but if you were going his way, he didn’t mind the company.

On the other side was a family whose son was in Jackson Prison because he killed a guy in a bar fight. Later, the son was paroled, married, and moved into the house next door (his parents moved to the next block). They were good neighbors too.

Lest you think we lived in misery in a slum, let me assure you that we had some good times there. The house cost only $10,000 — about the price of a really nice car at the time. It was a better-built structure than the houses we’ve owned since then. It was a solid, two-bedroom frame home with a walk-up attic and a full basement. The living room and dining room had beautiful thick woodwork and the floors were of fine hardwood. Its one bathroom had a wonderful old claw-foot bathtub. It was a very good fit for our needs at the time. Many fine people lived in that neighborhood. Theresa ended up organizing an art fair with the merchants on Vernor and Springwells Streets, the main arteries through the neighborhood.

I knew the area before we bought the house because it’s close to where we had lived in the Cutter apartment building. Also, my friend from the college paper, Walter Lubienski, had become a lawyer and handled estates in the area. In Michigan, real estate that was part of an estate in probate had to be appraised by two citizens. The judge appointed one and the lawyer appointed the other. Since the sale was usually already made, there wasn’t much doubt about the selling price, but the citizens were supposed to look at the house and confirm the judgment of the real estate market. I did favors for Walter, and Walter appointed me as a citizen appraiser. I would go and look at the houses and take a picture of them. That’s how I learned that solid houses with no apparent major drawbacks sold for as little as $4,000 in southwest Detroit. That’s how we knew that good houses there were cheap.

We put a darkroom in the basement of our newly acquired house and set up a studio area in the attic. The photography business improved. The only drawback was that we lived further from our airplane.

I was still reading Popular Electronics and thinking about the Altair. I understood the hardware better than I understood programming. Popular Electronics published programs in binary and assembly language for the Altair and the other early computers that were coming out. In theory, I understood what a program did but the practice was still a mystery.

One day I stopped at one of my favorite places, Radio Shack, just to hang out and see what was new. The manager mentioned to me that Radio Shack was coming out with a computer. He had a poor quality photocopy of the specs. I remember it started something like:

Why use the Z80 microprocessor? Because it beats the others hands down.

It went on in that vein, but if you waded through the technical description, it was clear that this computer would come with a tiny BASIC ROM and 4K of memory and it included a monitor for about the cost of the original bare bones Altair. I didn’t know why it was important that the computer was going to use “dynamic” rather the “static” memory, but the whole package sounded like what I was waiting for. Four thousands bytes of RAM was considered a lot to come with the computer then, but eventually I’d have a wristwatch with more memory than that. A few months later, actual examples of the computer began appearing in local Radio Shacks. The TRS-80 looked cheap, but it was a good kind of cheap… a Model T kind of cheap. Besides, compared to the Altair, it looked like a well-designed consumer product. The Apple II and the Commodore PET were available by then, I think, but the PET had this tiny keyboard and the Apple used a TV set as a monitor and was way more expensive when you added up the cost of the add-ons you needed.

The TRS-80 was close by. When you walked into a Radio Shack, there it was displaying the “Ready” prompt. What it was ready to do was have you type in a Level I BASIC program. The machine fascinated me. David Lien’s excellent manual was usually sitting beside the machine.

There were almost no programs. It came with Backgammon and Blackjack. That was the “bundle.” If you wanted the computer to do anything else, you had to program it. In a very short time, the computers in the store were running short programs that some customer or store employee had typed into the computer and saved on cassette. I played a gun game where you used the arrow keys to raise or lower a gun and then the spacebar to shoot at the only other thing on the screen... another gun. A second player could then try to shoot back, but most times, I was also the second player.

If you were curious about programming, you could press the BREAK key, which would stop the program, and then you could type “LIST.” This command would print the program on the screen. If the program was longer than 16 lines, it would scroll until it reached the end. BASIC programs have sequential line numbers, so if you wanted to see only the first part of the program you might type LIST 10-100 to show only the lines from 10 to 100. The command CLS was also handy because it would cause the screen to clear as would pressing the “CLEAR” key. Computers were not common back then so just watching it print programs on the screen was fascinating.

By looking at these programs and trying the modify them, and by writing little programs yourself, you could learn to program in BASIC. Radio Shacks were everywhere. When one store became too crowded or its management looked like it was about to run out of patience with you, it was off to another store.

A favorite first program to type was:

10 PRINT “MY NAME”

20 GOTO 10

This program would print whatever was between quotes over and over until is reached the bottom of the screen and then would continue printing as the screen scrolled endlessly up until someone shut the computer off or pressed the BREAK key.

If you wrote line ten as:

10 PRINT “MY NAME ”

The screen would print the names right behind each other like this:

MY NAME MY NAME MY NAME

until the line was full, then the whole screen, then the scrolling would start and continue until a someone pressed the BREAK key. With cool stuff like that, you could see why we all had to have this machine! Who wouldn’t pay $600.00 to see their name cover the screen in the comfort of their own home anytime they wanted? Well, it proved the machine could take orders and be controlled by anyone who took the time to learn a little BASIC, and learning to program was one reason to buy the computer.

The next few months, I went from Radio Shack to Radio Shack to get time with the machine and the manual. I learned Level I BASIC standing up. I wanted to satisfy myself that I could learn to program well enough to do some useful things with it; if not word processing, then maybe accounting for the photo business. Without a practical use, I didn’t think I could sell Theresa on buying a computer when she was using an old wringer washing machine and an ancient gas stove built at the turn of the century, both of which came with the house.

I told Theresa that it would be a business expense because I would do our accounting on it and that I would never, ever upgrade. I said I was so sure that the TRS-80 would be a useful tool that I would pay to rent one, if I had to.

I don’t remember the details of getting the computer, just an impression of a rush of excitement and the heady smell of new plastic and packaging materials. I do remember that every spare moment went into playing with the new toy. I wrote some little programs and tried to save them to the cassette recorder, but I had no luck in getting them to load back into the computer. I had to take the computer back to Radio Shack, where, after much fussing with the computer and recorder, they gave me a different model cassette recorder.

I wrote an accounting program as I had promised Theresa, but Level I BASIC was never meant for such practical things. It had only two string variables. That was enough to hold the names of two players in a game, but not enough to hold the names of my various clients. I got around this by putting everything into data statements. That also solved another problem with Level I BASIC: it didn’t have any way to save string data. Data statements would save with the program, so to operate the accounting program, you loaded the program from tape, listed the program, added new data statements showing the client, the date, the amount and a 1 or 0 representing “paid “or “not paid.” Then you ran the program, which would read the data statements and print them to the screen while it totaled the paid and unpaid amounts. You could also print to the screen just the paid or the unpaid clients. Then you had to save a new version of the program to use during the next session. The whole process was probably more time consuming than it was worth. The 4K of RAM could only hold a month’s worth of activity. Too bad if you became more successful and had a really good month; the program might become too big and no longer fit in 4K.

A Model I running a game from cassette tape.

We paid cash for the computer, but we had to take out a loan a month later to cover the money that the computer depleted and other shortfalls. This was just before our busy fall season so I wasn’t worried about the money.

I wrote a Tic Tac Toe program. When I was a teen, my father had taken me on a business trip to Chicago and dropped me at the Museum of Science and Industry. One of the exhibits was a bunch of relays connected to play Tic Tac Toe. The relays couldn’t lose; you could only draw against the machine. My program couldn’t lose either. I thought it was more fun to program than to play but I took the TRS-80 to a friend’s house one evening and his ten-year-old son spent the evening trying to beat the computer.

I was finding, however, that a 4K Level I computer had many limitations. At the time, I didn’t think speed was one of them. The little that the computer could do, it did fast enough. In later years when we fired up a Model I, Level I to relive those days, it did seem very slow, but back then there was nothing to compare it to. Our inevitable upgrade to Level II was only months in coming. The problem was, Level II was expensive. First, you had to get the ROM changed and that cost $100. Level II would barely run with only 4K of memory, so you needed to buy more. To make Level II really work, I needed to upgrade memory to 16K for which Radio Shack was charging $300.00 in 1978 dollars. By way of comparison, years later when I got Windows 3.0 for my 386SX, I bought four additional megabytes of memory for about $200. In case you’ve forgotten, one megabyte equals 1000K, so by then the cost of 4K of memory had dropped to 20 cents.

Radio Shack was the only option for the ROM, but memory was available from third parties for about $150. The computer went to Radio Shack for the Level II upgrade, and then we did the memory transplant in our basement. The sacrilegious act of opening the computer case voided the Radio Shack warranty. We took pictures and later gave a talk about this brain transplant at the Detroit-area TRS-80 Computer club.

Computer clubs were lifelines for early computer users. We joined SEMCO (South East Michigan Computer Organization) which was affiliated with the TRS-80 Computer Club which met at a branch library in Dearborn. Members came from all over the Detroit area. At first, the most popular topic was how to get the darn cassette system to read program tapes. Both the Level I and Level II TRS-80s cassette operations were unreliable. I thought that tape loading would improve with the advent of Level II but that didn’t seem to be the case. The Level II BASIC CSAVE and CLOAD commands were faster, and Level II allowed you to save string data, but you couldn’t always get the data back.

Level II BASIC

As much as Level I BASIC taught us, its limitations quickly grew annoying. It used single-precision floating point numbers: our pocket calculators were smarter about math. No string functions to speak of. (String variables handle characters, words, and sentences.)

Level II BASIC promised to solve such problems. It had all kinds of string functions for finding strings within strings, sticking them together, cutting them apart, comparing them, and translating them into numbers. It also had many other functions that made it easier and better for writing any sort of business program.

Level II BASIC compared to Level I BASIC as the Internet might compare to early Bulletin Board Systems. Suddenly, you could do all sorts of things that were difficult or impossible in Level I. Level II could handle numerous string variables stored in multidimensional arrays. It could “PEEK” at memory locations and return the values stored in them. It could “POKE” different values into them. It could be sent out to execute a machine language routine anywhere in memory (sometimes never to return).

We used PEEK to study the computer itself, treating it like a black box. POKE was used to put small machine language routines into memory where BASIC could execute them to do things that BASIC itself could not do. I remember Larry Ashmun who came to a club meeting one day with a book he made up of ROM routine “calls” and what they did. He learned all this using the Level II BASIC PEEK instruction.

People used the PEEK command as a can opener to see what was going on inside the machine. We wanted to know where BASIC stored programs in memory. How did line numbering work? How could you append one program to another?

Radio Shack was not helpful at all with these questions. There were many who thought that Radio Shack wanted to keep these things secret so only they would know the answers, but probably not many people in the Tandy organization actually had any answers. As users progressed from Level I to Level II, many of them became irritated with what they perceived as Radio Shack’s secretive, proprietary attitude. Owners were also getting impatient with the slow pace of Radio Shack’s software development. Programs that were released seemed to be poor in quality and overpriced. Seasoned owners thought that they and their friends could do better than Radio Shack if they had more information on how the machine worked.

By writing a few lines of BASIC, you could look in every memory location in the machine:

10 I=0

20 PRINT CHR$(PEEK(I));

30 I=I+1

40 GOTO 20

Running this program would cause all sorts of weird stuff to be printed on the screen because the numbers in memory were mostly not printable characters but machine language instructions to the computer. Amidst the random characters and graphic characters you would see words or phrases that were stored in the ROM or in the memory. Some of these were BASIC error messages stored in ROM. Some were the BASIC key words also stored in ROM. These messages were always the same every time the program ran because they were fixed in the Read Only Memory, but you would also see phrases that were part of the current or previously run BASIC program. When you “deleted” a program from memory, it became inaccessible and could be overwritten by new program code, but the “deleted” program was still in memory and you could see pieces of it by running the PEEK program. You could see strings left in memory by previously-run programs as well.

There are many potential improvements to the above program. You could arrange for the program to ask for starting and ending addresses. You could print the number held in each byte instead of the character. You could modify the program to print both the number and the character if it was a printable character or a blank if it wasn’t. You could translate the number into hexadecimal or binary with a little more programming. You could have it search for certain values or certain messages in memory and stop when they were found.

The PEEK programs were very useful tools for answering some of the questions about how the computer does what it does. The POKE command is the opposite of PEEK: it modifies the memory location that it points at. Using PEEK, people began to find the pointers in memory that told BASIC where its own currently running program started and ended. By POKEing these pointers and then loading a new program into memory, then POKEing the start of BASIC memory pointer back to its original address, you could append one program to another and merge them as one. Here was something useful that you could only do if you knew some details of the inner workings of the machine — things from the forbidden zone that Radio Shack wouldn’t tell us about. Harv Pennington would later make money off users’ desire to learn by publishing a series of “mysteries” books beginning with TRS-80 and Other Disk Mysteries. Programmer wannabes snapped up copies of these books.

After getting the Level II upgrade, I wrote an updated accounting program for the photography business. The program used the much expanded string capabilities of Level II BASIC and wrote data records to tape. The problem was that I could never count on the data records reading back into the computer. Accounting consisted of loading the BASIC program, then loading the data statements from the last session into the program. Loading the program sometimes required more than one try, but the real problem was the data statements. Each data record was a possible occasion for failure. If the volume control of the cassette recorder was tweaked to read the bad record, some other record wouldn’t read. BASIC would stop with an error message. You had to start the whole read again. That meant repositioning the tape. I got in the habit of dumping the data twice on to two separate fresh tapes each time. I got a device called a bulk eraser, which was just a big magnet, to wipe and recycle tapes.

The whole procedure was more trouble than it was worth until I rewrote the code to dump the data twice and write the index number of the data record as part of the record. When the program read the data from tape, it would always read the data to the same index in the data array. If a record couldn’t be read, it skipped that record and went on to read the rest of the records. Then it would read the second dump and find the records that it had missed in the first batch. If that didn’t work, you could tweak the volume and try reading the data again to pick up the missing records.

Various solutions to the cassette problem emerged. There were hardware pieces that would condition the signal for the cassette port and there were “machine language” utility programs that purported to correct the problem and that would even speed up the cassette data transfer. These things more or less worked because the cassette port was electronically very simple. All the hard work was done in software on the TRS-80 ROM. The utilities would replace the ROM routines with different and hopefully better ones.

Disk Systems

The ultimate fix for the cassette problem was the mini-floppy or microfloppy disk drive but these wouldn’t connect directly to a TRS-80 standard Level II, 16K keyboard. You needed an Expansion Interface and more memory. Getting a disk drive was a bigger upgrade than most of us in the Computer Club could afford. When Victor Andrews of Level IV brought in a TRS-80 equipped with an Expansion Interface and a disk drive, we all gathered around to watch this super TRS-80 boot up with a Disk Operating System instead of BASIC. The disks were single density and held an awesome 87K of data if you didn’t count the fact that the operating system had to be on each disk if you only had a one-disk system. The operating system took up about 32K or so. Still, it was a marvel to the cassette-bound. Everything happened so fast.

Of course, there were some catches. The TRSDOS operating system loaded itself into lower memory where all our cassette programs resided. Nearly every game or utility that worked on the 16K level II machine would not work under the TRSDOS operating system. Most BASIC programs would work, but they would have to be rewritten to take advantage of any DOS features.

It would be a while before I could get a disk system. In the meantime, there were plenty of tricks you could do with Level II. A Level II BASIC instruction, OUT, let you control the cassette port. That gave you a way to turn on the cassette motor relay. You could also switch the cassette port itself. A transistor or two would detect that and could then control some sort of useful load. I used the cassette motor relay as a pulse telephone dialer. A small BASIC program stored names and phone numbers in a string array. You could search for the name and get the phone number, then the program took apart the string and clicked out the right number of pulses for each number like an old dial phone (well, many phones were still pulse dial then).

Another cassette port program ran my slide projector. The program contained descriptions of the slides and their positions in the tray. You could search for a slide by keyword and then tell the projector to go to that slide. As long as the slide projector worked as it was supposed to and stayed in sync with the program and the cassette relay didn’t stick (which was another cassette problem), this arrangement worked fine.

The cassette port could also be used to make audio tones, music of sorts, and crude speech. It could be used as an RS-232 serial port with hardware provided by outfits like Small Systems Software.

The reason that the cassette port was attractive as a serial port was that the official serial port was an add-on card that went in the Expansion Interface (the TRS-80’s only official expansion card). If you didn’t have an Expansion Interface, you couldn’t use it. And even if you did have one, the card was both expensive and unreliable. I recall our method of dealing with its lack of reliability: taking the plastic cover off the Expansion Interface “bay” and carefully applying spit to the top of the chips to cool them enough to continue a modem session.

Early cheap printing solutions for the TRS-80 all involved serial printers interfaced to the cassette port through the Small Systems Software device or something similar. Later, there were plenty of printers that used the Centronics parallel port on the back of the Expansion Interface, but the urge to print preceded the urge to shell out the money for the Expansion Interface. There were a number of printing solutions: the black box printer and Selectric typewriter conversions come to mind. But the solution that seemed to be within financial reach was the Teletype solution.

To get printed copy out of any TRS-80 Level II keyboard, all you had to do was:

Find a used RS-232 capable Teletype, available for three or four hundred dollars

Buy or build the Small Systems Software hardware box to convert the cassette output into RS-232 signals

Load the Small Systems Software machine language driver into memory

Then you could use the BASIC LLIST command to print programs or the LPRINT command to print anything from a running BASIC program. The Small System Software driver would handle the details of sending serial bytes out the cassette port to the Teletype. These Teletypes would only produce uppercase letters, but that seemed OK since the TRS-80 only displayed uppercase letters.

One of my friends in the neighborhood was Ed Bullock, schoolteacher, landlord, and Dairy Queen soft ice cream storeowner. Ed had a TRS-80 and wanted to get it printing. He asked me if it was possible to connect the TRS-80 to a Teletype. I knew that other people were doing it so I said, “Sure.”

The Model 15 teletype

“I know where we can get one for fifty dollars,” he said.

The Teletype that he got for fifty bucks was a classic Model 15 such as had equipped the Detroit Daily Press during my first years in Detroit…the kind you can see delivering breaking news to fevered editors in 1940’s era movies.

This device had several problems from our point of view:

It did not have an RS-232 connector; it just had two wires coming out of it.

It did not use ASCII code as did the computer, it used “Murray Code.”

It not only didn’t have lower case, the punctuation marks and numbers shared the hammers with letters of the alphabet.

To make a punctuation mark, you send a shift code to the Teletype, then the letter for that mark. Then you send a shift code to print letters again. To make the Teletype work with the TRS-80, I had to make a hardware interface between the cassette port and the Teletype. I had to modify the Small Systems Software driver to translate between the ASCII codes used by the TRS-80 and the Murray code used by the Teletype, and send the shift code when needed. The driver also had to keep track of the state of the shift in the Teletype.

The most convenient way to load a small driver into a TRS-80 Level II was to POKE it into memory using BASIC. The “machine code” in BASIC is a series of decimal numbers in DATA statements. The first thing the BASIC program does is read the DATA statements and POKE them into memory. Writing the DATA statements from scratch would be a daunting task, requiring you to know the decimal numbers that represent each machine instruction and how to translate the memory address into the low byte, high byte format that the Z80 requires. Certainly, there were people around who could do that but I wasn’t one of them.

Learning to Program in Assembler

The easy way to build such a driver is to use an assembler program. One of the first pieces of software that Radio Shack offered for the computer was an Editor/Assembler that let you do assembly language programming. I bought the Editor/Assembler (EDASM) program right after I got the Level II upgrade. I looked over the documentation and discovered to my dismay that the manual was barely comprehensible. No clever, easy to understand, step-by-step manual here. There were some instructions on how to load the Editor/Assembler, one example program, and page after page of descriptions of Z80 instructions with barely a hint of how to do anything. I put the EDASM away and went back to BASIC…until Ed brought me the Teletype.

With the aid of some books I picked up on Z80 assembly language, I forged ahead. Gradually the simple program provided by Small Systems Software began to make sense. It helped that SSM provided the assembler source code in printed form. That’s what user manuals were like then… incomprehensible to the uninitiated perhaps but more complete.

It was probably about this time that I bought William Barden’s book on assembly language for the TRS-80. It was a small book with a blue and yellow cover that took the same light tone towards Z80 assembly language programming that David Lein had taken in the Model I, Level I BASIC manual – even down to the corny jokes and smiling computer cartoons. In addition to the high comfort factor, it was very effective in teaching assembly language programming as it applied to the TRS-80. That’s important because when you write a program in assembler, you have to know what’s going on and where it’s going on inside the computer the program is running on.

Bill Barden wrote popular books that taught a generation of programmers how to work in Assembler. This book followed his first book on Assembly Language.

With a higher-level language like BASIC, the programmer can write useful programs without knowing much about the internals of the computer. The language would take care of that. In BASIC, I could just tell it to LPRINT “HELLO THERE” and BASIC would send it to the printer. In assembly language, you have to tell the program how to find the string “HELLO THERE” in the memory, then how to get the letter “H” and send it to the printer, then how to advance to the next letter of the string and send it and so on. The program has to have some way of knowing when it’s sent the last “E” and what to do after that. BASIC calls machine language code that somebody already wrote in assembler that can do all that.

The process for writing a program with the Editor/Assembler was to load the Editor/Assembler program off tape, type in the program in assembly language…that’s the editor part…then write out the machine language program to tape and save the text of the source code to tape. Then you loaded the program back into memory from tape and tested it.

If you make a mistake in BASIC, program execution stops at that point with an error message. That’s because BASIC is a high level language and an interpreted language, which means it reads the BASIC program that you wrote and translates it into machine code as it goes so it can catch mistakes and refuse to execute them. Most high-level languages are compiled. Even Visual BASIC, BASIC’s distant descendant, is compiled. In a compiled language, the program is translated into machine code all at once before the program is executed. A compiler can catch mistakes while it’s compiling and usually incorporates some code to stop execution of the program gracefully on certain kinds of errors during run-time.

Assemblers, on the other hand, only catch errors in syntax. If you program something that sends the microprocessor off to some place in memory that has your grocery list, the computer will try to execute it as code no matter what crazy results that produces. The screen may fill with random characters, or devices attached to the computer may come to life and try to do who knows what. The only way to stop a crash of this type is to press the Reset button, which in the case of the TRS-80, was at the back of the keyboard where the Expansion Interface would plug in. Anyone programming the TRS-80 in Assembler became familiar with this button, as did early adopters of TRSDOS.

After some study, I rewrote the Small Systems Software (SSS) driver to include a look-up table to translate the ASCII that the computer was sending into the Murray Code that the Teletype required and to keep track of the Shift state of the Teletype. I hooked up the cassette port to my one-transistor Teletype interface and tried to LPRINT a line from the computer. I think the text was something like:

MOSCOW – THE RUSSIANS ANNOUNCED TODAY THAT THEY WANT TO APPLY FOR STATEHOOD.

To my satisfaction, the Model 15 leaped to life and printed the line at its blinding speed of about 10 characters per second. My satisfaction was short-lived however. It was printing characters, but not the characters that I was sending. Obviously, I thought, I screwed up the translation code somehow.

I spent hours going through the translation code. One of the most frustrating things about the process of debugging is searching for an error in code that is actually correct. After walking through this fairly simple code many times, I was convinced that the code was right. The next possibility was that the baud rate (the rate at which the software was sending the string of bits to the Teletype) was wrong. To experiment with that, I wrote a BASIC program that used PEEK to read and translate the driver into BASIC POKE statements. Two bytes of the program controlled the baud rate. I wrote a BASIC program that poked different values into those bytes and printed my test line over and over again at slightly different baud rates. After two week, I had a ream of nonsense printed by the Teletype but no progress toward readable copy. I began to think the Teletype was at fault but that didn’t seem likely…it was printing something, after all, and it never printed any part of the output correctly. It had to be software.

Then I checked the hardware design of the SSS interface against mine. I switched the polarity of two wires and tried again:

MOSCOW – THE RUSSIANS ANNOUNCED TODAY THAT THEY WANT TO APPLY FOR STATEHOOD.

Everything worked perfectly! The Teletype was big, clunky, noisy, and slow and only printed UPPERCASE but it was beautiful and I was elated. Assembler programming had turned out to be as difficult and tedious as everyone said it was, but it also put you in TOTAL control of the machine. I liked that feeling.

Now that I had a printer – Ed seemed more interested in seeing the Teletype work than getting it back from me – I could work on doing some crude word processing. Even better, I could write an invoice program that would print up invoices for my photography clients. I’m not sure what they thought when they started getting invoices on cut Teletype roll paper sheets that were starting to turn a little brown. The lines and borders were all made with “*” and of course everything was in uppercase, but computer generated invoices in those days generally lacked high standards of graphics and presentation, so it probably didn’t seem that strange.

Although the computer was taking up increasing amounts of time, our business was still photography, and flying was still a main interest. The photo business was doing well but I was suffering from “burn out” as a photographer. Our marriage was, maybe, a little burned out too. One Christmas, we decided to counter the usual Christmas-time blues by flying to Mexico in our trusty Tripacer, 42Charlie. The plane had just gotten its annual inspection. We took off from Grosse Isle airport where the plane was based at the time and set out for Texas where we expected to take a train from Nuevo Laredo, on the Mexican side of the border, to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. About a half hour into the flight, Theresa, whose time between bathroom stops never exceeded the range of the plane, announced she had to go and could we please land. There are solutions for this problem that light plane pilots use but they are especially inelegant for females, so I looked for the nearest airport.

After the bathroom stop, the “mag check” was bad; meaning that the dual ignition system safety feature of the plane was in doubt: one cylinder had only one reliable spark plug instead of the normal two. The plane would still fly but it was not a safe condition so we found a local mechanic and waited while he looked for the problem. We were able to borrow a car and get something to eat (people were generous and trusting at small airports in those days). After this delay of several hours, we took off again…into worsening weather conditions. The delay was enough so that we missed the chance to sneak through the developing front in Arkansas between us and Texas. Instead, we landed in Harrison Arkansas, a clean little mountain town with a nice Best Western motel and little else. The most exciting feature of Harrison was the airport where our plane was parked while, day after day, it was flyable under the cloud cover but with ceilings low enough to trap us in the valley.

The motel in Harrison had a bookrack that held only religious books. The plane was grounded, but there was still a way out of Harrison; we rented a car and headed for Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a pretty town built up against the side of the mountain with winding hilly streets that were lined with cute craft shops and artist galleries. We spent New Years Eve there at a friendly party thrown by a group of artists. Theresa enjoyed this as much as she could with an upset stomach a good deal of the time, and worries about the motel bill and tie-down fees piling up on the VISA card.

Finally, we were able to fly again. There was some discussion about simply heading home, but I didn’t want to concede defeat. Theresa was more inclined to go home. In the end, we headed for Laredo. The rest of the flight there was bumpy but uneventful. We arranged to leave the plane in Laredo on the American side.

Once there, we were able to enjoy some of the charms of Mexico, especially the low prices since our budget had already taken a beating in Arkansas.

The train was slow and a little seedy but we had Pullman accommodations. That’s when we discovered that sleeping together in a Pullman berth on a train is not as easy or romantic as it looks in the movies. Especially when the train is going through mountains and stopping and starting seemingly at random.

After recovering somewhat in San Miguel de Allende, we headed back to Texas, our plane, and home. We met a girl who was hitchhiking back from Mexico to Dallas and gave her a ride to Dallas. That was the best part of the flight. The rest of the way we were being chased by bad weather. We stayed the night in Nashville with the idea of getting out fast in the morning, but the plane developed some trouble… a stuck parking brake I think it was. Theresa was ready to give up and booked a ticket for herself on Delta. Then the parking break healed itself and we were able to go. We thanked Delta for being ready when we weren’t and took off with the bad weather right behind us.

By this time, Theresa was feeling reasonably healthy again, but I was not. I normally don’t get airsick, but with the flu helping along, I was airsick that day. Theresa flew the plane to Indianapolis without much help from me. Theresa was a licensed pilot, but she’d had a little accident landing the Tripacer when we first got it and was gun shy about landing after that. She didn’t want to land, so I took over and landed the plane on instinct. As soon as we were tied down, I lay down on a couch and stayed there for an hour. But that weather was still chasing us, so we got back in the plane and flew back to Grosse Isle. It was dark and getting late when we landed. When we got home, we learned that our house had been broken into and robbed (again). Our next-door neighbor who was supposed to be watching the house for us had been distracted because his teenage son had died of unknown causes suddenly during the night while sitting in a chair at home.

It was a hard winter after that. The VISA card was full. Things did get better between Theresa and me, but there were other problems on my mind. I was looking for something legal that might make money and provide a break from photography.

The TRS-80 was beginning to look like it would take over the world. It had it’s own magazine, 80 Micro, and was widely covered in the other computer magazines. Programs were beginning to appear for it in greater numbers. Old microcomputer hands who had cut their teeth on Altairs were trying to learn how to write programs for the TRS-80. A large enough market was developing to support making some money.

And there was little competition, yet, from Radio Shack itself. The first programs they released didn’t excite customers and some were down right dumb. Most of the good ones were games. But gradually a picture emerged of the typical Radio Shack buyer of that era and he wasn’t primarily a game player, he was a small businessman.

He – and, mostly, it was men — wanted the computer to do something useful. Computers were routinely used in large businesses by the late 70’s, but aside from pocket calculators, small businesses had no cyber help: no accounting programs, tax programs, payroll programs, no job estimating programs, no mass mailing programs, scheduling or contact list programs and not a word was being processed, although that was about to change. The TRS-80 looked to many small business people like a can opener sitting in a room full of cans, and he was willing to pay for the Expansion Interface and disk drives if that’s what it took to open his cans.

I was one of those people, but I was in the first wave and willing to do my own programming. Many newer buyers wouldn’t be. They would want their programs on disk and ready to work everyday for them.

Going into the Software Business

At that time, one of my clients was the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The assistant public relations guy there, Steve Davis, was a friendly sort who liked to chat. During one of these conversations, I started to tell him about the TRS-80. He was very interested and asked lots of questions. It was clear he knew next to nothing about computers, but he was intrigued…especially with my ideas about how there might be money in writing programs for these small computers.

One day, I brought in the TRS-80, hooked it up and demonstrated it to him. He was fascinated…especially with the idea of writing and selling programs. He wanted to know what kind of programs I thought I could write for the TRS-80 that a businessperson might be interested in buying. I explained that, to do the kind of programs that a business would require, I would need a disk drive and maybe a decent printer. Steve suggested we go into business. He said he had a friend who might be interested in putting up some money.

I thought this was an interesting development, but I didn’t take it very seriously. Steve arranged a meeting at the Symphony between his friend, Darrell Brayboy and us. Darrell didn’t ask many questions as I remember. He just gave me $5,000.00 in cash. Five grand was about what we’d spent on the airplane. We’d financed it through the Credit Union and spent years paying it off. It was more than I’d paid for both our cars total. It was more money, in cash, than I’d ever been in the same room with and they were just handing it to me with no written contract. I didn’t know what to make of that, but I had some trust in Steve and it looked like a good deal to me since I didn’t see any other way that I was going to get money for an Expansion Interface and disk drives. It looked like a chance to see what I could do with computer programming without risking starvation. I was on board and shook hands with my new partners.

It was after four o’clock, so I just took the money home. Theresa was stunned to see this money, in cash, sitting on our dining room table…and immediately suspicious.

“Who would just hand you $5000.00 cash?” she asked, “The mafia? Could it be drug money?”

I admit that the thought had crossed my mind.

“Five thousand dollars isn’t that much money to a lot of people,” I told her, “it’s just a lot of money to us.”

She didn’t want the money sitting in our house, which, as I’ve stated, had been broken into a number of times. I agreed with that and put it in the bank.

Theresa wanted to meet my partners and when she did, she was not very impressed. Steve Davis was younger than we were. He was a sharp dresser and gave the impression that he was at ease among wealthy people, but he didn’t know anything about computers beyond what I told him. Darrell seemed even younger than Steve but it was clear that Steve deferred to him. It turned out that neither of them were business geniuses, which probably accounts for the five thousand dollar cash transaction. We weren’t either, but we had had the experience of scratching for a living and knew how to do things cheaply.

In the beginning, our lack of business experience and that of our partners didn’t matter that much. Since I was the expert, I was in control. The partners didn’t bother me too much. We had occasional meetings, during which I told them what I had been up to, and that was it. What I was up to in the beginning was buying an Expansion Interface and disk drives for the TRS-80. We still hadn’t mapped any concrete plans as to what sort of programming services we were going to offer. I envisioned picking a business, doing a set of programs for that business under contract, and then selling a generic version to similar businesses. I figured that Steve, once properly trained, would make a good front man. He could be in charge of sales, wining, and dining. I thought he’d be good at that.

One of the first potential customers that Steve suggested was his employer, the Detroit Symphony. At that time, an outside firm was handling the Symphony mailing list. They were using a system that was hot then called “key to disk.” They had a machine – a microcomputer really – that had a keyboard and screen and ran one program only, which was the data entry program for the mailing list. Their entries were recorded to an eight-inch floppy disk and sent off to the contractor who used the data to update the mailing list, which was probably stored on big tape drives until the next mass mailing. Steve showed me this arrangement and wanted to know if we could do the whole job on the TRS-80. I did some quick calculations and decided that project was out of scope for us. Even with four single-sided floppies hooked to the TRS-80 there wouldn’t be enough storage space for the Symphony’s thousands of addresses. And then there were the problems of converting the data. We decided we should pass on that project.

I was thinking of something like computerizing my airplane mechanic. Here was a guy who keeps a lot of records…all on paper. He makes money, but not enough to interest IBM. He’s gadget inclined and therefore would be easy to train. It was this type of market that I was thinking about.

But my immediate concern was to get acquainted with the new disk drive and Expansion Interface. Adding a disk drive meant working with a Disk Operating System or DOS. In this case, it was TRSDOS at first, then NewDos, a patched version of TRSDOS. One reason for the nearly immediate switch from TRSDOS to NewDos is that NewDos had various additions and patches to it that made it less likely to crash, and it included EDASM. This was the Radio Shack EDASM – the same one that I had on tape – but patched to load from disk and load, save, and assemble programs to disk files. TRSDOS and NewDos also included extensions to BASIC they called “DISK BASIC.”

TRSDOS came with a loose-leaf binder manual that was fairly easy to digest, but without the humor or handholding that characterized the famous Level I manual. The NewDos manual was printed using a dot-matrix printer then copied on paper that seemed to be one grade above toilet paper. It was tough going if you didn’t already have a good background in computer operating systems. Typical of early documentation, it told you more about what went on inside the code than it did about how to operate the programs. NewDos required you to have a copy of TRSDOS and the TRSDOS manual to satisfy Radio Shack copyrights

Using these two documents, I was learning how to get a computer with an operating system and disk storage to do useful work. I started by writing some programs in BASIC that I needed and that the company might need. I wrote an accounting program for the photo business, converting the tape version to use disk storage. I wrote the previously mentioned invoice generator program to crank out Teletype printed invoices. I wrote a program to compute wind triangle vectors for flight planning. And I started writing a text editor in BASIC to use to compose documentation. I reasoned we would need this to document all the great programs that we were going to write for “vertical markets” (a term I hadn’t yet heard).

I wrote something in BASIC that was essentially a line editor. It worked like an expensive, all uppercase typewriter. But the holy grail of text output then was full justification. Even margins on both the right and left side meant you were looking at professional typeset work. (Of course, once full justification became commonplace in word processors, it didn’t matter anymore and “ragged right” became a widely used style even for typeset material.)

My teletype did not use proportional type, I hadn’t even heard of it in fact, and it did not adjust the spacing of characters so the only way for it to do full justification was to insert extra spaces as needed. I’d gotten very good with strings and knew how to go about doing that in BASIC, but BASIC came with some built in problems. It was an interpreted language and was therefore slow and it had a way of handling strings that resulted in a “garbage collection” routine taking over every now and then to rearrange the string data in memory. If you weren’t doing much string manipulation, the garbage collection wasn’t a problem, but it you were constantly editing text and using all of BASIC’s string talents, you saw a lot of the garbage collection routine. What you saw was the computer locking up for a while. This “while” could last a long time. If you knew what was happening, it was annoying; if you didn’t, you probably thought the computer had crashed.

I got to thinking about how much fun I’d had pounding my head against the wall trying to get the Teletype to work and how, using assembler, I could avoid all the problems presented by BASIC. True, my experience with assembler had been only with one small serial driver, but through that experience, I’d learned a lot. True, much of what a word processor did was write to the video screen and the driver project didn’t write anything to the screen. But I was well acquainted with video memory because of the presentations at the TRS-80 club.

Every month the club invited a guest to demonstrate something or assigned a member to give a talk on some interesting aspect of the TRS-80 or computing in general. One month it was my turn to talk on strings in BASIC. I figured that many of our members knew how to manipulate a string in BASIC so I wanted to do something that would get their attention.

The BASIC manual had some obscure information on how strings were stored in memory. One BASIC function returns the address of a string variable pointer that contains the address of the actual string.

You could write a program such as:

INPUT “WHO ARE YOU”; A$

Then you could find out where A$ was in memory and read it with the PEEK function. Even better, you could poke new characters into the string… even graphic characters. If you then printed the string to the screen, it would print the graphic much faster than you could do the same job with SET and RESET, which were the BASIC functions to put graphics on the screen. Programmers who wrote games in BASIC learned to use this “packed string” technique to speed up the TRS-80 slow graphics.

Another neat trick was to use SET to draw a picture on the screen, then set a few string variable pointers to the addresses of portions of the screen. Then copying these variables to other variables would copy the contents of the screen to BASIC strings. If these strings were printed to the screen in the correct fashion, the picture would reappear much faster then originally drawn. Better yet, you could store these pictures to disk or tape as string data.

If the string was part of a program (for example a string in a DATA STATEMENT, the variable pointer told you where it was in memory so you could poke it with graphic characters, then store the revised string with the program. I wrote some little programs using some of the string packing techniques to dazzle the club members during my talk. From this experience, I knew how the screen was laid out in memory.

I think it was at this meeting of the computer club or the one right after that I met Vern Hester. He is a tall black man who dressed better than the rest of us and didn’t talk much. He sought me out at the meeting because one of the other members told him I knew something about how the line number pointers in BASIC worked. I did know that from another investigation I did partly for the club.

When we all had only the Level II machines, one of the frustrations was that there was no way to append one basic program to another. If you wrote a program, then tried to load another one from tape, the new one loaded on top of the old one and replaced it. There was no way to stop this behavior even when what you wanted was for both programs to load in together. It didn’t matter how the program lines were numbered.

I discovered that there was a section of memory where BASIC stored pointers (addresses where something is located). One pointer determined where the BASIC program loaded into memory, another where it ended. If you POKEd a new address into the start pointer and then loaded in a new program, it would load to this new section of memory. Then you could POKE the start pointer back to its original value, making the two programs become one…or at least LIST together. When I discovered that, I was thrilled because, for a week, I thought I was the only one in the universe that knew how to append programs in Level II BASIC…until I saw the technique described in a magazine.

I’ve oversimplified above: both programs would both be there if you followed the rules for BASIC line pointers and loaded the new file at exactly the end of the old program and so on. To do that you had to know how the line pointers worked and how the line number is held in memory, which is what I explained to Vern. What he wanted to do was renumber the lines. And he did this, coming back to a later meeting with a program that renumbered, appended, moved lines of code around and had better debugging tools than any available at the time. This became BOSS; the first program he published and sold.

Programming the Word Processor

Armed with a little knowledge and the desire for a fast, easy-to-use word processor, I started programming in assembler. If you want to do something outstanding, ignorance is sometimes a great help. I didn’t have any formal education in programming and no experience with big projects. If I had, I would have known the dimensions of what I was undertaking and done something else instead. I was misled by an easy start. After a couple of days of banging the keyboard, I had about eight feet of code as printed out on the Teletype and a program that did word processing. It let you type things on the screen, move the cursor around, overtype things, and insert and delete characters. Of course, at that point, it didn’t print or save to disk and if you were to type to the end of memory it would try to store your keystrokes in the ROM. I was so excited by the program’s abilities that my brain flooded with ideas for improvements.

What started out as an in-house product to help with documentation seemed to me to have the potential to be the first product. I didn’t get any resistance from the partners on this change of direction. We would be in the packaged software business instead of the custom or semi-custom business. It was all the same to them. In fact, it seemed to all of us that selling a product had more potential to make money faster than servicing a few clients at a time. Radio Shack was selling these computers like ice chips in Hell. This would mean there would be many TRS-80s out there looking for software to eat. We would make the “records” to play on these new “record players.”

We didn’t know what we were doing, but then, no one else understood the phenomenon either. I read of a survey that asked people what they would do with a computer. Most said they might use it for accounting. Word processing was hardly on the list. A couple of years later, the best selling, “must have” application for your microcomputer was word processing.

Theresa and I occasionally pitched stories to a Detroit area metro magazine editor. Around that time, I suggested to him that we do a story on microcomputers. He couldn’t see it. “What would people want to do with a microcomputer?” he wondered.

Even computer hobbyist magazines were not clear what the “killer apps” were going to be. Many thought that “someday soon” we’d be controlling our house using the convenience of our TRS-80 keyboard. (I personally like the convenience of a light switch for that.) Women would store their favorite recipes on the computer (although two grand seemed a lot for a recipe card box.) The trouble was that, except for special situations, the computer couldn’t add much value to the traditional methods of dealing with house control or recipe storage and retrieval…not enough to make up for the bother of setting up and running the computer. And microcomputers were nothing if not a lot of bother. Early TRS-80s would reboot for no apparent reason. They demanded a regular space where they could be set up. The gray plastic TRS-80 housing screamed, “Put me in the basement where I won’t be seen,” to the wife who was supposedly waiting for this thing to solve her festering recipe retrieval problems.

The computer could add value to the process of writing, however, and would be worth the bother. At least, that’s what I thought.

Word processing wasn’t my invention, of course. Since the early days of computing, programmers had been editing the text source code of their programs using the computers they were programming. As microelectronics made building special purpose computing devices more feasible, a number of firms saw the possibilities of a dedicated “work station” device to edit complex business documents. They thought companies would want them to produce letters quickly. Lawyers would want them to produce the volumes of paper documents they required. I don’t think that they saw that mere writers would want them, because the prices they had in mind were in the range of a small house in a good neighborhood in Detroit or a good used four-seat airplane.

My friend Walter Lubienski was a lawyer and therefore a potential customer for these companies. Walter got interested in word processing because I was telling him about the possibilities. He could raise the money to buy usable hardware and software and he liked anything that would increase the efficiency and reduce the boredom of legal work. His office had legal secretaries but he didn’t have full claim on their time. He is a hands-on guy and liked the idea of doing some of the work on a computer. He asked me to go with him to check out the offerings in this area.

We visited several companies. I remember the visit to Xerox in particular. They were in a big new office building in a nice suburban location. They showed the word processor by appointment. They served coffee as a woman demonstrated the wonders of the device. That was the first time that I saw a mouse. They were very proud of it and explained it in detail.

The word processor consisted of a keyboard, mouse and a vertical CRT, which was in the same size and orientation as a piece of paper as it would commonly go into a typewriter, and a Qume daisywheel printer. This was the first time I’d seen a daisy wheel printer. The output was beautiful compared to the output of the Teletype or the all-uppercase dot matrix printer that the Shack was selling for $1500.00. I liked the Xerox machine a lot. The display showed black characters on white – not quite WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get — another term that was unknown to us), but it was close. Walter and I liked the system, but the price was $15,000.00.

Another company we visited was Exxon. Why the oil company thought it should get into word processing, I don’t know but there they were. They showed a group of people the beta version of their new project. A pretty girl worked the keyboard while a guy extolled the features of the new system. One selling point was that you could display two pages on the screen at one time. The system crashed every few minutes, though. The guy explained that the software was still in development. These problems would be gone by the time the product was released. They had incorporated numerous nice touches. For example, you could press a key and the cursor would move a word at a time. I thought, “I could program that!” I did end up putting a similar feature in the word processor I was writing. By extension, I programmed a move by word, sentence, and paragraph.

Walter ordered one of the Exxon units, for $20,000, and waited a year for the software to be debugged and the unit to be delivered. It never was. He ended up getting another product from Exxon called Qyx that was essentially a typewriter with a memory and a system for making corrections in memory. But before that, I convinced him to get a microcomputer and word processing software. He settled on an IMSAI VDP-80 8080 computer that included two eight-inch drives. He bought this from Rick Inatome, the founder of Inacomp. Inacomp had grown from the two small rooms it had occupied when I first visited there looking for word processing solutions a few years earlier to a large stand-alone establishment resembling the spacious stores of CompUSA that came years later, only this was a bit smaller. They had a few TRS-80 things, but since they were not Radio Shack dealers, the staff tended to disparage the “Trash 80” in favor of the Apple II, Commodore PET, the IMSAI, Ohio Scientific, and various flavors of the month. That month, I think it was the Exidy Sorcerer.

My word processing program was just in the beginning stages, so I recommended that Walter try out the IMSAI. My argument was that the IMSAI and Electric Pencil might not be as good as the dedicated word processors we’d been looking at, but that the computer could also do other things that might be useful to the law office. Walter wasn’t very interested in the other stuff, though. He wanted the word processing. Walter was skeptical when Rick didn’t seem to know what Walter meant by “proportional spacing.” I didn’t either before our tour of the big-time word processing outfits.

Proportional spacing is how type is set. Each letter gets space according to it size. An “m” gets more space than an “i”. This makes the letters fit together nicely on the page, where as mono spacing allots the same space to each letter regardless of its natural size. Most typewriters worked this way because of mechanical limitations. The only one that didn’t was the IBM Selectric. The Selectric could do the proportional spacing trick, but it couldn’t do full justification. Word processors would eventually do both together.

Typewriter typefaces were designed to look reasonable even though mono spaced, but there’s no question proportional spacing is slicker looking. As computers grew in sophistication, even type on the screen was proportionally spaced, looking exactly as it does coming out of the printer. Proportional spacing became automatic, so that most people don’t even realize the computer is doing this. They just pick a typeface and use it. Walter was ahead of his time in demanding this capability. Rick didn’t know what he was talking about but thought that Electric Pencil was the best out there, so it must have it in there somewhere, if it was important.

I told Walter to make sure that he got all the documentation, since the system wouldn’t be very familiar to either of us, my computer experience being restricted to the TRS-80 and his being nonexistent. When the computer came, it was accompanied by a Diablo daisy wheel printer and a pile of manuals that towered above the computer. These manuals told us enough about the computer to allow us to build a working model but we had to search hard to find any info on actually operating it. This was my first encounter with CP/M. It was amazing to type DIR and see all those file names wiz by… those eight-inch drives held an awesome half a megabyte each. Later, a Radio Shack employee would describe the capacity of a the TRS-80 Model II’s eight-inch floppy as “more than one person could type in their entire lifetime.”

I got Walter started with the IMSAI and CP/M so that he could load Electric Pencil and figure it out. It did not go well for him, however. He couldn’t get the computer and Electric Pencil to do what he wanted and ended up giving the whole thing back to Inacomp. I had mixed feelings about that because I was hoping to get to try out an advanced system that I couldn’t afford to buy even with my partner’s money. But Walter was happy to get rid of it. The IMSAI did not bring to mind the phrase, “user friendly.” A few months later, IMSAI went broke. For years after, Walter would say, “Remember that IMSAI? I’m sure glad I got rid of that IMSAI!”

Meanwhile, I had a start on this new word processor. It needed to be able to save things to disk and print out in a useful fashion. It also needed a name. Theresa suggested “Easy Writer.” It went by this name among the partners for the better part of a year. Then we learned that there was already an “Easy Writer” being sold. In fact, “Easy Writer” was the name of the first word processor that IBM sold for their new personal computer. When Theresa heard that, she did a quick mental shuffle and said, “How about “Lazy Writer?” That became the name of the new product.

Programming moved ahead by fits and starts. I was still shooting photographic jobs to support us and Theresa was still booking the jobs and printing pictures in our basement lab. But any additional time I had went into programming.

Saving to disk under program control was a bit mysterious. There are a number of “jump vectors” in the TRSDOS operating system that allowed a machine language program to talk to the operating system and get it to do different things, what later came to be called the “API” (Application Program Interface). The TRSDOS API contained calls to “open” and to “write” to a file several different ways. One call let you write out a disk sector at a time. (A disk sector is a division of the disk. On TRSDOS, it’s 256 bytes. In MS-DOS it’s 512 bytes.) It worked fine, but the trouble was that NewDos, which was quite popular, calculated the number of sectors in a file differently from TRSDOS. TRSDOS counted the number of whole sectors but wrote the rest of a sequential file into the next sector so that the total count was the count plus one. The author of NewDos thought that was wrong so NewDos counts all the sectors that are written to, including the partially filled one at the end. This difference meant if you wrote it using the TRSDOS method, it wouldn’t work correctly on NewDos and visa versa.

But there is another call into TRSDOS that lets you write out a sequential file a byte at a time. Just tell it where in memory the byte you want to write to disk is and keep calling the routine for each byte you want to write until done. The beautiful part is that it works in both Model I TRSDOS and NewDos. There is a sequential read call that reads to the end of file as well. Problem solved! (But not for long.)

My first version of Lazy Writer (before it was named) just typed things into memory and displayed the characters on the screen at the same time. There was no “word wrap” and a carriage return was the end of a paragraph. When you typed, a pointer advanced through the screen memory and another pointer advanced in the text buffer memory to keep track of where the current character was in memory. Everything is simple until you get to the bottom of the screen. Then the program has to know that you have reached the end of the screen and it needs to scroll the text up one line. That means that one line of text scrolls off the screen at the top and a fresh line appears at the bottom. The program has to reset the cursor, not to next line, but to the same line. That’s if you are typing fresh text. If you are moving the cursor through already created text and you get to the bottom of the screen, the program has to scroll the screen, then print the line of text that was previously beyond the screen. So the program has to know if it has reached the end of text or if there is still text to print. Going the other way, it has to know when the cursor has reached the top of the screen and if it has reached the top of the text. I worked out some simple tests for keeping track of where the cursor was on the screen and where it was in relation to the text in memory. Then I had to figure out how to update these various pointers when text is deleted or inserted (typeover is easy).

All that is child’s play compared to doing word wrap and keeping everything straight. Now the program has to detect when the text has reached the edge of the screen, then it has to figure out where to break the line, erase the word that won’t fit, reprint it on the line below and reset the cursor. The routine that does it has to account for situations where the word ends exactly on the edge of the screen, when the last character is a carriage return character, when the user inserts a line of spaces or when the person makes a solid line of characters. A simple way to keep everything straight is to simply reprint everything on the screen starting at the top of the screen. In a later era, if you were using a slow computer and were observant, you might have sometimes seen Microsoft Word doing this in some situations. Compared to the computers that came after it, the TRS-80 was very slow and that made reprinting the screen obvious and annoying. I didn’t want to do anything that would get in the way of the user. I remembered the annoyance of Microsoft’s garbage collection routine for BASIC strings. In retrospect, it might have been possible, in theory, to write multithreaded code on the TRS-80, but no one was doing that and I certainly didn’t have the skill to do it. Yet, my program needed to keep several balls in the air to do its job. Computer programs on the TRS-80 did one thing at a time. If you wanted the illusion that the program is doing several things at once, you needed to have it execute a loop that polls for various conditions, then does various things depending on conditions. The more things you put in the loop, the slower the computer appears to be.

The TRS-80 is a software-based machine. Even decoding the keyboard is a software function. When I started Lazy Writer, I simply called the keyboard routine resident in ROM. Doing this caused the computer to loop until a key was pressed. When the key is pressed, the routine returns a letter. The ROM routine had several problems. It didn’t return every possible combination of keys. Worse, the routine didn’t fully account for a phenomenon called “keyboard bounce.” Keyboard bounce occurs when the mechanical contacts in a depressed key vibrate or “bounce” producing multiple returns to the keyboard routine and resulting in several copies of the letter rather than only one. Bounce is not the same as a repeating character feature. Bounce results in mmmultiipllee leeetters where the users only typed one. This problem is more annoying in a word processor, where all you are doing is typing, than it is in other kinds of programs where you are only typing short lines or making choices from a menu. I wanted to be able to control bounce and do several other things that would be difficult or impossible if I continued to just use the ROM call.

Controlling printing was another problem. In fact, for a word processor, it’s the major problem. I wrote some primitive formatting and printing routines to send text to the Teletype. The Teletype was a very primitive printer with no control codes or fancy forms handling. If you wanted to advance the paper, you sent it line feeds. There was no form feed code. The machine took rolls of paper, so there was no concept of a “page.”

To make a form feed; I had to count the number of lines Lazy Writer printed. When the lines reached a predetermined number, Lazy Writer called its form feed routine. The form feed routine sent line feeds until it accounted for all the lines needed to get to the top of the next page. The printer routine started at the top of the document, figured where each line should end, inserted a carriage return and linefeed, and counted the lines as it went.

The Teletype printed uppercase only. But I figured that our potential customers would have better printers than my Teletype. I decided we should spend some more of our five grand to acquire a target printer with more capabilities than the Teletype. After looking at several, I decided to get a Qume Daisy Wheel printer. One problem, the Qume was a serial printer. The guy who sold it to me told me it could easily be converted to use the parallel port supported by the TRS-80 Expansion Interface. He was wrong, but I didn’t worry about it much at first…I had the Small Systems Software (SSS) cassette port interface and software. The original, unmodified SSS driver was fine for running the Qume.

The Qume came with a daisy wheel with the Courier font, but the wheel could be swapped for wheels with other fonts. The Qume could do all sorts of tricks that the Teletype could not, including the ability to print both upper and lower case letters. To take advantage of that, there had to be some way of utilizing the Shift key on the TRS-80. The Shift actually did work, although in an odd fashion. In BASIC, the keyboard produced standard ASCII uppercase characters. If you pressed the Shift key, you got a lowercase ASCII code. On the screen, it didn’t make any difference; the result was an uppercase letter, but the codes generated inside the computer where different, and case-opposite to ASCII standard. I wanted Lazy Writer to load any sort of ASCII text including ASCII BASIC programs. (Actually, it would load anything including machine language programs.) To stay compatible with the TRS-80’s odd way of doing things, Lazy Writer treated lowercase character codes as uppercase and visa versa. That didn’t matter on the screen, but when printing the text, the case had to be flipped on the way to the printer because the Qume and other printers wanted straight ASCII standard codes. The decision to stick with the TRS-80’s strange treatment of case in text file later caused a certain amount of grief.

Getting upper-lower case to come out of the printer was one thing, but how do you know what case a letter is in when they all look upper case on the screen? When Electric Pencil came out for the TRS-80, its solution was to require you to add a 2K RAM chip that substituted for the original character generator chip in the TRS-80’s video output circuitry. Conversion kits were expensive and results weren’t pretty on the TRS-80’s screen because lower case letters like g and p lacked true descenders, but installing these kits did let you see your upper and lower case letters. Later Radio Shack added a conversion kit that displayed real descenders. When I started Lazy Writer, these kits weren’t widely available. My solution was to have a toggle that, in one state, showed all capital letters as a “#”. In the other, it showed the character (in uppercase, of course). So “David Welsh” showed as either DAVID WELSH or #AVID #ELSH on the screen.

I did so much thinking about case that I added a feature that would flip the case of the character that the cursor is on and another that would flip the case of the whole file. When I put in my move-by-word, move-by-sentence feature, it occurred to me that, if the program knew where a sentence began, it could automatically find all the sentence beginnings and cap the first letter. I programmed a feature I called “Autocap” that tried to find and capitalized the beginning of every sentence. You could undo the results of Autocap by flipping the case of the entire file and then doing Autocap again, then flipping the case of the file again.

Controlling Printers

One of the problems that I was staying up late to solve was controlling the printer to format the look of the text on the page. Lazy Writer had a menu to set page margins and page length. But what if you wanted to change margins between paragraphs? There had to be a way for the user to indent a paragraph and return to former margins when the indent was no longer needed. You didn’t want to have to stop the printer midway through the page, change the margin on a menu, then stop again and change back. Computers were made to automate such tasks. What was needed was a way for the user to indicate a change in the text using a non-printing code. The most obvious place to do this was at the start of a new paragraph. What was needed was an escape code. It wasn’t hard to have the program look at the first character after a paragraph marker to see if it was the escape character and then call a routine to look for a command letter which could then be followed by a value. For example:

>l10    could set the left margin.

>r10    could set the right margin.

Once the program had detected a command letter, it could change the value on the printer menu. The program then looked for a terminator…another paragraph marker…to tell it that the command was over and it could go back to printing text. The idea here is simple, but programming it so Lazy Writer was forgiving of a user mistake and did not print the line, lose the line count, or ignore text after the command that it was not meant to ignore, proved challenging. Take a simple case, for example:

> l 10

The above means the same thing to a user as:

> l10

But the program has to discard the spaces and still do the right thing when it gets to the command and the value. A command like this is easier to program as:

> 10 l

But users aren’t used to this “value first” order and that means you have to do it the other way. I still remember my Dad’s struggles with the “pre-select” mechanical store where users selected the wrong item because they naturally thought they could deposit their money and then make a selection. They thought that because that is the way most vending machines work. When you think about it, selection first and then paying is more logical, but not to a public trained the other way. To most people, “left margin 10” sounds better and is easier to remember than “10 left margin.”

Another case that I had to work out was:

>l 10

>r 10

Two commands in a row. This is something I thought that users would do – and why not? Very frequently, you would want to change several settings at once. In fact, I thought, it would be nice if you could do it all on one line. In BASIC, you could write:

10 PRINT “HI”

20 A=10

30 PRINT A

or you could write:

10 PRINT “HI” : A=10 : PRINT A

The “:” was a separator that had the same effect as a new line. For my separator, I picked a “/” instead of a colon. Later I designated several separators, including the colon, that user could use if she liked, but the “/” remained the official separator. So the user could write:

> l 10 / r 10

or even

> left 10 / right 10

because Lazy Writer skipped everything after the first letter, if the first letter was a command, and went looking for the number value. That meant the program had to know the difference between a letter and number. I didn’t want to program user error routines so I tried to eliminate any occasion for error. By this I meant that the program wouldn’t crash no matter what the user put in a command line. I didn’t pretend to eliminate erroneous results, however. For example, if a user inserted this into his document:

> leg 1 0 / rat 1 0

The program would give him a left margin of 1 (skipping the zero) and a right margin of 1. When a user wrote “> left” only the l mattered to Lazy Writer. While working this out, I realized there was something else I could do for the user.

The Teletype only recognized the Shift character but the Qume had “control codes.” These code sequences usually started with the escape code (decimal 27) and would cause the printer to change its line spacing or the space between letters or backspace or some other interesting thing. These features were meant to be used under program control, but I thought it would be neat to provide a way for the user to send these code sequences to the printer himself. One of my commands was “e” to send the much used escape code to the printer. Any number, standing by itself was deemed to be a decimal code to send to the printer.

ll     > e/19/64

> 27 /19 /64

sent the codes 27, 19, 64 to the printer.

What the printer did when it got the codes was the responsibility of the user. Those willing to dive into their printer manual were rewarded with effects that they couldn’t get any other way except by programming in BASIC and using the LPRINT CHR$(##) command. The BASIC equivalent of the above would be:

LPRINT CHR$(27);: LPRINT CHR$(19);:

LPRINT CHR$(64)

Many who knew BASIC nevertheless found it easier to control and experiment with their printers using Lazy Writer’s embedded commands.

Testing and Marketing a New Word Processor

As my efforts on Lazy Writer progressed, we began to think about marketing the product. Radio Shack was not a big force at that point in marketing software for its own computer. The Shack seemed to think that selling the computer was the important thing. They had a monopoly on that. Other people were beginning to make a business out of selling things for the computer and a few even managed to sell the computer. They did that by getting them from Radio Shack franchised dealers or by becoming a franchised dealer themselves. Radio Shack didn’t encourage this. They tended to own their own stores and only liked to franchise to dealers in rural areas where a Radio Shack might be combined with an existing appliance store. Franchise stores could get computers for someone who wanted to sell them. There was not much mark-up for the seller, but these people could do things that the Radio Shack stores couldn’t…like sell cheaper memory, cheaper disk drives, and non-Radio Shack software.

Before I’d even upgraded my Model I, I became aware of one of these independent operations. I was at the local Radio Shack to complain about bad cassette loading when I met Victor Andrews who was selling memory for the TRS-80 out of his car. He was calling himself Level IV Products. Soon, there was a Level IV store. Victor had acquired a partner, Chuck Cheseldine. Chuck was older than Victor, a building contractor, and had an actual bank account. He supplied the money to get started and Victor was the sales/technical person who ran the day-to-day operations. Level IV disk drives were a hundred dollars cheaper than the Radio Shack version and they could write 40 tracks instead of the Radio Shack’s limit of 35. That’s how I happened to buy my disk drive from Level IV.

Level IV didn’t make the actual drive. They bought them raw from MPI and put them in a case with a power supply they made or bought from someone else. They just put the drive, case, and power supply together. These power supplies were often inferior to Radio Shack’s. Maybe that’s why the drives sold for less.

The first drive I had was extremely unreliable. It might have been the power supply or it might have been the Expansion Interface. The connection between the TRS-80 keyboard and the Expansion Interface was buggy. The Shack attempted a fix using a buffered cable. When the new cable didn’t fix the problem, they recalled the Expansion Interface and the keyboard to add a DIN cable between the keyboard and the Expansion Interface. Later, they came out with new Expansion Interfaces that didn’t need the buffered cable or the DIN cable. Meanwhile, with the fixes to the Expansion Interface and a trip back to Level IV to get the power supply adjusted, and fixes to the operating system, I could finally rely on the disk drive most of the time. Before that, I would lose a file every few days. I made sure I saved everything to two or three disks. The disk drive crashes convinced me to keep Lazy Writer’s text in memory during the editing process rather than use a system that was constantly updating the disk. That meant that a document had to be limited to the size of memory, but I later found ways to do longer documents while still doing all the editing operations in memory.

Since crashing and rebooting was a normal thing for the TRS-80, I looked for a way to protect the user in the event of a crash. I discovered that a reboot of the TRS-80 did not erase memory; it just reloaded the software without changing what was in high memory. That prompted me to program a “recovery” feature in Lazy Writer that let you set the end of text beyond where it was initially set. You had to make a guess as to about how many bytes long your text was. Inputting that number set the end of the text pointer accordingly. You now had the text on your screen. If you guessed too high, you saw garbage at the end of your text, which you could delete. If you guessed too little, your text would stop before the end and you had to make a bigger guess. Later, I tried to make it more automatic by not resetting the text pointer when the user reloaded it until after the user had determined he or she didn’t want to recover previous text.

When I got Lazy Writer to a certain point, I went to see Victor. I think the first time, I just told him some of the things I was doing. He was interested and made some suggestions as to what the program should have in it. On one visit, I brought the disk in and showed him how it worked. He wanted to sell it when it was done but he and I both thought it needed more work.

As Lazy Writer started to take shape, Theresa started using it. The Vernor Springwells Business Association, made up of local businesses, was looking for an event to boost sales in the neighborhood. At that time, the neighborhood business district was struggling. The economy was in “stagflation,” a term coined to describe inflation coupled with economic stagnation. When we moved into the neighborhood, its business district was frozen in time in the fifties. There was a Woolworth dime store with a soda fountain and a mechanical horse kids could ride for a dime, a candy shop, a camera shop, a collection of furniture stores, a wonderful hardware store, a few bars, a chain restaurant, a Coney Island (a type of Detroit restaurant that serves hot dogs in a style that is supposed to be fashioned after those served in New York’s Coney Island but that I couldn’t find during any of my New York visits), a couple of pizza parlors, and Rebert’s Bakery. The camera shop closed because the owner died and his wife couldn’t keep it going. The Woolworth pulled out and the store became a mattress store and then was empty. The candy store, Paradise Candies, became an ice cream parlor, and then closed.

Ed Bullock was active in the business association and he was probably the one who pulled us into the business association’s plans to put Springwells & Vernor on the map. At one meeting the idea of putting on an art fair surfaced. Theresa had so much to say about it, they made her chairperson. By then, we had the Qume and here was a real world project to use Lazy Writer on. I was interested because it was challenging to change the code in Lazy Writer to do things we needed it to do for the art fair. Theresa started to be a heavy user of the program and her regular frustrations were part of the feedback that influenced the design of Lazy Writer.

While the fair was taking shape, I read about a device called the Stringy Floppy. This was a fast, digital tape unit for the TRS-80 that sold for less money that a disk drive and did not require an Expansion Interface. I used part of our seed money to buy one with the intention of doing a version of Lazy Writer for it. It proved to be quite easy to work with. It had a little tape operating system, a TOS, which let you format the tape, get a directory, load programs, and load and save data. The tape was a continuous loop. If the program or data was next in line on the tape, it loaded quickly; otherwise, you had to wait until it came around again. Worse case, it was much faster than cassette tape, but best case, it was slower than disk.

Still, it seemed reliable, at first, and was less expensive and more portable than disk drives with an Expansion Interface. Norm Rebert, of Rebert’s Bakery, was the head of the Springwells Business Association at that time. We needed to compose a schedule or a press release or something with his signature on it at one point. I brought the TRS-80 monitor and keyboard and the Stringy Floppy with the then current version of Lazy Writer to his bakery where I set up the TRS-80 and Stringy Floppy and we wrote the document for later printing on the Qume. He was impressed. To people without technical background, seeing a live demonstration of word processing in their home or office was like watching magic performed: it was entertaining, they didn’t understand how it was being done, but most didn’t expect anything practical to come of it.

The Stringy Floppy was a dead end. Its big advantage was cost, but the price of a disk drive was drifting down. The floppy was becoming the standard. That meant that everyone would soon have one and everyone would be able to exchange programs and data with everyone else with a disk drive. Stringy Floppy owners would soon have trouble getting fresh tapes (which were prone to tangle and die). The company went out of business. I never released a version of Lazy Writer for the device.

During the course of producing real documents for the art fair, much of what the program needed to make a finished document became apparent. First, one needed to be able to set margins at the left and right. Since full justification was a goal, there had to be a way to turn that feature on or off. You needed to be able to set the number of lines on each page. You needed to be able to tell the program to stop printing. (The need for the latter became apparent when documents got longer and there was no way to stop printing even when you spotted a mistake or the printer started to eat the paper or shred the ribbon.) During this period, the Lazy Writer printer menu evolved. Most controls in Lazy Writer were single key presses. Program control in a word processor presents special problems because you want most of the keys to produce text. The IBM PC came with function keys, an Alt key, and a Control key that could be used in combination with letter keys to control the program. The TRS-80 didn’t have any such keys until the Model 4. My solution was to have two modes: a Text Entry mode and an Edit mode. The BREAK key toggled between the two. In the Text Entry mode, pressing a key produced a text character. In the Edit mode, pressing a key activated an editing command. This is a good way of editing and manipulating existing text since, while editing, you still want to see the text on the screen, not menus of commands. But when printing, there is no need to see the text and no need to make the user remember commands that can be shown on a menu. So the print menu appeared when you pressed Shift + p key in the Edit mode. Everything I added to this menu added to the length of the program and every byte added to the program reduced the memory left for text. This was especially apparent in the stringy floppy version where the keyboard unit was being used alone (without Expansion Interface) and therefore only memory in the keyboard unit was available. (You could use the Stringy Floppy with the Expansion Interface, but then why not just get a disk drive?) The march of the program code into the text memory is another thing that doomed the Stringy Floppy version.

But the increasing size of the program was also a worry for the disk version. Victor at Level IV urged me to make the program run on a 32K machine. Memory was still expensive and people who wanted disk drives were ordering Expansion Interfaces with only 16K instead of with 32K. With the keyboard memory, that made a total of 32K rather than the full compliment of 48k, and most programs would work with that.

I solved the problem of the ever-expanding program by borrowing a concept from TRSDOS: the overlay or subprogram. That meant dividing the code for Lazy Writer into a core function module and various sub-function modules. Initially, there was just the Edit module, which loaded with the core module, and the print module. Later, we added other discrete modules to do other functions. When you pressed Shift + “p” key, the printer module loaded into memory in the space where the Edit module had been. When you finished printing, the core program reloaded the Edit module.

This was a major design change that required rethinking and repositioning lots of already coded features. There had to be a way for the sub modules and the core module to communicate with each other. That required them to have common “jump addresses” and common data storage. Lazy Writer acquired a memory map. To load the sub-modules, I needed to understand how TRSDOS handled the loading of machine language programs as produced by EDASM. (Another reason for breaking up the program was that EDASM held the text of the source code in memory and I was running out of room in it too.)

Before Lazy Writer was ready for launch, Victor Andrews and Level IV parted company. Victor was my contact at Level IV and he was the person who knew how to sell software. Victor started a new company, Soft Sector Marketing, and he needed products to sell. I felt comfortable with Victor handling the product, so I consulted with Victor even more than before.

Even as art fair preparations were underway, Theresa began working on the manual for Lazy Writer. She would talk to me about the program, use the new feature, and write up a description of it. Then I would read it and tell her if she was technically correct. These editing and revision sessions took place at the local pizza parlor, mostly over lunch. Gradually the manual emerged. The fact that Lazy Writer was constantly changing and evolving made it harder for Theresa. These headaches culminated just before we left for Boston to launch Lazy Writer at a computer show. I had not yet programmed the header/footer function, so I described it to her as I thought it would operate. Just as she was about to have the manual printed, I said, “Wait, I had to change that!” I then explained to her how it would really work and she made those last minute changes.

Some of the documents we did for the art fair ended up as examples in the manual. It was a good real-world test of my ideas about how word processing should be done. One of the many things I discovered during that period was that justifying text by simply sticking in extra spaces where there is an existing space until you run out of existing spaces doesn’t work well. The spaces all piled up on one side of the page. What you have to do is alternate which end of the line you stick the spaces in. Your program also has to figure out when it needs to put more than one extra space between words. What I wanted was a good-looking, trouble-free, all-purpose justification routine that would work with any printer. My friend Walter’s much desired proportional spacing would have to come later.

Programming required an entirely different type of thinking from photography. Photography involves planning for the shoot, but once the shooting is under way, the important thing is perception not cognitive thinking. Photography is done in a trance-like state. It’s a performing art. A little study of Zen is helpful to a photographer. To take insightful pictures you have to clear your mind and be totally aware of your situation. With programming however, you get totally immersed in solving a problem. The level of concentration is very high. You become oblivious to your surroundings. Sometimes while driving, I would become completely absorbed in some programming dilemma and Theresa would have to remind me that we’d gone five exits too far. Frequently, I would work until 3:00 AM on some vexing problem in the code, go to bed without a solution and then wake up with the answer in the morning. In fact, I counted on that.

Launching Lazy Writer

Lazy Writer was officially launched at the Boston Computer show in December of 1979. We had previewed Lazy Writer at another computer show in Chicago where Victor was exhibiting, but we didn’t have the finished version to sell there. The Boston show was a blur of activity, bringing our first sales and showing that there was a strong interest in our product. When we returned home from Boston, I went right back to programming to straighten out some things that still weren’t working like I thought they should. Victor was beginning to run ads for Lazy Writer and orders trickled in. I split my time between shooting photo jobs to keep bread on the table and programming updates.

Now and then, Victor would call and tell us he needed a few more copies. Theresa and I, and sometimes our partners, would copy disks and assemble manuals in our basement to fill the order. Sometimes we would deliver updated disks to replace disks in packages Soft Sector Marketing hadn’t sold yet.

Early after the first release, I began to get phone calls from users. Some of these were filtered through Victor, but some came directly to me. In some cases, I happened to be at Victor’s store when a user called. I remember one call in which the caller had prepared a short list of “wish” features. One was for an unbreakable space. This would be a character that printed as a space but would be treated as a character by the justification system. You would use it in a name, for example, that you didn’t want split between two lines. Such as “Dr.#Welsh,” where the # stands for the unbreakable space. I programmed this in, using my keyboard routine to generate a special character that Lazy Writer printed as space but was otherwise treated as a character.

This ad, placed by Victor Andrews of Soft Sector Marketing, appeared in the June 1981 issue of 80 Microcomputing.

Another suggestion from a customer (maybe the same person) was that Lazy Writer should be able to send out codes from anywhere in text, not just at the paragraph breaks. To do this, I picked the unlikely combination of *> to start the code sequence and a single * to end it. A command in between could be sent to the printer. For example, *>27/54/61* would send the BASIC equivalent of LPRINT CHR$(27); CHR$(54); CHR$(61) Many printers had code sequences that started something, such as italics, and then a second code sequence would shut the feature off. With embedded commands, Lazy Writer could make any printer do at least some of the tricks the user had paid for, with no additional programming on my part. Victor loved this and featured it in his ads.

Life continued like that for several months. I was disappointed. I’d never worked harder in my life than I did on Lazy Writer and here it was selling fewer than 10 copies a month.

Victor, always the upbeat sales person, wasn’t discouraged.

“We sell a few more each month,” he pointed out.

In the Spring of 1980, we got a good review in 80 Micro. Suddenly, sales bloomed into hundreds per months. We were finally making some money. That’s when we moved the operation out of our basement.

During this period, I was trying to get Lazy Writer on the Model III. The Model III, the direct successor to the Model I, was cast solidly in the mold of the Model I but with the flakiest elements eliminated. It had a more substantial and polished look that better fit a business environment. True, it lacked a great keyboard and the one it had was inflexibly attached to the video and CPU, but this was before the days of “ergonomics,” so customers were more likely to be grateful for the lack of flaky cables than wondering why they couldn’t move the keyboard around or put it on their lap.

Adapting Lazy Writer to the Model III shouldn’t have been a tough problem. Despite its different case, the guts were almost the same. But TRSDOS for the Model III was a different story. The one-byte-at-a-time write that had solved my compatibility problems worked so slowly in the Model III TRSDOS that it was useless. I had to write a sector read/write routine, and then, to keep the code base the same as for the other DOS’s, I had to devise a test to determine which type of operating system Lazy Writer was on so it could write files correctly. I ended up hating TRSDOS Model III.

We had a lot of interest in the summer of 1983 when we held this seminar. That’s me at the podium.

By the time of the Model III introduction, there was a vast choice of Model I software that could run on, or be rapidly adapted to, the Model III. These programs came from small companies and even smaller companies. Vern Hester and I, two people, could offer most of the software needed to make the TRS-80 into a useful office machine…an operating system, and a word processor with many useful extensions. (We needed a third person to do a spreadsheet.) Software vendors like us could make money selling to buyers of the Model I version who were now converting to the Model III. In 1980 and 1981, the TRS-80 market was still growing and our products were still selling well.

By 1983, we had built the company up to the point where the cash flow was respectable. We never actually showed a profit but Theresa and I were getting a nice salary and meeting all our bills. We had, by then, a system of extensions for Lazy Writer that added to our revenue. But as we were toiling away to satisfy our TRS-80 customers, there were portents of what would ultimately do us in, along with every other TRS-80 software producer.

The first thing I saw that really worried me was the IBM crowd at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco, where we exhibited in a booth we shared with Vernon Hester and Phil Manfield, author of the Electric Webster spell checker. I had seen the IBM before, but here were fully equipped IBMs with massive 640K memories, color graphics cards and internal hard drives. People were selling all sorts of serious programs on these machines and big money was backing everything. The TRS-80 section of the show was sparse. Well, maybe that was to be expected. Frisco was the home of the Apple and never was strong for the TRS-80. But all these IBMs, fully equipped, and money no object? That was a little depressing. Especially when I looked at some of the software.

For example, I had a program Theresa bought me for Christmas (or maybe I bought me for Christmas) by Sublogic called Flight Simulator. This program on the TRS-80 would display the cockpit of a Sopwith Camel that you could take off and fly around. It was a realistic simulation if you had a good imagination. The program wrung all you could out of the TRS-80s limited graphics and Z80 processor. I saw this same program under the Microsoft banner running on an IBM with 640K and a “high res” graphics card and the difference was impressive. I wanted the IBM version. The IBM was not considered a game machine. Neither was the TRS-80, but here was a “show off” application that demonstrated the large gap in capabilities between the two machines…when the IBM was fully decked out. Of course, the IBM was expensive. At that time, there was still a $3000.00 gap between the TRS-80 and the machine that displayed flight simulator so well. With the growing number of IBM machines and IBM clones appearing daily, that gap would narrow.

Competition and Change in the Market

The IBM was a threat to both the TRS-80 and to the CP/M 8080 and Z80 machines that were the TRS-80’s closest competitors. Both were surviving because they were cheaper than the IBM or its clones. For a while, this looked like it was going to stretch the lifespan of the TRS-80 because Radio Shack was lowering the price on the TRS-80 as prices for IBM clones came down. The arrival of the Model 4 provided a new market but complicated life and added to our costs as well. We bought two Model 4s at around $2000.00 each: the standard version and the portable, the Model 4P. The latter was “toteable” but you couldn’t use it on an airplane because it had to be plugged into an electrical outlet. The keyboard was connected to the rest of the unit through a thick cable, but it would stretch far enough to be placed on your lap. The 4P had no cassette port but it did have a slot in the rear for a 300-baud modem card. The 4P had one other quirk: it had no Model III BASIC ROM. If you wanted to run it as a Model III, you had to have a Model III ROM image on your boot disk.

The Model 4 came with an 80 character wide screen and the possibility of adding a second bank of 64K of memory. The Model 4 would run as a straight Model III with no change to any software and it looked like a Model III except for the addition of three function keys, a CAPS key and a CTRL key. You could even boot any Model III operating systems on it with no change. That was great for software developers like me because you could still sell your Model III software while working on a Model 4 version. The problem was that you couldn’t use any of the new features of the Model 4 in the Model III mode.

The Model III in our basement. The cat liked the warmth.

We did a Model 4 version and a Model “4 Plus 3” version. The 4+3 version would run on the Model 4 under a Model III operating system but kick the video system into 80 character mode. The term “Model 4 version” referred to the TRSDOS/LDOS operating system provided with the Model 4. This operating system differed, of necessity, from all previous TRSDOS’s and LDOS’s. The Model III computer followed, with only minor changes, the memory map of the original Model I, Level II machine. When operating as a Model III, the Model 4 had the same memory map, but when you booted TRSDOS for the Model 4, a hardware switch made the Model 4 a different machine. It made use of the 80-character screen and abolished the BASIC ROM from low memory, substituting its own vector table — not unlike CPM. Programs that made calls to the TRS-80 Model III ROM would fail. Programs that tried to memory map video as in the Model I/III would fail. TRSDOS provided a Microsoft BASIC that matched that on CP/M and was mostly compatible with the BASIC on the IBM, but BASIC programs from the Model III had to be modified to be run successfully on the Model 4.

Vernon Hester eventually developed a Multidos for the Model 4 that was prefect for me because it would run on the portable without the Model III ROM program but was compatible with most Model III software. I quickly adapted Lazy Writer 3+4 version to run on it in 80-character mode.

The 4P was great for going to computer club meetings. From the earliest days, people had disassembled their Model Is, lugged them to computer club meetings, reassembled them and run demo programs, disassembled them and carted them back home hoping that no cables or connectors would be damaged in the process. The Model III could be toted the same way without much worry about connectors since these were internal, but it was awkward to carry and heavier than the Model I. The 4P solved these problems.

My friend Vernon Hester, shown here as guest speaker at a seminar we sponsored for users of Lazy Writer and Multidos

With each new computer, however, we had more versions of the program to maintain. There was Lazy Writer for the Model I, Model III, the Max-80, Model 4 using TRSDOS for the Model 4, Model 4 80-character version for Model III DOS (4+3), then we had a quick version of Lazy Writer for all these DOS’s and Models. The Quick Version was assembled to load into memory all at once. The user had less text memory but could get from the printer menu and back without disk access, speeding the workflow when all that was needed was to dash off a bunch of one page letters. The quick version became attractive when most people had upgraded to 48K of memory. Then there were all the extension programs that we had developed over the years to address different needs. Many of these had to be in a version for each operating system and computer model variant. Keeping it straight was a big job and sometimes we didn’t. Turnover in office staff made the problem worse. Just keeping source code straight took time and concentration.

Fortunately, Vern Hester developed an Editor/Assembler program for his own use that he then marketed as Zeus. I adopted Zeus early on and used its conditional assembly features to consolidate code as much as possible. We put our programs for distribution on a mini version of Multidos that we called “LazyDos.” LazyDos had a version of Vernon’s SuperBasic on it that I used to write an installation program that copied the appropriate files to the user’s target operating system. That helped reduce the number of calls and letters from new users who couldn’t figure out how to get Lazy Writer to work on their system.

Theresa Quits as Office Manager

Theresa was watching the advertising bills mount up and wondering how we would pay them. She was answering letters and phone calls from customers and dealers, filling out government paper work, working on documentation, and dealing with the staff. Our senior staff member at the time was an effective, hard-working college student, Debby Turchan, who tended to be headstrong and opinionated about how things should be done. She didn’t have any shyness about expressing her views to Theresa. The trouble was that it got emotional sometimes. This conflict was partly of our own making. Our management philosophy was to hire bright kids, explain what we wanted done, and then turn them loose to figure out the details. Mostly, this system worked, but sometimes the kids forgot who owned the company and whose money was on the line.

One day Theresa came home distraught and completely demoralized. I had heard her complaints before, along with her fears that we were going to be buried by our advertising debts, printing bills, and $5000 we borrowed from my father to make an initial payment to the partners, from whom we were splitting, and to whom we also owed money. I didn’t think things were as bad as she painted them, but after yelling and crying and arguing and discussing, it was clear that Theresa was mentally and emotionally exhausted.

“You go in and manage things and see how you like it,” She said.

So I started going into the office everyday. That meant I had to change my schedule because I had been sleeping until 11:00 then staying up programming until 3:00 AM I couldn’t do that anymore although I still didn’t get to the office when it opened unless there was no one else to cover. We took Theresa off salary, which eased the company’s money troubles at our expense, but we paid her for documentation work on a freelance basis. She was still involved in the company but I was running the show day to day.

In some ways, I was a better manager than Theresa. Debby tried to tell me how we should do everything just as she had with Theresa, but she didn’t get under my skin…though I think I upset her a couple of times. Mostly, I got along with the staff fairly well. I didn’t inquire too closely into what they were doing in the outer office except to check on the money and when a problem came up. I should have paid more attention. At the beginning of our sales efforts, I wrote a BASIC program to record orders and create an invoice or receipt. That fell into disuse, however, because the staff developed their own system that seemed to work OK. When the original crew left, there was no good system in place to track orders. Much later, when I was the only one left on staff, I wrote a better software system which I used and found indispensable. I should have created and refined the order system from the beginning.

Valerie and Debbie got me this shirt for Christmas, 1982

I was fairly good at juggling adverse circumstances. Helped by taking Theresa off the payroll, a staff reduction, and a negotiated settlement of the advertising debt we owed to Computer User, we were again solvent, although precariously so. Time management was more of a problem. It seemed to me that most of my time went in to customer support. Theresa had taken, apparently, an amazing number of phone calls from customers. The rest of the staff did too when they knew the answer to the caller’s question. Theresa had also kept up a steady correspondence with customers, dealers, reviewers, and others. I simply could not duplicate a lot of the work she had done.

Our Staff: Me, Debbie Turchan, Valerie Pugh, and Don Elmore

Debbie turned our office in Dearborn into a garden, with so many plants.

Becoming a Dad

Theresa and I badly needed a break and when we got an offer to come demonstrate Lazy Writer to a conference of romance novelist in Montreal, we decided to go, mostly as a way to escape for a while. I’d never seen Montreal or a conference of romance writers. It was, after all writers, not the business people who dominated our customer list, for whom I had originally created Lazy Writer.

To get to Montreal from Detroit you could drive through Canada, take a plane from Detroit Metro Airport, or cross the Ambassador Bridge into Windsor, Canada and take Air Canada. Air Canada was quicker than driving and less expensive than flying from Detroit. (Our airplane, by this time, had been traded for a piece of land in Harrison Township. We weren’t finding any time to fly it and we had found ourselves facing a “jackpot” annual inspection where seemingly everything on the plane needed to be fixed for the plane to be flightworthy.)

Normally when you cross into Canada, they wave you through customs, but it seems that every time I’m in hurry they want a full inspection. I get the feeling that if you go through the check point telling them that you intend to spend a few hours ravishing Canadian girls and smoking dope, that they’d let you right through, but if you’re on business, they think of you as a potential menace to Canadian Sovereignty. On the Montreal trip, they thought we should pay duty on the copy of Lazy Writer that we were bringing with us to demo. (The customs agents of the world were just beginning to get a handle on software. In the early day, overseas customers would frequently tell us to charge them full price for the manual and then declare the disk at the cost of a blank disk because books either carried no duty or were assessed at a lesser rate.) After a little arguing, we were allowed to catch our flight.

Interest in Lazy Writer was only luke warm, but being in Montreal made up for it. We had a first class room in the hotel where the conference was held. The city is beautiful and romantic. We tell our daughter that she was probably conceived there and is therefore an honorary Canadian. If that’s not true, it should be.

While we were there, we visited a Radio Shack. I was interested in the Canadian market and how things were going there. We had some customers in Canada but one problem at the time was there was no copyright protection in Canada. Not that there was any effective copyright protection in the US. Illegal copying was rampant. At shows, dealers would tell us they hardly sold any copies of Lazy Writer, but everyone seemed to have it. Customers, however, were buying the newest extensions. When we checked our registrations, we would only find a few registered copies in their geographic area. Sometimes none. Obviously, these users were getting their copies from someone other than us, and we were getting no money.

One time we sent out a mailing, which included business reply envelopes. One guy sent back our business reply envelope — which we had to pay for, of course — to tell us he liked our program, but he thought it was too expensive and so would continue to use his pirated copy. We were struggling to meet our limited payroll while he was using our business reply envelope to taunt us! Another time, we learned about a reseller in California who was selling illegal copies of both Lazy Writer and Multidos. There was not much we could do about it, since we lacked the resources to hire lawyers. The pirate may have been making more money than we were.

Anyway, the Radio Shack employee told us that what we needed to make it big in Canada was a French version. In fact, some French Canadians sent us a ROM for the MX-80 printer that would produce the needed diacritic marks, but doing a French version was another project for which there was no time or money.

Following the trip to Canada, we discovered that Theresa was pregnant. We hadn’t had kids when we were younger because we hadn’t felt settled enough or financially secure enough. Theresa didn’t even seem to like kids that much. We had always joked about wanting the non-smoking, non-kid section in restaurants. Nineteen eighty-four didn’t seem to be the year when things would improve financially either, but we had talked about having a kid because time was running out on that option. We didn’t so much try to have a baby as we stopped guarding against it. We were both happy as well as surprised when we found we were pregnant.

The Trip to LA

Before discovering that we were going to be parents, we had bought tickets to L.A. for October. The airline ran a promotion that lowered the cost to ridiculously low if you booked ahead of time. It was a no-refund deal. We realized Theresa would be far along in the pregnancy for the trip, but decided to go since there were some business-related things we could do while we were out there.

Theresa was very obviously pregnant on that trip. Nevertheless, we visited Lobo Systems. They were located in small factory-like building in an L.A. suburb. The main office area had a blackboard with the names of companies that owed them money. I didn’t see that as a good sign. The CEO, who was a major investor who had taken over from previous management, was willing to talk to us. He didn’t see much future in the TRS-80 clone business, but he thought that the Max-80 (a TRS-80 clone which they sold) or some variant of it could be sold as intelligent keyboards in data entry applications. He was most interested that we knew Vern Hester. It seems that they had shipped a Max-80 to Vern so that he could support it in Multidos. The CEO thought of this as a loan. Vern told me that he thought of it as a gift.

He explained, “I can’t support an operating system for a computer that I have to give back. If a problem comes up, I need to have the machine to check it out.” A year later, Lobo invoiced him for the full price of the machine.

The other piece of business on the trip was to make contact with Robert Aurtusy. He lived in San Francisco, so I got on a flight north and met him for the first time face-to-face. He was a programmer who had developed “hooks” (software driver) for outputting text to a Votrax speech machine to allow the blind to “read” text on the computer screen. It was pioneering work at the time. He contacted us and urged us to get Lazy Writer working with his system.

Robert got Votrax to give us a Votrax unit so we could test our software with it and set up a meeting with the Votrax people, who happened to be in Troy Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. The changes needed to Lazy Writer weren’t extensive and the idea was intriguing so I made the changes, which I think we sold as a special version. Mostly we sold this version through Robert, making him a dealer.

Robert met me at the airport and drove me around town. He was even more frenetic in person than he had sounded on the phone. Our conversation jumped around a lot. He was thinking about how to get something like the system that he had produced for the TRS-80 to work on MS-DOS. We talked about the changes in the industry. Robert marveled that there were now people going around with the title “Dbase Programmer” on their business cards. He wondered how you call yourself a programmer for what he regarded as essentially an application program. This was before the days of “Word Basic”, and “Visual Basic for Applications”, so the idea that an application program might require a programmer was new.

Another thing he said that sticks in my memory is his idea of what he wanted computers to become. He wanted a computer that would be his companion, like a girl friend. I assume he meant a platonic girl friend. I think he wanted more warmth and understanding from his machine.

Robert took me to meet one of our blind users. I don’t recall his name, but he was profoundly grateful for the Votrax and our efforts to make it speak the text on his computer screen. This combination enabled him to write letters and other material that would have otherwise not been possible or would have required someone else’s help.

It was an inspiring visit, but I left with the impression from Robert that the TRS-80’s days were numbered even for niche applications like talking computers for the blind. Well, that wasn’t really news. But we had a baby coming and the TRS-80 was what was putting food on the table. Converting the product to MS-DOS seemed to be the best course of action, but the development effort was not trivial. Worse, marketing was an enormous problem. To reach IBM users required much more money than to reach TRS-80 buyers.

Here’s me at a seminar in Chicago sponsored by one of our dealers. That’s a Model III running Multidos next to me.

Byte magazine, which covered computing generally but was increasingly focusing on MS-DOS, was becoming the size of a big city phonebook and charged $10,000.00 a page for ads. If you could afford the ten grand, would enough people see the ad and buy? It looked like you would need many ten grand ads to get the buyer’s attention. That’s what companies were doing in the MS-DOS market. All the players were much bigger than us. At one point, I read a story in Info World that Micro Pro, the creators of Word Star, hit a rough patch and had to lay off 100 people. My joke was that I’d have to hire 98 people to be able to do that. The TRS-80 had never been “big time” in that it didn’t interest Wall Street, but now it seemed more small time than ever. Even my dentist was asking if Lotus Development of Lotus 123 spread sheet fame would be a good investment.

“Sure,” I told him, “but watch out. Software and computer stuff in general has a short life cycle. The hot product of today is the dog of tomorrow.” I may have told him my theory that about the time a computer company constructs its first brand new showcase headquarters building, it’s finished.

Coping With the Ultimate Decline

When a booming industry starts to shrink, everything goes into reverse. Instead of spinning off new businesses, those that exist consolidate. That’s what happened to Vernon Hester’s operation, Cosmopolitan Electronics, and our company, which was renamed AlphaBit Communications. When TRS-80 sales were hot, Vernon had opened an office, hired a girl to answer the phones and prepare orders, and even hired additional programmers. Eventually, the economics wouldn’t support the office any more. We were not in great shape either, but we had a sales operation that was still surviving. So, despite the fact that Theresa was almost ready to deliver our child, we made plans to take over the publication of Multidos. That meant advertising, revising and printing manuals, and filling orders. That’s how it came to pass that Theresa’s water broke while she sat in her office proofreading a Multidos manual.

Consolidating products, producing new goodies for loyal users, and becoming a more efficient producer extended our company’s life. Pitching direct mail pieces to the Lazy Writer and Multidos customer base brought in money when nothing else seemed to. But we could go only so often to that well.

Sumup

Most of the programs we wrote to tap the wallets of friendly Lazy Writer users were extensions to the word processor or very directly related to it. One was not and walked in off the street, you could say.

Most of our business was by phone or mail. We didn’t keep our location a secret but weren’t set up for walk-in customers and didn’t advertise locally. Some customers who lived in the area and knew us would occasional drop in to buy something or say hello, but it was rare for a new customer to walk in the door. We never had a sign on the front of the building or a display rack of retail goods… it was just an office.

One quiet day, I was alone in the office when a customer walked in and introduced himself as Bill Robinson. Bill was young, black, and a little shy. He was interested in getting a product that we sold, a set of floating point math routines by Paul McLeod, Vern Hester’s part-time employee and associate programmer. These were routines in Assembler that programmers could use in their own programs to do floating-point math without having to go through the pain of reinventing that particular wheel. I explained that these were program subroutines and that since I didn’t need floating-point to write a word processor, I wasn’t familiar with them and so we were offering a pretty much no-support deal, but that others had used them successfully.

Bill told me he was a Z80 programmer for GM but he was just getting familiar with the TRS-80 and wanted to write something for it that would sell and maybe make some money and did I have any ideas for a program that I’d like to publish.

“The TRS-80 market’s getting a little thin,” I explained. “A couple of years ago would have been better, but there is something…”

I told him I’d been reading about “pop ups” for the IBM PC and clones. These were little utilities that hid in memory and popped up on the screen when the user pressed a key combination, and then disappeared off the screen when they were finished doing whatever they did. When they “popped down,” they restored the screen to whatever state it had been in before they popped up. I didn’t see any reason that something like that couldn’t be done on the TRS-80. The TRS-80 had interrupts just like the IBM. It didn’t have as much memory though. People had used interrupts to control drivers that hid at the top of memory, but I didn’t know of a “Terminate and Stay Resident” (TSR) program for the TRS-80.

“What I’d like to see is a calculator program that will do simple math and be a pop up. I don’t know if you can make it small enough to still leave room for a useful amount of room for Lazy Writer, but it sure would be nice to be able to be writing along, and then pop up a calculator when you need it.”

He said he’d think about it. Not long after, he came in with a working version that did just what I wanted it to do. We made a deal. Sumup was a dream product because it didn’t require extensive documentation, was simple to use, and didn’t create any support nightmares. I just wish I’d had it four or five years earlier.

We Attempt to Trim Printing and Mailing Costs

More use of direct mail increased the amount of printing we needed to do. It was probably our biggest expense, other than advertising. When the office first opened, we got a used Xerox machine to make up small quantities of documentation on demand, just to save runs to the Kwickie Printer that we used. The Xerox was too slow and the quality was marginal, so we graduated to a 24 page per minute Sharp copier which we beat to death. The copier repair guy was like a family member, he was there so often.

Then Theresa and I saw a Gestetner automatic printing press at a business show that looked like the answer to our prayers. At the show, it looked almost as easy to use as the copier and it produced 115 pages per minute. This was real offset printing, not xerography. Better yet, we could get this $10,000.00 machine on a lease deal with little money up front, just like the copier. At the time, we had four rooms, so one office was converted into the printing room where flyers, update notices, and even full sets of documentation were going to spew from the printing press in a trouble free manner.

It turned out that the press’s automatic features were less then robust. If the machine was maintained just so, and the moon was full, it would work on automatic. We got training on the press and all took a turn at using it, but my father (unpaid) and I ended up doing most of the printing at first. Later, we got a teenage boy who was taking printing classes in high school to come in and do the printing at odd times that fit his schedule. The press broke a lot, produced poor quality a good deal of the time, and was generally more expensive to run than we thought it was going to be. Another thing we didn’t figure on was somebody now had to collate manuals. This boring job was assigned to a series of teenage kids that we hired for as little money as we could.

Finding The Right Office Help

Our clerking staff was a little more stable. Both Theresa and I did extensive interviews before hiring one we thought was the cream of the crop. She left us with about 90 back orders piled up, which we didn’t know we had and desperately needed the money from. When she left, we hired a girl with no computer experience because she was the only one who showed up (the labor market had tightened up). Her name was Kim Stein. She managed to clean up, in two weeks, the back orders the other girl left. She made some mistakes, but she got orders out and cleaned up any mistakes quickly. Our next office manager was a guy who seemed to understand computers but when he left, we found uncashed checks from dealers squirreled away in file folders. I don’t what he was saving them for. Our last employee was hired as a collator but promoted to office manager when the guy with the odd filing habits left. She was not a teenager, but a young black woman and single mother. She didn’t seem especially qualified to be an office manager when I hired her and she had no experience with computers, but she was a reliable collator and gradually learned how to do other things. She did a fine job as office manager until somebody offered her a better job and she too left. My experience with hiring employees is that it’s largely a matter of luck.

We Try To Stay Afloat

During the first year of my daughter’s life, we still had four office rooms and a staff but the sole income was from the declining TRS-80 business. It seemed obvious, at least to Theresa, that this wasn’t going to support us much longer… I was hopeful that we could find a way out, especially if we could find outside investors. We put out some feelers to see if we could get some private investment. We got one call from a Lazy Writer customer who said he was ready to invest $20,000.00. I put him off because we had no money to go with it. I’d made some profit and loss projections that showed that the most modest effort to get established in the MS-DOS market would require $100,000.00 to $200,000.00. I didn’t have the ten other investors. These estimates were undoubtedly way low; Bill Schroeder had estimated entry into the MS-DOS world would cost millions.

Theresa came up with the idea of starting a computerized resume service using the TRS-80 Model 4, Lazy Writer, our daisy wheel printer, and the room we weren’t using much anyway. We put some ads and flyers out, which bought in a trickle of customers. Theresa would come to the office, often with baby Amy and a compliment of baby stuff. She would help with the business and service her resume customers. Her new business didn’t bring in much money at first, but I think it would have ultimately been at least a modest success. The flow of customers was steadily increasing. Theresa, after all, had worked several years as an employment counselor, was an excellent writer, and knew all there was to know about formatting documents using Lazy Writer. She’d literally written the book on that. But she got discouraged at the slow pace of business expansion, and decided to seek some other sort of job. After some fruitless interviews, her own excellent resume landed her a job at Electronic Data System (EDS), a firm that had been recently purchased by General Motors; they were hiring a lot of people in the Detroit area. Her starting salary was $30,000.00 a year... more than we’d averaged out of our business for the two of us. More than we had ever made in the photo business, free and clear, in any year. Plus they provided health insurance and a retirement plan. There was just one formality; they had to check her out with her former employer. Naturally, I gave her a glowing recommendation and told them how sorry we all were at AlphaBit Communications to lose her.

After Theresa started full time work, childcare mainly fell to me. Since I was still trying to deal with the TRS-80 software business, we found a childcare provider who was flexible about hours and would take Amy for part of the day. Sometimes, I’d bring Amy to my office for half the day, and then take her to the childcare person for the other half. This was after Amy started walking. Amy was relatively easy to take care of, but finding things for her to do at the office was sometimes not a great aid to productivity. Our answering machine was taking more of the calls, which were becoming less frequent. The only thing that was picking up was calls for the now defunct resume business.

In the early years, an ad in 80 Micro was the answer to cash flow problems. But 80 Micro ads returned less and less as the magazine changed and the market contracted. And while there were more TRS-80 owners out there than ever, they were a tough sell. Most of them already had the software they wanted or they had learned where to steal it. Many were thinking about their next computer, which would probably not be a TRS-80. 80 Micro was printing more stories about Tandy’s newer MS-DOS machines, the 2000 and later the 1000. I was wondering how they’d be able to maintain a magazine focused on the TRS-80 product line when the new computers sold under the Tandy nameplate were so different. The answer was: they couldn’t!

We had credit with 80 Micro, but we weren’t able to keep up with the ad bills. Finally, in late 1984 we stopped advertising. They noticed that: 1. we weren’t booking new ads, 2. we hadn’t paid for the old ones. The warmth went out of our relationship. They dunned us and then they sued us.

The lawsuit came after a really nasty call from a person representing himself as a lawyer from Lansing, Michigan, who threatened to have us shut down and jailed within the week. That was just a harassing phone call, of course. The real legal action was much more genteel and handled, on their side, by a well-known Detroit law firm. I contacted Walter, my college friend, whom I had no money to pay but who came through anyway.

“Don’t worry,” Walter told me, “everybody gets sued eventually.”

Walter, had abandoned his Qyx word processing typewriter for a Model III and Lazy Writer. But I think by that time he’d moved to an IBM AT with a “massive” 70MB hard drive, and Word Perfect.

Whichever computer he was using at the time, Walter did all the things that lawyers do when the facts don’t exactly support their client. I think the whole thing lasted about a year. I was never in court. Finally, the lawyers on the other side figured out that we had no money and a low figure deal was struck to get everybody out of court.

The printing press churned out direct mail pieces and documentation at lower unit costs but quality and reliability suffered. And there was still the unpaid bill of our original printer. Fortunately, he wasn’t the type to take legal action, but he did have a TRS-80 and wondered if he could get some software for it. I gave him a copy of everything we sold. Every once in a while we would send him a check. Gradually we paid him off.

With the lawsuit looming and our debt to the Kwickie printer and our potential liability on the printing press lease, I thought about just filing for bankruptcy as a solution. I contacted the lawyer who set up the corporation, but he told me he only sets them up, so he referred me to another lawyer who took me through what I’d have to do to file for bankruptcy.

“Well, you’re only about $18,000.00 in the hole,” he told me, “you might be just as well off working it out.”

So that became the plan. Orderly contraction. I held a big sale pitched to the locals selling off our Model III, filing cabinets, software and miscellaneous items. We nursed the printing press through a fairly massive printing of manuals and promotional material, then I contacted Gestetner with a list of complaints. I told them to come and get the printer and braced for a lawsuit from them or the leasing company. They didn’t sue. They came and got the printer. We were done with that.

I had earlier vacated the two extra rooms we’d acquired when our neighbors in the building, the hypnotists, had moved out of their offices across the hall from our original office. In the end, I gave up our original front office and moved what was left of AlphaBit Communications into the small office that had been Theresa’s office, then the printing room. It still smelled like a printing room. That’s where I spent the last days of having an office. With no employees and no salaries to pay, including mine, Lazy Writer and Multidos were generating a small positive cash flow again that went to pay off debt, pay the remaining overhead, etc. AlphaBit was able to do a couple of things for us as it spiraled down to nothing. We bought an IBM XT clone, a laser printer and a 5MB hard drive for the TRS-80.

The latter we bought at a kind of garage sale that Radio Shack held in a rented storefront. We got the hard drive, originally a $1,500.00 item, for $400.00 dollars. Later, when it failed, a friend of a friend who knew hard drives installed a used 15MB drive in the five megabyte box for $100.00. With the small files used by the TRS-80, the 15MB drive seemed immense. We also bought several 300-baud modem cards for the Model 4P for fifty cents each which, for some reason, I still have.

The laser printer we acquired was an Epson. It was their first and an ill-fated model. The toner cartridges and the drum were separate and toner cartridge was expensive. The idea was that it would cost less than the all-in-one toner and drum solution used by Cannon and HP. That would have been true if the drum had held up but it didn’t. But when I first got it, the Epson looked like another printing solution like the copier and the printing press only more versatile. I worked out how to do double sided printing. With the hard drive, I could store and print things on demand. The cost per unit would be higher, but there would be no inventory cost. This idea worked for a time because I didn’t need to print the big manuals for Lazy Writer or Multidos because those had been stock piled.

Armed with the laser printer, the TRS-80 Model 4, and the hard drive, I became a very efficient one man band; printing out orders and labels, making disks, packaging and shipping them myself. My last few mailings I sorted, labeled, and posted myself. I was not only the original Lazy Writer, I was the last Lazy Writer. I still got calls and letters. Many of these people were asking when I’d have Lazy Writer on MS-DOS. Between these calls and filling orders and taking care of Amy, I was still trying to work on an MS-DOS version.

When I really got to know the XT clone I bought, I decided that there was no way to do a simple port to the IBM/MS-DOS world of a program written in Z80 Assembler and wedded to the TRS-80. I started from scratch. Well not from scratch exactly. I knew a lot more about the algorithms I needed and how things should be organized internally. I had rewritten almost all the code of the initial TRS-80 release of Lazy Writer, not only to add features, but to make it easy to expand and maintain. The MS-DOS version started off with the benefit of that experience. I still tried to make a program that would be small, fast and would handle any kind of file, including unvarnished ASCII text. I still tried to refrain from adding special codes that would make Lazy Writer text a proprietary format. I still tried to program it so that an error in the file would not mean a program crash or the loss of the whole file.

About Programming and Porting Software

My assumptions about how programming should be done were already out of step with the MS-DOS world.

On the TRS-80:

One programmer would put his stamp on the program and that was considered good. Customers wanted his name

Tight, efficient code that ran fast on a slow processor was considered a virtue

Assembler was the best solution because it produced tight, efficient code

The programmer (at least myself) treated the computer/storage media as prone to fail

It was best to avoid proprietary file types and write the program to be independent of the file type so that the program would not crash if something was missing in the file

Extra time spent optimizing the code to achieve the above goals was considered time well spent.

In the MS-DOS world:

Teams of programmers were becoming the norm: the customer didn’t know who they were and the company producing the program didn’t want to tell them

Bloated, slow code, quickly produced, was the norm; if the program ran too slow, no worry; next year’s computer model would be faster

Assembler was the method of last resort; you can code faster in higher-level languages and more programmers can figure them out

The computer was expected to be perfect: if there were machine/storage errors, they would be fixed in next year’s computer model and the program would run fine

File types tended to be proprietary; let the competition write a conversion program

Programs should expect a certain file type and if the file is not error free, they have the right to crash

Getting the product out quickly is more important than program speed, optimized code or being bug free… next year’s computer model or a new hard drive can solve all problems

As the TRS-80 business faded, I worked on the MS-DOS version while alternating between exhilaration at once again building a word processor from scratch to despair of the dim possibility of ever getting it to market.

Customers were calling asking for the MS-DOS version that they assumed would get text from their TRS-80 disks to the MS-DOS environment. Actually, this was a problem for me as well. As it happened, Lazy Writer files in standard case could be moved over easily with several programs that would either write to an IBM formatted disk on a TRS-80 computer or would read a TRS-80 disk on the IBM. Most TRS-80 files, including Lazy Writer, used an ASCII code 13 decimal to indicate both a carriage return and a linefeed. The IBM/MS-DOS world used an ASCII 13 for a carriage return and a 10 for a linefeed. In normal text, you need both at the end of the line. These programs would take care of the conversion.

These transfer programs worked well considering the variety of TRS-80 operating systems and the well used and cranky TRS-80 hardware they were expected to work with and the variety of IBM clones they had to satisfy. My favorite was a program from Hypersoft that could read TRS-80 disks from the IBM or clone. I used this program long after the TRS-80 had officially died and was no longer available from Radio Shack and I had moved on to other pursuits. I was writing technical manuals with the TRS-80 Model 4P and Lazy Writer, then moving them to my XT clone. I put them into Word Star, fixed a few things, then imported them into Ventura Publisher for final formatting.

The reason I did this was the TRS-80, running Multidos, was still the easiest computer to use. Especially using Multidos and a hard drive, the boot was instantaneous compared to the ponderous start up of my XT clone. Finally, when few were any longer interested, the TRS-80 was reliable and very fast. When I got my first 386 computer, however, I drifted away from the TRS-80. The 386, running Word Star was finally fast enough to boot and use casually. At least it was until I put Windows on it.

As I developed the MS-DOS version of Lazy Writer, I used it for my own writing on the IBM clone. I never really figured out how to correctly handle memory management on MS-DOS. My temporary solution didn’t conform to MS-DOS standards but it worked for my development versions and I figured I could fix it when I was close to having a product. I spent a good deal of time and energy setting up a windowing system so that text lines that were longer than would fit on the 80 character screen would be displayed in a window that scrolled horizontally to reveal the hidden portion of the line. This was something that the TRS-80 version didn’t have. In the TRS-80 version, lines that were longer than the screen would wrap around with the ends of lines displayed below each line. This system is not as bad as it sounds because most people didn’t use it. You could set the video width in Lazy Writer to show text this way, but most people just typed the text with the default video width of 64 or 80, then formatted however they wanted with printer commands.

The MS-DOS version used the TRS-80 Lazy Writer printer commands but I expanded on them. You could equate a line of printer commands to a single word. These words could themselves be strung together and equated to another word that, when invoked, does all the commands. The system of words being defined by other words that are in turn defined by still other words or primitive commands was elegant and powerful, like the Forth programming language. Theresa compared it to the styles in Ventura Publisher. I think that many users would have hated it, but some would have admired it. Too bad it never saw the light of day.

What killed the MS-DOS version of Lazy Writer was the realization that:

1.  I would never get it done at the rate I was going. I had a daughter to look after. I didn’t have the endurance to pull all-nighters any more.

2.  If I got it done, I had no way to market it.

3.  I was truly burned out. A sustained effort that might end in another brush with bankruptcy was just not in me.

Moving to the Suburbs

In 1987, Theresa’s EDS job moved from Southfield to offices in Bloomfield Hills, a long drive from Southwest Detroit. We also were beginning to think about three-year-old Amy’s future schooling. Theresa was not in love with the Detroit school system. Both the Catholic school at the end of our block and the nearby public school lacked any kind of playground and both seemed to use textbooks from the last century. As she drove through the suburb of Ferndale on her way to work, Theresa spotted a house she liked, an old “handyman special” home next to her favorite fast food morning coffee drive-through. The house needed a lot of work, but Theresa insisted it had potential, and it was only a block from a beautiful elementary school and playground. We made the move, thinking that it was midway between her job in Bloomfield Hills and our office in Dearborn, where I was still holding out after contracting down to one room.

The move was epic because not only were we moving the usual personal stuff, but also the fallout from our photo business, including the darkroom, and all the files and leftover stuff from AlphaBit that I had moved to our house in Detroit as the office rooms were abandoned. We are pack rats anyway. As you get older, it’s harder and more expensive to move because you run out of young, strong friends to heave stuff onto a U-Haul truck. All the stuff crammed into our basement and attic would not fit on the truck anyway, so I ferried about 20 station wagon loads to the new house before the official move with a truck and guys we paid to do the heaving.

We sold the house to Roberto Santos, son of our neighbor, the motorcycle club member, on a land contract. He never missed a payment.

When we were getting the last of the stuff out of the house, I was confronted with the Model 15 teletype that was rusting quietly in the basement. I couldn’t face moving it then, so I just left it there and turned the keys over to Roberto.

“There’s an old teletype in the basement,” I told him. “If I don’t make it back here for it in the next few days, it’s yours.”

With all the unloading at the new house, I never did make it back. Now I wish I had, but I wouldn’t have had a place to put it in the new house, which was newly crammed with stuff.

For a while, I made trips to the Dearborn office with Amy in tow. I’d drop her at daycare in Lincoln Park where she was going before the move. I would then go to the office and deal with the mail, an occasional order, phone messages and the like.

I looked for offices in Ferndale, but they all cost more than our remaining room in Dearborn. Finally, I got a post office box in Ferndale, and closed the office in Dearborn. I stopped doing mailings, but I did continue to service customers who could still find me. Amazingly, I was still processing an occasional order as late as 1994, mostly for Multidos. By then, the TRS-80 was a distant memory for some and not even that for the younger crowd. While negotiating for a VGA monitor at a garage sale one day, the seller and I got to talking about the TRS-80.

“I think I have something like that in the basement,” he said. “You want it?”

“I’d like to see it,” I told him.

He disappeared for a while, and then returned with a large box containing a barely used Model I, Level I, 4K TRS-80; monitor, power supply, and a small collection of tapes. He threw in the TRS-80 stuff with the VGA monitor.

The final indignity for the TRS-80 occurred when my Ferndale neighbor acquired a Model III and a Model 4 as a gift. The Model III was in rough condition but still working. The Model 4 was in good condition. He wanted to sell them cheap, but I didn’t want any more obsolete computers. He couldn’t find buyers for them so finally he took them to the family cottage “up north,” as we say around here, and used them for target practice. He reported that shooting the imploding monitors was pretty satisfying.

By that time, AlphaBit Communications had faded away for good. There was no more money in the bank account and VISA dropped us so I couldn’t accept credit cards. The Post Office box would fill up with junk mail and boring junk mail at that. I closed the bank account owing the bank money by their reckoning. (Banks like to charge you for being broke.) I closed the Post Office box. Even telemarketers trying to sell things to AlphaBit finally decided we were gone.

When we moved again to another house in Ferndale, our business was completely gone, but I still had documentation from that last mass printing, and there was still an attic and a basement full of business records. Some of it got tossed in the move, but most of it was loaded into my station wagon again (different station wagon) and moved to the new house. This move was in some ways even more chaotic than the first move to Ferndale. Much was in boxes that hadn’t been opened since they left Detroit. They ended up in the basement, garage, and storage shed (an older, second garage). There they sat for years until we got around to organizing and weeding out in an attempt to make the basement passable again.

“You know,” I said to Theresa, “We ought to either toss this stuff out or write a book.”

4   Theresa’s Story:

What it was Like on the Bleeding Edge

Few people growing up in the 1950s and 1960s knew anything about computers. Computers were mysterious machines that ate punched cards that your utility company helpfully reminded you not to “fold, staple, or spindle” when you got them in the mail with your bill. The first time I remember seeing a computer was in the 1970s when we were doing a promotional slide show for a new health care plan that became one of Michigan’s first HMOs. They had a whole room devoted to their computer, complete with raised floor and special air conditioning. They had a guy whose job was “software” and I remember wondering what that word actually meant. We are the generation that started life knowing nothing about something that came to play a central role in our lives. By the end of that same decade, computers — about which I was so abysmally ignorant — would become my business.

In the late 1970s, I was a free-lance writer who loved writing but hated typing. David, who also wrote articles sometimes, wasn’t much of a typist either. He used to joke that he could type “sixty errors a minute.” Editing a manuscript meant marking it up with red ink, then retyping everything on an electric typewriter. It meant brushing on plenty of messy white stuff called Liquid Paper to cover up mistakes, then trying to type over them. During that decade of trying to make a living as a writer, I heard about something called word processing, and I wanted it. I could think of nothing more wonderful than being freed from the chore of retyping manuscripts.

Buying a Computer Led to a Business

The TRS-80 seemed an improbable machine to be of use, since it lacked most of what you’d need to do word processing. But it was the only computer we could afford and we figured we could take a tax deduction since we actually wanted it to help us with what we did for a living, free-lance writing and photography. We bought the Model I Level I and suffered with trying to load programs from the cassette player and learned some BASIC. We acquired a lot of books and magazines. As we worked with the TRS-80, computers became a lot less mysterious and David became a competent programmer.

David was thinking about getting out of photography, which he enjoyed, but he’d been doing the same kind of PR jobs for the same clients for a number of years. We were both in our mid-thirties and had no children. He thought, with his new-found programming skills, he could write some business programs and sell them to small businesses. There was a huge demand for business software and the TRS-80 was a hot machine. That was about the time he began his discussions with Steve Davis about going into business. The infamous $5000 from Darrell Brayboy arrived soon after and we found ourselves in business with two partners I hardly knew and didn’t like.

Here’s me back in the TRS-80 days

Stuffing $5000 into an envelope and giving it to someone you’d just met seemed to me a strange thing to do. I wondered where the money had come from and why we hadn’t been given a check. The only explanation we ever got (from Steve) was that Darrell had gotten an insurance settlement for a car accident, but that didn’t explain why the money was all cash. I also found it odd that neither partner seemed to have any real interest in computers. To this day, I don’t know what they were thinking in giving us that money.

Steve came up with the company name, ABC Sales, and we went along with it, even though I thought it was a stupid name. When we ended the partnership and incorporated some years later, we found that the name “ABC Sales” was already taken. We adopted the name AlphaBit Communications, Inc. because it let us retain the “ABC” part.

The early Model I TRS-80 as it was sold was not up to doing any word processing. To make it a real business machine, you had to pour a lot more money into it. Could you imagine sending out business letters printed in all upper case? How about having characters obviously made from large dots? Add fanfold paper with a ragged edge, and any good typist with an IBM Selectric would laugh at such pathetic-looking output.

We set up our equipment in the basement of our small house in Detroit. The $3000 Qume Sprint 5 printer was quite a contrast to the old huge and clunky Model 15 teletype machine that we had been using. David had turned the old teletype into a computer printer by writing his first assembly language program to convert Murray code into ASCII. When that ancient piece of metal finally began printing real words, it was a thrill to see old technology mated to new technology. The teletype banged away on a big roll of yellowed paper that we had salvaged. The machine was slow and noisy and you could certainly NOT print business letters and documents on that roll paper, but it was OK for program listings. By contrast, getting the Qume gave us the ability to look like a business and, with its professional-looking output, held out the promise of real word processing at last.

Our Model I, with Expansion Interface, in our basement in Detroit; the $3000 Qume printer is in the background.

During 1978, David worked on what would become the word processor we ended up selling, and I began documenting it. David’s early text processing program seemed pretty good; it inserted, deleted and saved text to disk. He thought the rest would be easy, but he was wrong. He poured untold hours and years of his life into creating Lazy Writer.

I spent many hours marking up print-outs of the manual at Vince’s Pizzeria, a neighborhood restaurant. We used to go there for lunch, then just stay and study our work and think up new features. We showed early versions of Lazy Writer at our local computer club. That’s where we got to know two people we’d spend a lot of time with in the coming years, Victor Andrews and Vernon Hester.

Being in the Software Business

Victor Andrews, who became a good friend, was a fixture at the computer club. He always brought computers and set them up, demonstrating software and hardware add-ons. Over the years he had various storefront locations from which he sold TRS-80 stuff. Initially, Victor was partners with Chuck Cheseldine in Level IV, which eventually became a chain of stores around the Detroit area which lasted into the early 1990s. Victor and his partner split in what Victor said was a dispute over whether Victor’s wife or another woman, Nancy, who worked for Chuck, should work in the business. Chuck thought Victor’s wife Diane too unsophisticated and wanted Nancy, who he regarded as better-educated and more attractive, to be in charge. Victor didn’t agree.

Victor had worked in electronic repair and he and his wife and their son lived in a house that was once World War II “temporary” housing. Victor’s grasp of computing came from his interest in things electronic and his innate abilities at selling technical products. His “just folks” touch appealed to the hobbyists who were the primary customers. In response to the growing conflicts with his partner, Victor walked out and founded Soft Sector Marketing, with his wife working with him. Their young son, Brian, was often with them at computer club meetings and at their store; he was an extremely active kid with a talent for getting into harmless mischief.

We had been talking to Victor while he was still at Level IV, but now he asked if he could represent us through Soft Sector Marketing. Victor liked Lazy Writer and said he could sell lots of copies. We thought he could too; he was a good salesman and a hard worker. After we agreed on a deal giving Victor marketing rights, he asked if we could have Lazy Writer ready to debut at the 1979 Boston Computer Show. David said yes.

We got airline tickets and, after doing some research on where to stay, I booked the Copley Square Hotel, and we worked like crazy. The night before we were to leave, David was still fixing bugs and writing code. When morning came and it was time to leave for the airport, I discovered him still sitting at the keyboard where he had been all night. He hastily put his work into a carry-on bag and off we went. He caught a little sleep on the plane. In Boston, we went right to the exhibition hall where we found Victor’s booth, and David continued working. A workman went by vacuuming the carpet, getting ready for the opening, and David’s computer responded by rebooting (for years afterward, I would cringe when anyone operated a vacuum cleaner near my computer). The airline managed to lose a suitcase that had some Lazy Writer manuals in it, but they did finally locate it and deliver it to our hotel.

I nervously watched as real customers began entering the hall. As David anxiously recovered his program from the reboot, I worked at another TRS-80 set up as a demonstration machine which had begun to draw people who wanted to see this wonderful new word processor. David finally loaded what he had on the demo machine and I began talking and showing the gathered crowd how it worked. Some of the features were not quite solid, but we got an enthusiastic response from those who saw it and we sold about 15 “pre-release” copies with an update promised. I was hoarse from talking and tired from hours of non-stop work, but we were in business. We had customers!

Updating and selling the word processor became our business and pretty much consumed our lives for about five years. While we were doing business with Victor, our work consisted of making the disks and getting the manual duplicated and delivering copies to him. He placed all the ads and paid for them, recruited dealers, and shipped product when orders came in. Our part of the work was pretty manageable. However, that changed when we took over marketing the product ourselves in July of 1982.

We needed more space so we moved the business out of our basement to a rented office over a second-hand store in Dearborn, an older suburb a short ride from our house in Detroit.

Moving into our first office was exciting. We had a big odd-shaped second-floor room with a large picture window that looked out onto busy Michigan Avenue, the main thoroughfare in Dearborn. The building was an old two-story brick structure with two storefronts flush with the sidewalk and a door leading to a stairway in between them. Directly below us was a funky resale store called Cinderella’s Attic. The owner had a wonderful talent for creative window displays, featuring bright colors, manikins, and wild retro clothes. Inside were racks of used dresses, skirts, shirts and odds and ends that were billed as “vintage” clothing. The other storefront was a beauty shop whose customers seemed as ancient as the building. It had the wilted look of a place that had been there forever. The terrazzo stairway between these two establishments led up to our office.

Across the hall from our office were a husband and wife team who did hypnosis. The woman, Mary, was beautiful, with a friendly smile and sincere manner. Her husband, Todd, was a younger man who she had divorced a banker husband to be with. Both did the hypnosis work part-time. Mary worked at Greenfield Village (a major tourist attraction in Dearborn that also includes the Henry Ford Museum and a factory tour) arranging meetings, and Todd worked in a clinic. But both loved their hypnosis work and would show up at various times when they had appointments. Their office was dimly lit with a recliner chair for the client. I tried hypnosis with Mary one time and found it very relaxing. Todd and Mary were interesting people and we used to chat with them quite a bit. They owned what they called a farm a short drive from Detroit and let us stay there a few times. This was just a good-sized piece of land with a small cottage on it. The place had a loft-type upstairs with a bed and the downstairs featured a deck that looked out onto a pond and wooded area. It was peaceful and lovely; a wonderful retreat from the hectic pace that controlled life at the office.

Todd and Mary sometimes did group counseling at their office across from ours, so they had a lot of chairs while our office consisted of a lot of tables and desks. I remember that the cottage also was full of chairs, but seemed to have no tables. We had to search for a folding tray to use as a table for eating, and I noted that even what looked like a table was actually a chair — it was a “chair table” — a chair whose back folded down to become a small table. The number of chairs symbolized for me their desire to reach out to others. At one time we talked about creating a computer graphic that would help put people in a trance and David worked out some designs on the TRS-80 Color Computer, which we also owned. Todd and Mary were always interested in new techniques.

Another legacy Todd and Mary left us was a dog named Cleo. They had moved somewhere where they couldn’t have a dog and I decided to take Cleo, since we had a house. I’d always been a cat person and after a year or so of Cleo, I gave up on ever having a dog again, especially one that panted a lot and knocked me over when I came home. We always remember the Christmas we left out a plate of homemade cookies and candy and the next morning found it all gone with Cleo sleeping by the empty plate. Fortunately, Todd and Mary bought a house and took Cleo back. We went back to having cats who hate cookies.

The other person I remember had a small room facing the back of the building. His name was Kay and he was an Asian-American who made false teeth. He ran a one-man dental laboratory and worked quite a few hours, always by himself. He used to say hello when we walked by his small office on our way out the back door. There was a metal staircase that wound down to the ground level, facing a parking lot. This part of Dearborn was a commercial area, with stores, restaurants, and office buildings. I used to enjoy coming early and watching the guys at the Cancellation Men’s Shoes shop open their store and sweep clean the entry area by the door. Across Michigan Avenue was a wonderful art deco building of a yellowish brick, with store fronts on the ground level and offices upstairs. I’d see the other merchants opening their shops and feel like I was part of the commerce of this busy strip.

One of the storefronts was a Sanders store. Sanders was a Detroit-area tradition dating back to the 1920s, but gone bust in the 1990s. They were a confectionary business, with candy, ice cream and fabulous gooey toppings they sold in glass jars. Their storefronts were on every commercial thoroughfare in Detroit, but the decline of the city was also the decline of Sanders and by the time we had our office in Dearborn, there were a dwindling number of Sanders storefronts in older suburbs and a few viable old neighborhoods. Our Sanders still operated a lunch counter and I used to go there and get an egg salad sandwich and coffee for lunch. David favored their hot fudge cream puff, a delightful concoction guaranteed to expand your waistline.

Also across the street was the Onassis Coney Island I used to visit for breakfast or when the craving for one of those chili-loaded hot dogs Detroiters call a “coney island” would get the best of me. The eggs and hash browns were greasy and good. The place was all done up in yellow and black with cheap plastic tables and chairs and customers who looked like they might have spent the night. I remember they had a sign in the front window that said “loose buggers.” Of course they meant “loose burgers,” but that didn’t seem to bother anyone. I’m sorry to see spelling become such a lost art. Another restaurant nearby had an awning with these words: “Jim’s Dinning Room.” Makes you wonder if they taught spelling in the Dearborn schools.

There were other great places I could walk to for lunch as well, like Annie’s restaurant, where an ample-sized Annie poured you hot coffee, or Lyle’s, home of the best ham and pea soup anywhere, or the little white hamburger stand a block away, where you perched on a stool facing the grill where a guy in a white apron cooked up really cheap hamburgers.

After we rented the office, the local Dearborn newspaper, The Press & Guide, sent a reporter to our house to interview us. They ran the story, along with a picture of David sitting at a Model III with me standing next to him, in the February 11, 1982 edition. The headline read: “Computer Couple: Southwest Detroit pair make ‘Lazy Writer’ work.” It was full of misinformation and quotes from me that made it sound like we decided to sell software because we made so little money doing free-lance writing and photography. It was badly-written with silly statements like “it is the TRS-80 computer for which the Welshes have developed a technical manual “ and “…the Welshes received favorable exposure from computer-oriented critics.” The press did not know how to cover computer subjects and this reporter apparently didn’t grasp anything we told her.

Just before we were fully moved into the office, David and I took a three-week vacation we called “the friends out West” trip. We visited California, New Mexico and Nevada. We took a train from San Francisco to Reno that was almost cancelled because of snow. When that train got to the top of those mountains that separate California from Nevada, I saw more snow than I have ever seen in my life. It was piled up higher than the train and I was amazed at the sight. In Nevada we visited friends from college and they took us to “secret” hot springs and we climbed little hills that seemed to consist of gray stones from which we saw more gray landscape. In Santa Fe, we visited friends who had recently moved there and enjoyed the many art shops. I bought a poster, “Woman with Chili Pepper” by Native American artist R. C. Gorman, and had it hanging in my living room for many years after.

David in California in 1982

But when we got back to our business, full of energy and optimism, we were in for a shock. Our partners had been busy spending money while we were gone. I had looked forward to furnishing the office, but we discovered Darrell had bought all kinds of expensive furniture while we were away, including four $400 executive chairs. I was furious! These were the kind of huge molded and padded chairs designed for large males and I was a small five foot one female. The $400 chair was exceedingly uncomfortable for me and I hated it! He had also bought desks from a company called Marvel Metal and announced that we could be a dealer for the furniture. David and I had no interest in selling furniture and I thought after all we’d been through getting Lazy Writer ready and on the market, we should have been able to select our own furniture. I could never forgive the partners (whom I secretly called “the dippy duo”) for buying that furniture. In my mind, they had robbed me of the pleasure I would have had in furnishing my own office.

We were able to send back one of the chairs, but the other three remained and we still have two of them. David, whose reaction to the chairs was somewhat different from mine, actually ordered replacement parts for one of them in a later year. I used to joke with David that if he were to die, the first thing I would do after the funeral was to throw out those chairs, which I have continued to intensely dislike. We still have the Marvel Metal desks, which I think will last forever, and I’m still working at one of them. The whole incident didn’t do much to endear me to Darrell or to Steve, who had apparently thought buying furniture without consulting us was a good idea. It was one of the many incidents that showed David and I to be on totally different wave lengths from our clueless partners. The one useful thing Steve did was to hire an artist who created a logo for Lazy Writer that we used throughout the life of the product.

During our years in business, we sold add-ons, some written by other programmers. For help, we hired students from the Detroit College of Business (later called Davenport University), which was right around the corner from our office. Our first employee was a nice girl named Valerie Pugh, who seemed so young and child-like at times, but was a very good worker. She made disks, answered the phone, and learned to use our software. In a newsletter I sent out in April, 1982, I euphemistically referred to Valerie as our “Customer Service Manager,” and suggested users refer questions about their orders to her. Valerie did a great job for one so young and we were very sorry when she graduated and left us to work in a law office.

My first office, with the simple secretarial chair I used in preference to the one Darrel bought. I made the white fuzzy cover for the chair.

In June of 1982, we added another young Detroit College of Business student, Debbie Turchan. Debbie was working with the Prime minicomputers they had at the college and wanted a career in the computer industry. In a meeting agenda I wrote at the time, I listed her duties as:

1.  Answer technical questions about Lazy Writer (phone and mail)

2.  Test all versions of Lazy Writer as well as other software sold by ABC

3.  Evaluate new software for possible sale or purchase

4.  Do in-house programming

This was a lot of responsibility to put on a young person with no professional experience. Debbie wrote a lot of answers to the flood of letters that poured into our office on Michigan Avenue from greenhorn customers, and she usually gave the right answers. Under her signature, she used the title “software technician.” She was a pioneer too.

Over the years, we employed a number of college kids and they mostly performed well for us. In later years, it became more difficult to get good help and that contributed to our ultimate demise. As the economy got better and college kids could get better jobs, they didn’t want to work for the poor wages and no benefits that we offered.

Valerie Pugh and Debbie Turchan, our first office staff members, were students at Detroit College of Business. That’s me in the background.

We did well in 1982 and going into ’83, so we expanded and rented another room behind the one we had. I took over this room as my office. David mainly worked at home so he could program without being disturbed. There was an old desk in the room, left by the last tenant, and I pushed it against a wall, brought in my file cabinets, and spent years of my life in there writing documentation, creating our customer newsletter, answering mail, and taking calls from customers. I sat on a simple “secretarial” chair covered with furry white padding from the fabric store that I preferred to the $400 executive chair. It was a matter of principle for me to have a chair of my own choosing. Next to my desk was a window that looked out on the roof of the one-story building next door. A tiny restaurant opened in that building that consisted of a long lunch counter with stools. The food smells would drift upstairs as I worked. The woman who owned it had a very short man-style haircut and was always friendly as she plunked down plates of hot food onto the counter. I used to go there often for her daily specials, which were always delicious.

In my own small office, I liked to open the window and let in the natural breezes and smells from the world around me; it gave me a sense of connectedness that I liked. Later, when I went to work in the corporate world, sitting in a cube with no view outside at all and the freezing air conditioned blasts coming down from the bland ceiling panels, I wondered how people survived such a hostile environment year after year. Our Dearborn office was not luxury and the neighborhood was not classy, but I came to love it. It was at various times the place of triumph, of wonder, of learning, and of despair. We would run the gamut of experiences and emotions before it was all over.

Two of our programmers were still in high school. I remember sitting down with the father of one of them, an eager young man named Don Elmore, and working out a pay rate for part-time work at our office and a royalty deal for the LazyFont program he wrote and we sold. When Don first came to see us, we had suggested that he try to create a font program, and to our surprise, he actually did it! When he came back to us with something that looked promising, we decided to hire him.

I also remember getting my first copy of VisiCalc, the forerunner of today’s spreadsheet software, and puzzling over how to move my accounts from a huge paper record sheet I was using into this new and amazing piece of software. I gave Don the VisiCalc manual and said, “Read this and figure out how to move my accounts onto the computer.” He came back the next day and set up a spreadsheet for me in VisiCalc and showed me how to use it.

Don Elmore with his LazyFont program.

Don was one of many “whiz kids” who got started with the TRS-80. His LazyFont program was popular, but he never finished the Version 2 that he began. We wrote in our last newsletter, in 1986, “Don did some work on a new version, but the demands of college and an impending marriage left LazyFont pretty far on the back burner.” We were offering the old version for half price.

The other high school kid, Mark Barlow, wrote our LazyComm package. He was student at Grand Blanc High School and his father was in the real estate business. Lazy Writer had the ability to dump text to a modem for transmission over a phone line, but in 1984 Mark brought us a program he’d written in Z80 assembler that had much more capability than what David had built in. We gave him some suggestions for improving what he had, wrote instructions, and released his program as LazyComm. Mark lived too far from our office to work onsite like Don did. We worked out a royalty deal for him.

During the time we were in business, we met fascinating people who developed, sold, and used the software that is the basis of today’s computerized world. We also got calls from users who wanted new features we’d never thought of. We tried to incorporate as many of these ideas as we could.

Supporting Our Products

I (or a staff person) answered every letter sent to us and I kept copies of my answers. I truly appreciated the people who bought our product, and I gave very little thought to the cost of reading the mail and writing those letters. It just seemed like the right thing to do, plus the compliments in the letters were a source of motivation. In May of 1981, I wrote to reviewer George Bond (whose review of Lazy Writer was very positive):

We’ve been working night and day getting out the next version of Lazy Writer and have finally done that, so there’s now some time to breathe and get back to people like you who have said such nice things about our product. Believe me, I read all the mail and it really has kept me going during all the months of overwork. The response to Lazy Writer has been overwhelmingly favorable.

People liked Lazy Writer, but many wrote to ask about small things that didn’t work quite the way they wanted, or features they thought we should add. I always had a big stack of mail on my desk, and looking at it would keep me working long hours as I tried to find answers for all those who wrote.

Writing the Lazy Writer documentation (the manual, information sheets, bulletins, ads, dealer bulletins and newsletters) gave me skills I was able to use later when our business died, although that is not what I was thinking about at the time. I had always been a writer, starting with keeping journals as a teen-ager and young adult, and I’d majored in English at Wayne State University. Before we started our software business, I’d been doing free-lance writing, and I’d gotten to where I sold almost everything I wrote. It was natural for me to write a user manual for Lazy Writer and it pleased me that my manual was frequently mentioned by reviewers who gave it high marks.

In a letter I received from Mark Lautenschlager of Micro System Software dated March 16, 1982, he wrote:

I thought you might like to hear, being the author, that the strongest selling point we have found for Lazy Writer is its manual. It is better written and laid out than the Scripsit manual. I have fewer problems with people misunderstanding it than I do with almost any manual we have.”

He went on to tell me Micro Systems had opened a retail store in Palm Beach Florida and added “They sell lots of Lazy Writers.” Scripsit, of course, was Radio Shack’s word processor.

The Engraver’s Journal, which reviewed Lazy Writer and published a two-part feature on word processing, stated, ”One particular problem we’ve encountered a number of times is poor instruction manuals. In many cases, the persons who created the programs are the ones who wrote the manual and either they are too close to the subject to write a decent manual, or just poor writers. The result can be many hours of needless frustration…” The article goes on to recommend Lazy Writer and states, “Aside from the fact that Lazy Writer is a very nice word processing package having many powerful functions, it is supplied with a comprehensive and very easy to understand manual. That is one solid point in its favor. The Lazy Writer manual not only tells you how to do a particular function, for example, consecutive page numbering, but gives specific examples of how to do it several ways, e.g. at the top of the page or the bottom. It also has both an index and a reference card that at a glance lists all the keystroke functions… and the manual is written in plain English, not computerese….”

A 1982 InfoWorld review gave it an “Excellent” rating in their Report Card section. The reviewer, T.A. Danieluk, stated that the manual “ is thorough, clear, detailed and full of examples.” He said in his conclusion, “Lazy Writer is one of the most sophisticated TRS-80 word processing packages around.”

A reviewer for 80 Micro, in their September 1982 Word Processing Edition, stated in his review “the manual is well-written and complete.”

My desk, a Model I with Expansion Interface running Lazy Writer.

Lazy Writer and my manual always got good reviews like these and had many ardent fans. I’ll never know how many more phone calls and letters we might have gotten if we hadn’t had a well-written manual. It was my most successful contribution to our business and laid the foundation for my subsequent ability to earn good money as a technical writer.

When we took over distribution from Soft Sector Marketing, we had to figure out how to ship software, which was on 5 ¼ inch floppy disks. You could get floppy disk mailers, but these were expensive, and we often had to ship documentation along with the product. A full Lazy Writer was a manual in a three-ring binder along with the disk. We sold a lot of add-ons, which would be a disk with some loose sheets of paper with instructions. I researched local sources of cartons that could be used for mailing, and we discovered the Cloyd Container Company.

Cloyd Container was located in a seedy commercial area of Detroit that was mostly ancient brick warehouses. The company was in a large, low building along a major thoroughfare and had no particular character. Apparently Cloyd did most of their business long-distance because there was no obvious entrance for customers. The place was a warehouse, not a store, and was built like a fortress that discouraged anyone from coming. But if you went there and managed to find the nondescript-looking door that let you into an anteroom where you could ring a doorbell, a man would come and let you in. If you asked for boxes, this man would sell you boxes. It was always the same man, the only person we ever saw at Cloyd Container.

When you got inside, you were in this huge place full of piles of cardboard, but you would be led to a spotlessly clean little office where this man, a quiet person who confined his conversation to what kind of box you wanted, would write your order on an order pad, then disappear for a short while. He would return with the pile of corrugated cardboard that could be folded into the boxes you wanted.

We always wondered if anyone else ever worked there, or if the place was a front for some totally non-box related activity, or what, because no matter when we went, we only saw this same man and, like actors in a play, we would all perform the same roles over and over. It felt bizarre. But we liked the cartons they sold us, and we also bought a lot of cast-off cardboard circles from them which we bought for pennies apiece. We taped our disks to these corrugated circles for protection, then mailed them in envelopes. It wasn’t classy, but it worked.

It was Mostly a Guy Thing

In the days of the TRS-80, programming was important and some programmers became stars. For many, programming was an all-consuming activity. Most of those programmers were men, and the women in their lives were not always thrilled about their new past-time. There’s a story about Scott Adams, whose Adventure games were very popular. The story says his wife became so angry one day about all the time he was spending at his computer that she put the disk with his game kernel program on it in the oven with the intention of turning it into toast. When we asked Scott about this, he said the story was true, but added that she did not actually turn the oven on, and his disk was not toasted.

The article I wrote in 1982 about the TRS-80 Pocket Computer."

There were many complaints from “computer widows” and other neglected family members. My dentist, who was also a club member, told me his wife said that “TRS” stood for “Totally Replaces Sex.”

Women who got infected with the programming bug proved just as talented as their male counterparts, and some couples worked together on their computer obsession. One example was Dan and Kathe Spracklen, who wrote the Sargon chess program. It was a true joint effort and Dan always made sure his wife got equal credit for their accomplishments.

However there was a male chauvinist quality to some of the computer club meetings. I vividly remember giving a demonstration of the TRS-80 Pocket Computer, which had a one-line LED display and used a tiny BASIC, at our local club. I had written a few simple programs for it and enjoyed using it. I thought I had enough expertise with it to explain its benefits to the club. In fact, I wrote and sold an article about the Pocket Computer to Popular Computing magazine (published March, 1982). I remember being nervous facing all those males sitting in the haphazard collection of chairs at the Dearborn Bryant Branch Library where we held our meetings.

Trying to keep my hands from shaking, I held up the little computer and explained its BASIC functions and how to enter and save programs. David stood off to one side while I talked. When I was finished and asked if there were any questions, a guy got up, looked right at David and asked David his question, as if I were not even there! He obviously thought a female couldn’t know anything about the computer, despite the fact that I had done all the talking.

My cat, Nutmeg, with the TRS-80 Pocket Computer.

Those were the days of living in Detroit in a tough neighborhood and one day the Pocket Computer fell victim to a house robbery. The thieves also stole a Model 3 we had that had an adaptation called the Holmes Vid-80. This was a board you installed that gave the Model 3 an 80-character screen. This was much better than a 64-character screen for word processing (and just about anything else). How useless that computer must have been to those thieves who wouldn’t have had a clue as to how to use it, since it was not a vanilla TRS-80.

Despite my efforts with the Pocket Computer, David was the real programmer in the family, not me, but I was pulled into the excitement of this revolution-in-the-making and attended almost all the club gatherings. Often, Victor’s wife Diane and I were the only females there. But sometimes other brave women also came. The membership was fluid, with no one keeping track or really caring if those present were actual members or not. Theoretically, our organization was part of SEMCO, the Southeast Michigan Computer Organization. This group had access into the Wayne County Board of Education’s computer system for time-sharing. There were various SIGs of SEMCO. A SIG is a Special Interest Group and ours was the TRS-80 SIG. But it really was just a bunch of people who liked computers and programming who owned TRS-80s. The gatherings were informal, with various people bringing their computers or other gadgets that they would set up on a table and show to whoever was interested. Some people, like Victor, sold stuff. Sometimes there were refreshments if anyone remembered to bring them. There was no pressure to buy or to do anything. The meetings were fun.

Programmers Were Cool

Most computer enthusiasts started programming with BASIC. It’s the language that came with the computer and was easy to learn. There were other programming languages available and those who were really into it soon began exploring other languages like Forth or Pascal. Those who programmed in Assembler, the low-level language of the microprocessor, were considered the most skilled. Programming was essential for getting the computer to do anything and learning to program was your real entry into the club. While there were some TRS-80 owners who were pure users, in the beginning there were only programmers.

Programmers created the software that gave computers their value. Programming was an important activity and no distinction was made between designing a program and writing one. Programmers were creative people who developed their ideas through use of a computer language. They had vision and those of us who were in the know about computers understood that. Programmers got respect. Programmers were cool. Bill Gates says in the Microsoft 25th anniversary book, “In the beginning, I had some reservations about hiring people who couldn’t write code — we were a software company made up of really great programmers, and I thought we should stay focused on that. I also thought we didn’t really have to manage our programmers in a traditional way because the quality of their work was in the source code — you managed them by reviewing the code.” Thus the world’s biggest software company, founded by programmer extraordinaire Bill Gates, was built on profound respect for the skill and value of programmers.

Partnering Never Worked Out

During our years in business, we had various opportunities to work with other people, but mostly, these never panned out.

In 1981 we heard from Bruno Muller of Switzerland who wanted to do a German language version of Lazy Writer for sale in his country. He had already translated the prompts into German, but wrote me, “Unfortunately the German text became longer than the English language version due to the particular language structure. I hope that your husband can ‘steal’ some additional bytes somewhere.” We exchanged letters back and forth and Muller wanted us to send him the source code. David would not do this and we never came to a final agreement.

In the spring of 1982, we were contacted by a wealthy industrialist and Lazy Writer user, Alan Rothman, to meet someone who wanted a different version. Rothman had a business associate, Hans Stutke, fly in from Europe just to meet with us and discuss a European version of our software to run on the Alphatronics computer which used the 8080 chip. They wanted to set up a seminar-style direct sales operation and sell the program (to be renamed because “Lazy Writer” would not translate well) for considerably more money to business users. We visited with Rothman and Stutke at Rothman’s home in Pennsylvania. It was one of the last trips we took in our plane, an old fabric-covered Piper Tripacer. We flew it to Pennsylvania to meet with these men who wanted David to convert Lazy Writer to work on the 8080. David didn’t feel that made much sense. It would be a step backwards, as the 8080 had a smaller instruction set.

I remember Rothman’s fabulous house and the wonderful food they served us (shrimp and steak). The Rothmans actually had a private tennis court in their yard. It was quite a contrast with our modest house in a working-class neighborhood of Detroit. We slept in a room that had a display of antique quilts. I had put one of the quilts over the bed for extra warmth, then found out from Rothman’s wife over breakfast that the quilt was worth a lot of money! I remember hurrying back to the room we’d slept in and carefully putting the quilt back on the quilt rack. We also went to our first professional hockey game, courtesy of Rothman. He had business the evening we were there, so he loaned us a car along with tickets to the game. We didn’t know much about hockey and as we watched the Philadelphia Flyers play, we thought hockey involved four periods so we were surprised when people got up to leave after three. Of course, since our home town Detroit Red Wings subsequently won three Stanley Cups in six years, we have become well versed in the ins and outs of slamming a puck around the ice. During the years since our trip to see Alan Rothman, hockey has enjoyed huge popularity in Detroit, which is known as Hockeytown. Detroiters know about hockey.

I took this picture of David (center) with Hans Stutke (left) and Alan Rothman (right).

We had meetings to discuss the version they wanted. Rothman was concerned about interference from David’s partners and offered to tell us how to end the partnership, but David was unwilling to consider it at that time. Stutke was very familiar with my manual. He actually quoted from it. We ended up referring Bruno Muller to Stutke. It was interesting to see the impact our work had on distant places we’d never seen and couldn’t afford to visit, like Australia and Europe. Our modest success with Lazy Writer let us occasionally enter the world of the rich and successful, but these visits were fleeting and never permanent. Nothing came of the Rothman proposal.

The partnership that had begun as ABC Sales never worked out either. We began to regret taking the money from Darrell and eventually paid it all back with interest in a deal we struck to get sole ownership of our business. I wrote in September of 1982 in the work logs I kept: “another nerve-wracking meeting with Darrell.” The topic of discussion was probably ways to end the partnership.

We had constant suspicions (never confirmed) that the initial money from Darrell had come from some shady dealings. Darrell had no obvious means of support but lived in a nice house and always had money. Steve was not a great partner either; he could be a bit ditzy, and once tried to run David over in the parking lot after some disagreement. Feuding with these partners certainly did not help us build success.

Steve finally moved away and Darrell never came to the office to work or learned anything about software, but he was very slow to agree to a buy-out. Once he saw we were determined to end the partnership, he attended a long series of “nerve-wracking” discussions (it was mostly my nerves that got wracked). Finally on December 28, 1982, we officially ended the partnership. That day I wrote in my work log:

THIS IS A VERY VERY HAPPY DAY — DARRELL FINALLY SIGNED THE CONTRACT — THE PARTNERSHIP IS OVER!!! YEAH! YEAH!

No need to keep this log anymore. Now I own this company (David and I own this company, that is!) Justice is done!

I had kept the work log because I was paid hourly for my work, and I had to note down what I had done. If Darrell or Steve put in any hours working, they also turned in a log and were paid. Mostly they didn’t do any work. I had always felt a three-way partnership made no sense since David had created all the company’s products; why was his share only one third? Looking back, maybe I had too much anger about this; my relationship with the partners was always poor and perhaps they became scapegoats. David DID receive an author’s royalty on each product sold which gave us most of the money we took in. Once we dissolved the partnership, we did not have to keep track of hours and royalty payments any more.

That’s me on the right; the picture was taken at a seminar in Chicago, hosted by one of our dealers, at which David was a speaker.

The partners were not our only problem. In 1981 we connected with an Australian distributor, CISA Microcomputing, operated by a guy named Eric Akroyd; they were supposed to represent us in Australia and New Zealand. The Australian version of the TRS-80 was called the Dick Smith System 80. It was popular there and there was a lot of interest in Lazy Writer and other American software. We had our lawyer friend Walter help us put together a contract with CISA, and we had special labels printed for the disks we sent them. Shipping to Australia was expensive and a hassle, but it seemed we were selling a lot of copies because we got a lot of mail from Australia, and Lazy Writer was reviewed in Australian computer magazines. However, CISA turned out to be another poor partner for us. One of my meeting agendas shows they sent a check for $500 that came with no accompanying accounting of how many copies of anything they sold. That may have been the only check we ever got and before we knew it, we learned that CISA was out of business. We never knew how much they actually owed us. We couldn’t afford to hire an Australian lawyer, so we just had to accept the situation.

We had other Australians interested in us and I wish we had made a better alliance than the one with CISA. I remember a period when it seemed every time I answered the phone it was someone from Australia wanting to sell Lazy Writer. One time a “Mr. Vincent” (so noted in my work logs from October, 1981) visited from Australia to discuss some kind of working relationship. I wrote “We picked him up at the airport at 5:20 PM and took him to dinner in Windsor (Canada); he paid for dinner. We talked over dinner about the computer situation in Australia and learned some about his company. Back at home, we called Vernon and Victor. Both came over and Vernon demonstrated Multidos. There was long hours of discussion. We didn’t go to bed until 3:30, then had to get up at 5:30 to get Mr. Vincent back to the airport…”

I also recall that this Australian gentleman was eager to visit Canada, which he identified as a sister-country to Australia, as both are part of the British Empire. In Detroit we have only to cross over a bridge to get to Windsor, Ontario, which has great restaurants, so we were happy to oblige him in his desire to see more of the so-called empire. We’ve been to Canada many times; it’s a beautiful country and a great place to visit, but we’ve never gotten excited over this “empire” business which seems rather silly. But we didn’t say that to Mr. Vincent.

David’s Broken Leg

In 1982, we had a huge snowstorm in February. The snow just kept coming for days until the side street in southwest Detroit where we lived was practically impassable. In this older neighborhood, the small houses were close together and garages faced alleys that ran behind each block. Our house was a story-and-a-half style with a walk-up attic. We had a garage, but the alley we used to enter the garage was not passable with all the snow, so we had to park on the street. At the time, the city of Detroit did not plow side streets. In later years, they got in trouble over not plowing during a big storm that literally shut down the city, and they have since changed their policy and now do plow at least some side streets.

Our street remained snow-covered, but the cars going though it made a huge center ridge with tire ruts on either side. Neighbors, who were not always real friendly — we had a bunch of guys who were in a motorcycle gang living next door — would shovel out a parking place for themselves and often would set a kitchen chair in the spot when they were gone, reserving that parking place. We shoveled out a spot too and made it to the office most days by getting the car into the tire ruts in the street and carefully making our way up to Michigan Avenue, which was plowed. One evening, one of the motorcycle-gang neighbors knocked on our door and said our car was in “his” spot. David went out in front of the house to see where his car was parked. It was in front of our house, but the neighbor insisted that HE had shoveled out that spot. David moved our car and as he jumped over the snow pile getting out of the car, he managed to slip and fall on the sidewalk that looked clean but was actually iced over. Next thing I knew he was howling with pain.

With the help of the hostile neighbor, who had mellowed somewhat, I got him into the car and took him to a local clinic where they confirmed he had a broken leg. The clinic tried to send him to a charity hospital because we didn’t have any health insurance. It was humiliating and I argued that we could pay cash; how expensive could it be to set a leg? Finally, they put a cast on the leg and we got him some crutches. But with the cold and the icy sidewalks and the broken leg, he couldn’t leave the house. He was mostly confined to bed and I had to brave the elements each day to get to the office, then make it back down those snow-covered streets to bring him lunch since he found he couldn’t navigate the kitchen with the crutches and make his own lunch. If he tried to open the refrigerator door and dropped a crutch, he would fall and couldn’t get back up. He was not in good humor about this and was in a lot of pain. I remember bringing him one of those loose burgers (or “loose buggers”) from Onassis Coney Island and hearing him complain about how messy it was to eat. I brought neatly wrapped sandwiches after that. All this was a setback for the programming effort, since he was our only programmer dealing with Lazy Writer.

Trying to hold things together at the office, my harried condition showed through in this letter I sent in March of 1982 to the LDOS people, along with a registration card for LDOS that we had never sent in and a free copy of Lazy Writer (in hopes they would improve compatibility between our programs):

We know we should have contacted you earlier and sent you this stuff a long time ago, but we are very busy, short-handed, and two weeks ago our ace programmer (who is also my husband) broke his leg and that has set us back more. We’ve recently opened an office and are getting set up and will be hiring help soon, so we are improving (we’re trying!).

I was glad when that cast came off his leg and soon after that we hired Valerie, so I had some help again. Things were looking better as the snow melted and spring brought a steady stream of sales.

The 1983 West Coast Computer Faire

I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but Vernon Hester had decided to exhibit at the 1983 West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. It was a financial stretch, so he asked if we would want to go too and share a booth. It would still be too expensive, so we got on the phone and talked to Phil Manfield, who was living in California, about also sharing the booth. Phil sold a terrific spell checker called Electric Webster. Maybe it was because neither of us had ever seen San Francisco, but we wanted to go and be part of the excitement that was computing in those days. Shows offered a chance to meet some of the people we’d talked to on the phone, but hadn’t met. So in March of that year, we got on a plane and went. We stayed at a motel where other exhibitors were also staying and the guy in the next room had a small army of little robots that all looked like R2D2. They were, in fact, RB5X’s from the RB Robot Corporation and they too were on their way to the Faire.

We managed to have a wonderful time, meeting some of those people whose names we knew, and now we knew their faces. We watched show organizer Jim Warren roller skate through the exhibition halls, greeting people and making sure everything ran smoothly. We all had a grand time over dinner at Alioto’s one night, and I bought some neat Chinese paintings from a street vendor who insisted he’d be famous some day (but I’ve never heard of him since). We loved San Francisco and visited the wine country near Suasalito and were in awe at the beauty of the Monterey Peninsula.

David at the 1983 West Coast Computer Faire; that’s Paul McLeod, who at the time worked for Vernon Hester, with him.

What we saw at the Faire was less wonderful. The area set aside for the TRS-80 products was like the inferior tables by a noisy kitchen in a nice restaurant. The prime territory was loaded with IBM PC stuff — software, clone hardware, add-ons, whatever. What eager young people were demonstrating behind those tables was amazing new hardware and software and it was drawing most of the crowds. The new PCs and clones had so much more memory than the TRS-80, better graphics, great software. We saw clearly that we were the poor relations and our products were yesterday’s news.

I later wrote in my July newsletter “In a show completely dominated by Apple and IBM, having a TRS-80 in the booth was a bit like babysitting a dodo bird. I kept waiting for people to point at it and ask What’s that?”

Vernon Hester at the 1983 West Coast Computer Faire; Lazy Writer shared the booth with Vern’s Multidos and Phil Manfield’s Electric Webster.

We do a Seminar

So maybe we didn’t have software for the hot computers, but our users loved us. We reasoned that we could offer them some added value and came up with the idea of putting on a seminar. Debbie and I organized the whole thing. There was a motel right up the street from our office called the Royal Inn, although the “royal” part was a gross exaggeration. This was a motel that had weekly rates and a restaurant that wasn’t on anyone’s list of where to eat in Dearborn. But they gave us a low rate on their meeting room and threw in a buffet lunch of cold meat and salad. We sent out invitations to our mailing list and 83 people signed up. That was more than we expected and totally filled the small meeting room. David and Vernon were speakers and there was a lively interchange. Also on hand were the people who created a video tape on learning to use Lazy Writer.

In my newsletter article published in July of 1983, I stated that the front table held “a Model 4 and a Lobo Max-80. The Max was hooked up to two monitors, one facing the audience. During the breaks, there was a lot of interest in both machines and attendees got to try ‘hands on’ both computers.” The Model 4 was fairly new at the time. I also noted in the article that I had overheard someone refer to the Model I we also had set up as an “antique.” Technology was moving at a rapid pace and we were trying to keep up with it.

Also attending that seminar was lawyer Bob Johnson, who brought his entire law office with him. He demonstrated for anyone interested a set of legal documents he had prepared using Lazy Writer. He later worked with me on a book about computerizing your office we called “Cookbook,” but somehow we never got it finished. I still have old drafts of the manuscript.

We only charged $20 to each seminar participant and besides the presentations and food, they got a disk full of examples. But I noted some problems in my newsletter article. It said “We had a few problems with the Royal Inn. There was a hail storm a few weeks before and the Inn’s sign was knocked down, making it hard for people to find the place. The people on duty at the desk did not know what ‘Lazy Writer’ meant and told people who called they didn’t know anything about the seminar.” Proving once again that we were not great at business, we had a room full of customers who enjoyed the day, but we managed to book a second-rate motel, we charged too little and probably didn’t make any money on the event.

The seminar at the Royal Inn

Ten Days in the Hospital

Running the business was difficult; neither of us had any prior experience managing a company. I was so busy with customer letters and calls, writing documentation, getting out the newsletter, dealing with Victor and our college-kid employees, the print shop, the ads, etc. that the strain took its toll. In the autumn of 1983, I became ill and had to stay home. It hurt when I moved, so I just stayed in the same spot. I spent days lying on the couch, unable to eat. It was the only time in my life I ever watched soap operas. Where I had to take care of David when he had his broken leg, now he had to take care of me and keep the business going. The doctor thought I had only a minor problem and said it would go away. But the doctor was wrong. One day David said I should try to get up and go out to eat. I tried and noticed my body seemed swollen. I could not get my skirt buttoned, which didn’t make much sense since I was thin to begin with and hadn’t been eating. I still had a lot of pain. Instead of going to a restaurant, we went straight to the doctor.

My doctor was on vacation, but his partner looked at me and was puzzled; he thought my stomach didn’t feel right and sent me to Botsford Hospital to see a specialist. That was one of the longest rides of my life. The movement of the car caused so much pain, it felt like we were driving over some washboard back country instead of Telegraph Road, a main artery. Fortunately, we had by this time gotten health insurance (although I was later left with a payment plan to pay off the large deductible). When we got to the hospital, a doctor looked at me and reacted with alarm. He said I not only needed to be hospitalized, I needed an immediate operation. What had happened was that a fissure had become an abscess which had become infected, and the infection had filled my lower body, causing the swelling. They put off operating until morning so other doctors could look at me. I remember how unpleasant it was, having so many people stare at my rear end, but I was too sick to do anything about it. I was in their hands. They wheeled me into the operating room the next morning. David had a long wait during the operation. The doctors told him the prognosis was not good. I might need a colostomy. I might not live.

But the operation was successful and I had the best possible outcome. The recovery, however, was far from pleasant. I was hooked up to an IV. They had cut holes to release the infection, so my body was not what it used to be. I was 37 years old and still looked pretty good, but now I’d had a permanent alternation to my derriere. At least the damage was where it could not be readily seen. The days in the hospital seemed like years. It was so boring just lying there in bed. I incessantly watched the clock, hoping it would move a little faster. Nurses would come and take me to hydrotherapy, and that was all the excitement I had. After being so busy with the business, this idleness and boredom was hard to take. My appetite was coming back, but I weighed only 97 lbs. I looked like one of the Cambodian refugees I’d seen on TV. From my bed, I could see out a window and watch the cars on Grand River Avenue. I wanted to be in one of those cars on my way back to the little house in Detroit. Even the motorcycle gang next door would look good after staring at those hospital walls.

Here’s me during the years we were selling TRS-80 software.

After nine days of this, the doctor finally told me I could go home soon and he would let me know exactly when. I remember watching the phone by my bed, waiting for the doctor’s call, and crying when no call came. They took me to hydrotherapy the next day and I sat in the swirling water and cried. I was still crying back in my room when the doctor came through the door and said the magic words: I was free to go home! I was on the phone right away to David who came to get me. He suggested we stop at a restaurant, but I was too sore to sit on a hard chair and still felt weak and was taking a lot of pain killers. When we got home, he said he’d go out for food. What did I want? Without hesitation, I said I wanted a Big Mac, a large fries and a huge milk shake. He looked doubtful, but I insisted he get it right away. After eating hospital food for a week, Mickey D’s fare was delicious!

I was soon on the mend, walking every day and doing some work from home. A visiting nurse came frequently to check on me and David had been taught at the hospital how to assist with the daily irrigations I needed to continue healing (what he called his “minutes of medical training”). Soon I was able to go back to the office and resume my life. I’m grateful that I’ve had few problems since because of that operation, which saved my life.

Feeling Overwhelmed

By 1983 it was apparent that the TRS-80 might have a limited run. Other computers were out there, including the IBM PC. David and I had endlessly discussed creating other versions of Lazy Writer, but we were currently drowning in the numerous versions we already sold, and David was the only person we had to maintain those versions. How could we keep up with what we had, and still create products we’d need down the road?

On top of worrying about having future products, I had to cope with the pile of bills sitting on my desk. Revenues were barely adequate to meet our expenses. I recall one week when I had overdue bills that urgently needed to be paid, and adding up how much I had to get in that day’s mail. I asked Debby to bring me the mail when it came, which she did. I remember her casual manner, breezily laying the pile down on my desk, and wishing I could feel so nonchalant about it. Of course, things were different for the hired help than for those who were personally responsible for success or failure. I closed the door as Debby sashayed out of the room so no one would hear my moans if the envelopes in front of me did not yield the required amount of money. As I opened them and my trembling hands took out checks, I found I had just enough cash to pay the bills.

But what about next week, and the week after that? How long before there simply wasn’t enough? It seemed to me we were heading for disaster. The business was a runaway train with no one even looking for the brake. Perhaps it’s just in my nature to worry, but I began to feel totally overwhelmed. One day I came in and felt wrapped in a cloud of doom. I sat at my desk unable to do anything. The pile of mail and bills were still there, the letters from users wanting to know how to get their printer to make bold face, or how to format a long document were still there, but those things seemed trivial compared to the weight that crushed my spirit. I sat at my desk and began to cry. I just didn’t know what to do.

That day, I went home and told David I was quitting as Office Manager. The problems had beaten me down, and I just couldn’t go on. He seemed surprised and disappointed with this indication of my lack of skills as a manager. But who was I to know how to resuscitate a dying business? I was just a factory workers’ daughter who had wanted nothing more than to be a writer and to figure out how to have an income that supplied a modest lifestyle. I was not a heavy hitter. I was not consumed with ambition. I was not Bill Gates. Not even close.

David went to the office in my place and I worked from home, still handling the documentation and newsletter, the part of the work I did very well.

The Best Surprise!

A big surprise was in store for me, something far more life-changing than the operation, an event that lifted me back into the world of optimism and hope. In 1984, I began getting calls from a lady who wanted me to give a presentation of word processing to a group of romance writers. The lady sold me on the fact that they were meeting in Montreal and I’d get a discount at a wonderful hotel and could see the city and it would be a tax write-off. I’d never been to Montreal and David’s Dad was Canadian-born and we’d always loved Canada, so we got on a Canadian Air jet and went.

Something big came out of that trip and it had nothing to do with software. When I got back, I began to notice some changes in my body. I missed a period. At age 38, I had given up on the idea of having children, but both of us were having some regrets about our childless state. I had always found other people’s children to be noisy little pests and thought I’d be an impatient and poor mother; I had begun wondering if I might be wrong about that, but my biological clock was running out. A friend of mine who was about my age had been visiting from New York. She was pregnant. I had teased her about how she would be the oldest mother at the PTA, but those words were about to haunt me.

We were shopping at a mall one day and I went into a CVS drug store and saw a shelf full of home pregnancy testing kits. The idea had crossed my mind that I could be pregnant. I bought a kit that cost $10 and I figured it was a waste of money, but I had to see… . The instructions said to use urine from first thing in the morning. That was a very long night. I got up very, very early and visited the bathroom, then set up the kit. The instructions said to wait a half hour, then look in the test tube and if I saw a circle, it meant I was pregnant. I went back to bed and watched the clock. Twenty minutes later, I could stand it no more and went out to the dining room to look in the test tube. There, in the bottom, was a perfect circle! I stood there in wonder, in awe at what was happening and felt an overpowering sense of the rightness of it. I was supremely happy! I went running into the bedroom where David was still asleep. I shook him, yelling joyously, “Wake up! You’re going to be a daddy!”

David was past 40 years old and had given up on fatherhood too. But he reacted the same way I did. We were both totally euphoric! We both knew our inadequate health insurance didn’t cover pregnancy. We didn’t think this would happen, so we had saved some money on the policy by excluding pregnancy. But that didn’t matter to us on that morning when we were both lost in the wonder of creating new life. I remember putting on a black skirt, with a snug waistband. It was the last time I would wear that skirt.

We had to celebrate, so we thought about what would be open so early in the morning and remembered that Dave’s Coney Island up on Vernor Highway was open all night. Vernor was an old commercial strip, the main drag through our neighborhood. There were many boarded up buildings, storefront churches, ancient party stores that hung on by selling liquor, stores with big plexiglass panels between the customer and the cashier. But our steps were buoyant as we walked past these places in the early morning dawn, talking happily about our altered future. The lights were on at Dave’s and we took a plastic booth, amid the old men with hangovers who sat at the counter, and a smiling waitress came to take our order. This waitress was the first person to know that David and Theresa Welsh, creators and sellers of a TRS-80 word processor, were going to have a baby.

Vernor Highway in Detroit, the main street through our neighborhood.

Difficult Times & New Challenges

As the 1980s unfolded, the evidence of a takeover by the IBM PC and its compatibles was all around us. Victor began having a tougher time making a profit off the programs he distributed and that was why he decided he should just be a dealer for Lazy Writer. That would free him from having to create and pay for all the ads. Making up our own ads was a heavy and expensive chore. We were advertising mainly in 80 Micro, which was still a healthy magazine. We had also connected with Phil Manfield who created the Electric Webster spell checker and we each sold the others’ programs. Vernon, who began with Level IV as distributor of his programs and later did his own distributing, gave us rights to distribute Multidos in 1984. We became the sole distributor for Multidos and Zeus. By 1984, Wayne Green had sold 80 Micro to CW Communications and it was no longer the user-written, idiosyncratic magazine it had been.

Our March 1984 newsletter shows we had begun selling some miscellaneous products, in an attempt to beef up our revenue. We were selling a disk box and Sentinel Diskettes and we sold the video tape created by Lynn Computer Services on how to use Lazy Writer; it cost $39.95. We also had video tapes for NewDOS 80, TRSDOS 6, Multidos, and VisiCalc. To help our users avoid the problems we’d had with daisy wheel printers, we began selling the print wheels that worked with Lazy Writer. They cost $10 each. But the biggest item we offered was the C. Itoh Daisy Wheel Printer for $1300. I can’t recall how much money we actually made off these, but I don’t think it was much and we didn’t sell many of them. One of our motivations was to get our users into a printer that worked well with our software.

Piracy was also a problem. Many hobbyist thought software should be free and gave away programs and this was part of the reason small software companies like ours had problems staying afloat. We had to simply have faith that users would pay us when they used our software, but we had no way to make them do so.

Parenthood

We were still working hard in 1984, but we were distracted by our impending parenthood. Because my health insurance didn’t cover pregnancy, I again had to endure the humiliation of being told I could not get any service at several area hospitals. I finally took some advice I’d gotten from Victor’s wife, Diane, who’d just had a baby girl. They didn’t have any health insurance at all, and she had found a program at Garden City Hospital (in Garden City, a suburb of Detroit) that covered the pre-natal care and delivery for one fee. I signed up for that service and I got excellent care. One of the benefits was getting used to the hospital and the people there so it would feel very familiar when the big day actually came. The fee was based on income and since our previous year had been a good one, I had to pay the full amount — $1400. The cost was a strain because our income was way down and we ended up borrowing part of the money, then later added to the loan, which we were still paying off long after the baby was out of diapers.

Because of my small size, I began to look pregnant almost right away. At three months, I was in maternity clothes and soon I could no longer drive; I had to sit close to the steering wheel because I was short, and my belly ran into the wheel. I had David drive me to my appointments at the hospital. There were three doctors, all residents at the hospital, who looked after the clinic patients. They were all excellent doctors. One was a woman who had just had a baby herself, and she was wonderful to us. On the day she thought we would be able to hear the baby’s heartbeat, the fetal monitor was in use. She went and found a portable unit and hooked it up so we could hear our baby for the first time. She connected the machine to me and we listened. The faint thumping sound of our baby was a thrill to hear. We also attended LaMaze classes and parenthood classes together. I found I was NOT the oldest-looking lady in these classes. Many people of our generation put off having children until their late thirties and early forties.

Every day, I’d walk to a produce store nearby and get whatever fresh fruit they had. I gave up drinking wine, even though I love a glass of wine at dinner time. I took care of myself, but I managed to gain 40 lbs by the ninth month! I just kept getting bigger.

The year 1984 was noteworthy for another reason too. Our local baseball team, the Detroit Tigers, won the American League pennant that year and I remember thinking how I’d like to go down by Tiger Stadium and join the celebrating crowds, but I was pregnant and it didn’t seem like a good idea. When the Tigers won the World Series, we were at the office working during the last game, listening on the radio. At the moment the game ended, there was a blare of horns from the cars down below on Michigan Avenue. Their headlights lit up the street as we watched from the big picture window in our office. The cars were hardly moving, just blowing horns, people shouting through rolled-down windows, and the air of excitement and triumph filtered up to us in the dim confines of our office. The Tigers won in five games over the San Diego Padres, their first championship since 1968.

I took two airline trips during the pregnancy. I had begun doing some free-lance writing for Syndicated Writer’s Group (SWG), an innovative organization that came from the fertile minds of Daniel and Sally Grotta. This husband-and-wife team were travel writers who used Lazy Writer and had contacted us about their activities. They had been early users of modems for moving articles from their TRS-80 to an editor’s computer in another location. Using a communications program, two computers could connect over a phone line and files could be moved. Files could also be stored on a bulletin board, which was just someone’s computer connected to a modem and phone line. Other people could call that computer and download files. Daniel and Sally had the idea of organizing a group of travel writers, storing their articles, then letting editors download those articles. Syndicated Writer’s Group (SWG) would receive the payment and disburse it to the writers. SWG alerted writers to offers of free travel; writers accepting the offers would then do articles about the place they had visited.

I got an offer from SWG to go to the Keystone Resort in Colorado. I was at the beginning of my pregnancy at the time and I enjoyed my visit. However, when I got on the plane to come home, I was extremely nauseous. I rang for the stewardess, who thought my condition related to the heat. It was a very hot day. She brought me whiskey, insisting I would feel better if I drank it. I remember exclaiming “no, no, you don’t understand,” and pushing away the proffered drink. I managed to convince her my condition was because of pregnancy and she brought me some orange juice on ice. Much better.

SWG was way ahead of its time; it didn’t survive. Daniel and Sally ARE survivors and became the authors of a number of books and produced content for ZDNet, an online site for Ziff-Davis.

The other trip came about because we had purchased airline tickets for California before we knew about the pregnancy. One of the airlines was offering round trip tickets to California for $150 and I wanted to visit my sister in LA. I realized I would be seven months pregnant for the trip. I didn’t want to cancel (the ticket was nonrefundable), but I was afraid the airline would not let me on. When the time came for that trip, I tried to conceal my condition (not easy, as huge as I was) and got on the plane. This was a pleasant trip with no problems.

Less pleasant was Christmas 1984. We came home from the office one day just before the holiday to find our house had been burglarized and our presents stolen from under our Christmas tree. Our neighbors (the motorcycle gang members) had seen the crime happening and had called the police. The Detroit police were famous for not coming unless you told them that dangerous crazies were in the process of axing little children. People sometimes made up stories like that just to get the police to come. This event, a mere house robbery, was not worth their bother. It was pretty devastating to us though. I felt very vulnerable and wondered who would do such a thing to a poor pregnant lady. I cried all night.

Our business was not making much money and we could no longer afford the cost of printing the manuals and literature. We decided we could save money by leasing a small printing press we saw at a business exposition. David moved the press into our office and spent frustrating hours trying to get it to make copies as good as we’d seen at the show. I couldn’t operate it because I found the smell of the ink made me nauseous. The smell of the food at the little café below my office drifted up when my window was open and also made me sick. None of these smells had bothered me before, but being pregnant was a whole new sensory experience.

The baby was due the first week of February, 1985, but the timing of a birth, like the fate of a company that depends on the products of other companies, was beyond our control. On the evening of January 30, I began to feel what I thought were faint contractions. I timed them at five minutes apart. I called David who was at the office working late. He came home and we continued to monitor the contractions at five minutes apart. We decided to drive to the hospital. I vividly remember the snow falling onto the deserted highway as we drove to the hospital in the middle of the night. The hospital parking lot was full of huge piles of snow and I carefully made my way by them across the snow-covered pavement to the door. We knew exactly where to go and were soon in an examining room and I was connected to a fetal monitor. However, we learned that the baby was still many hours away and that we should go back home. Feeling foolish, we went back out into the snowy night and drove back to the house in Detroit.

We were trying to get out a new release of Multidos and I had the manual, which Vernon had written, to edit. In the morning, with the contractions still about five minutes apart, I went to the office and sat at the long table by my desk, editing the Multidos manuscript with a red pen. Suddenly I felt a whoosh of water let loose and saw my legs were wet. It was a definite message from the baby! I put aside the Multidos manual and we were on our way to the hospital again. This time they kept me.

We started in a standard labor room and I remember we watched the evening news before the birthing suite became available. The birthing suite was a lovely room with its own bathroom, a patchwork quilt on the bed and a sound system. I had put together a tape of songs I wanted to play while waiting for the baby to be born. I had no idea I’d have to listen to that tape so many hours as we tried to get the baby born. I breathed in and out, in and out, using what I’d learned in LaMaze, staring at a picture of a tiger, which I’d selected as my “focal point.” Doctors came and went. The shift changed at the hospital and Dr. Semrad came on duty. David brought me ice chips, one time incurring my wrath when he told me there were no more ice chips (“Find more!” I insisted, between contractions).

The clock on the wall made its way toward midnight on the last day of January. Exhausted from the effort and suffering from a bad cold, I listened to the nurse who had stayed with me urge me to push harder, to keep going. Finally, with the room full of trainee doctors, at a bit more than a half hour past midnight, our beautiful little Amy came into the world on February 1, 1985. She was tiny and red and did not cry. David, sitting in a rocking chair by my bed, was delighted to hold her. We had a little cradle in the room for her. It was a tremendous moment for both of us.

When we were able to come down from our elation and get our heads back into our business problems, we knew we were facing an uncertain future. We put out a newsletter together, that featured a picture of Amy on the back page under a headline that read “New Release: Amy Ruth Welsh.” I wrote in the article that accompanied the picture, “David and I have had to juggle the needs of our customers and our business with our own needs as new parents. Producing Lazy Writer and our other products has engaged our creativity for the last five years. As satisfying as that has been, I’ve found being Amy’s mother tops everything!” And I still feel that way.

At home in Detroit. Amy was born on February 1, 1985.

Dealing with Decline

As it turned out, 1985 was the last year we did any substantial business in TRS-80 software. In December of that year, we ran our last ad in 80 Micro. It didn’t get us many orders and we could no longer afford the cost of ads. We began sending out mailings offering products at 40% off. Our staff left us. Victor was already out of business, having laid off his employees and finally closed his store. It was a depressing year, with the only bright spot being the baby. I spent most of my time with Amy, either at home, or bringing her in her baby seat to the office. Realizing we’d need some other sources of income, I advertised to do resumes and business letters. I got a steady trickle of business, putting the daisy wheel printer to good use to produce attractive resumes. We needed the money I made from this work since our software business was sinking fast. But it was hard to leave Amy at all. Sometimes when I’d be talking to a resume customer, I’d hear Amy fussing in the next room and I could hardly concentrate on the work.

I took this picture of my last office, with the portable Model 4P and my beautiful daughter Amy, who often came to work with me.

David had little time for programming, with helping care for Amy and coming to the office to deal with the mail and phone calls that continued coming in, but started work on an MS-DOS version of Lazy Writer. We looked into raising money to make the shift, but we didn’t know how to go about it. I contacted a venture capitalist, David Silver, who suggested I read his book, which I did. But this type of finance was not my strong suit and David was too busy trying to keep together what little business we had to be of much help raising money. Eventually he had to box up orders and make disks himself.

Here’s me with our later staff, Kim Stein and Warda Berry, with baby Amy.

We had a few people who were familiar with our products offer to invest in a new version, but we knew it was not enough and turned down the offers. In retrospect, the meager amount we could have raised wouldn’t have done more than buy us some time. I began to feel with each passing day that time was my enemy. My days as a software entrepreneur were coming to an end and I didn’t know what lay beyond.

Lazy Writer gave a lot of people great service during the years they used it. In a letter we received in 1987, A.M. Phelan, Jr., wrote of his experience with the MS-DOS PFS word processor, “To say that I am disappointed with what PFS has to offer is an understatement. You have spoiled all of us. I have read the reviews in InfoWorld on the several word processing programs available to MS-DOS, and can’t believe that what we had for the TRS-80 with little memory had so much more utility and ease of use.” He enclosed a credit card number so he could be the first to get the MS-DOS version of Lazy Writer. But it was a version that would never be.

Life After the Software Business

Instead of working on yet another version of Lazy Writer, I looked for steady work that would give us the income we needed. In the summer of 1986, I went to work full time for Electronic Data Systems (EDS) as a technical writer and found it was work I liked. I always felt what I did was not nearly as important as what David did and it seemed unfair that my skills transferred to the outside world more easily than his. I thought I should have had more programming and technical skills, and when I interviewed at EDS, I thought they would reject me for having insufficient technical knowledge. But, in fact, though I got the job, I later learned they had almost turned me down for being “too technical.” The persons doing the staffing had the idea that technical processes could be best explained by someone who lacked technical knowledge, an idea I utterly and totally reject. I feel strongly that you can’t take the “technical” out of technical writing. A good technical writer understands the processes he or she describes, but understands the need to break the process down into its component parts for users and explain each in clear and unambiguous language. A good technical writer also thinks like a user, looking at tasks, not programming units.

Because the program is created in a different fashion from how it is used, programmers sometimes make poor documenters because they cannot get their head into a user mode. I learned about technical writing by being a user and tester, but that did not mean I reveled in my ignorance of how to program in assembler. Ignorance is never a good thing.

I had never worked in the corporate world before and it was an eye-opener for me. While working with microcomputers had been a fascinating learning experience, something undertaken willingly for its own sake, I found workers in Corporate America had to be spoon-fed the new technology. It wasn’t their fault. Working with computers in a corporate setting just wasn’t as much fun as playing Android Nim or writing your own story on a word processor you took pride in using, or creating an original program in Z80 assembler.

The corporate world was obsessed with control and keeping down costs, so managers dictated what kind of computer you would have, what software you could use, and what printer you got. None of it was designed for creative output, but rather for efficiency. At EDS, I was not even given a computer at first. They expected technical writers to write by hand and give the hand-written copy to “word processors,” temps who typed it and gave it back for review, which you marked up by hand. Even though the AT&T computers they used had hard drives, the Kelly Girls they hired to do the typing saved all files only to floppy disks. This slow and inefficient process seemed a poor way to accomplish the task at hand. One day I brought in my portable TRS-80 Model 4 and began typing my documents with Lazy Writer. That caused a lot of consternation and resulted in my being given a computer, an AT&T PC with Multi-Mate, a word processor from Ashton-Tate that was EDS’ standard at the time.

Because of my experiences working in my own small business, I did a lot of thinking about what was wrong at EDS. I went to see my boss one day and told him he should get rid of the Kelly Girls and let the writers do the entire job. None of us would survive without word processing skills, which were second nature to me after operating a word processing company and having a resume-writing business. I also suggested he not tell the other writers what I was asking, as some of them would not agree. He let the idea gestate for a while, but eventually, the Kelly Girls were gone. The writers were given computers.

That was better, but it led to the idea that we should all work in the same manner. Of course, if several people are working on the same manual, they need an agreed-upon style, and having a style book makes sense. But I found I resented being told exactly where to set the tabs and margins for all documents. As writers learned the tools, they were not encouraged to experiment with either the technical capabilities of the software or its creative potential.

At that time, the concept of desktop publishing was just appearing and Ventura Publisher and PageMaker were new programs that integrated words and pictures on the computer screen. I began investigating these packages, which were not being taken seriously by corporate types. At EDS, they were planning on implementing what they called a CAP system — Computer Aided Publishing. This involved a lot of really expensive hardware and software. One supervisor had been looking into this for many long months and had amassed file drawers full of product literature. I asked him who would maintain the software, thinking I’d like to be first to learn such a system, but he answered, “Well, we’ll have to have an SE (System Engineer) assigned to it full-time.” Not only did that sound like tremendous overkill, but it also seemed like another way to keep the writers from controlling their tools and I felt it was totally wrong.

One night I went to bed troubled about what was happening at work and I had a dream in which I knew what to do. I remember sitting bolt upright in bed, with a “eureka” feeling and a determination that seemed to come from some unknown source. I went to the office that day and ignored the pile of work on my desk. I loaded up my MultiMate and began writing. Lunch time came and went and still I wrote. By 1:30 I was done. I printed the document and gave it to my boss’ boss. It was my prescription for what needed to be done to get our manuals written. In it, I recommended we adopt Ventura Publisher and that the writers all learn to use it. That afternoon, the man who’d received the report came to my desk and said “This is good. We’re going to do it.” We never heard any more about the CAP system.

Users need some say in the tools they use. Corporations are concerned about support and training costs, but they sometimes resist letting the users do their own support, as if they were all too dumb or disinterested to learn about their own tools. When we were in business, we never had a formal support program for Lazy Writer. We showed our staff how to use it and when people called, whoever took the call tried to answer their question. The tough ones were passed on to me or David and we knew these calls took up time, but we also learned a lot from talking to our customers. This simple model of taking calls and answering questions doesn’t easily scale up to a big company. But whether a company is big or small, they make no money off taking customer support calls. The problem of support has always been the gotcha in selling software. Microsoft has tried to address that problem by extracting annual usage fees, which has always been the model in big systems.

At EDS, they had a large training department that offered classes in all kinds of subjects, from gaining technical expertise to how to manage your career. Classes can be useful, but we never took any classes when we were running our software business. We worked with the hardware and software, read the manuals and magazines, and figured things out. But it wasn’t like that in the corporate world. Managers could not let workers simply figure things out. Everything had to be set up and standardized according to the ideas of the managers. This is a process I saw continue through my years as a contract worker at Ford Motor Company and I observed standards get more carved in stone, with the final solution being that workers have no say at all in their computer equipment.

People need an incentive to learn and when you take away all control over their work environment, they won’t find much enthusiasm in the tools you impose. When I left EDS in 1990 and went to work at Ford as a contractor, I had to go to a special group they had that controlled software and beg for a copy of Ventura Publisher. I remember the guy I talked to telling me I couldn’t have it because they wouldn’t support it. I told him I didn’t need any support, that I was an expert user and would never ask him for any help. Finally, I got my copy of Ventura Publisher.

At Ford, they were not quite as obsessed with training as at EDS (at least not at first) and sometimes allowed for people who could learn a piece of software on their own. That’s actually what they expected from contractors, although Ford employees had training plans that provided for expensive training classes. As for software, over the years, the noose tightened on what Ford workers could have on their PCs. In some divisions, the support people controlled even the appearance of the computer desktop.

It’s easy to get nostalgic for computers that had no “desktop,” just a blank screen waiting to receive orders from someone who learned how to give it orders without benefit of classroom training. It’s not that those early computers were better, they simply were a lot more fun because those who used them were in control.

The differences between then and what came later is very apparent when you look at the magazines that existed in the early days. Creative Computing magazine used to run a huge variety of articles, stories, puzzles, cartoons and articles about all aspects of computing. Everything was directed at enlightening readers about this important new field. Volume I of The Best of Creative Computing, published in 1977, includes poems, two short stories (one by Isaac Asimov), an article about Smalltalk written by a Junior High School student, a six-panel cartoon about a robot dog, a fantastic full-page ASCII portrait of Star Treck’s Mr. Spock accompanied by a program listing in BASIC for “Super Star Trek,” a learning exercise designed to “stretch minds in imaginative new directions” and only peripherally using a computer, and an editorial on “The Computer Threat to Society (“The impersonal, mechanical computer is a convenient scapegoat …”). Just compare that to the computer magazines of later eras with their collection of “we test the latest gizmo” articles.

The computer, once the province of a kind of big business priesthood who controlled its use, went through a rebirth as a personal tool, but has been gradually reverting back to the control of corporate managers, at least in the workplace. As the hobbyist market was lost to business users, learning about computers became institutionalized. As we produce more technicians with certifications (like the Microsoft Certified Professional programs), ordinary people will know less about the machines they depend on. Fewer computer users know a programming language. Vernon Hester used to watch a screen of hexadecimal codes go by on the screen, a look of intense concentration on his face replaced by an “aha” look as he located an error. Where are the people who, like Vernon, can read hex codes?

Programmers who worked in assembler had tremendous skill and had to know both how to design a program as well as how to code it. In the TRS-80 world, there were no “Systems Analysts.” I never even heard that term until I went to work in the corporate world. But the corporate world did not deal in assembly language programs or understand the incredible skill of these self-taught programmers. The world did not beat a path to their door when the TRS-80 finally died. The corporate world was looking for people with college degrees in Computer Science and experience working on big projects. It never seemed to occur to those doing the hiring that it took a lot more ability to teach yourself how to design and write a usable and saleable piece of software than it took to sit through some classes taught by someone who had never produced anything that could be sold to an actual customer.

The people we knew and worked with understood the innards of their computer. The close relationship and deep understanding between person and machine created a bond of affection that is missing with the Windows PC sitting in a look-alike cube in a hive of cubes at some glass and steel office building surrounded by a big parking lot. Even a computer you buy to use at home is more like an appliance than a friend. What was once microcomputing has become an industry selling an appliance. And, you might say, so what? That’s what happens with every new industry. It matures and becomes old. It was inevitable that microcomputers would go that way too. Maybe so, but it’s useful to remember that there was a time when it was all new and wonderful. Perhaps the first generation to use any new technology remembers its infancy with nostalgia and feels its ultimate saturation in society has diminished its meaning.

Soon after I started working at Ford Motor Company’s Research & Engineering corporate campus, I took a walk one day through the hall of a nearby building, just taking in the sights. On each side of the long hallway were rooms where teams of engineers worked on the parts for tomorrow’s automobiles. I walked with a leisurely pace, sneaking a peek into the rooms and niches, thinking how far I’d come from those years of bearing the weight of trying to keep alive a defeated company. Instead, here I was, in the hallways of a company representing America’s industrial strength, where all I had to do was write documents, where my presence was barely noted by anyone. Life was way less stressful, but nothing I was doing here really mattered either. At my own company, I had always thought of myself as the glue that held things together, but at Ford I could be easily replaced, like you replace a worn-out desk or an obsolete computer.

At several points in the hallway were piles of old equipment waiting to be hauled out to the trash bins. In a pile up ahead, I spotted something that looked familiar. I approached and saw that sitting forlornly on the floor was a wide-carriage version of the Qume Sprint 5 printer, the same model we’d once paid $3000 of Darrell’s cash to have. That printer had been a pivotal part of our odyssey through the world of early software sales; it was the piece that had given us professional-looking printed pages, that had let us look like a business, that had made David’s code worthwhile.

I bent down to read a note that had been taped to the printer. There was just one word handwritten on it: “Junk.”

5   Computer Commerce:

Games, Business, Robots, and Scams

By the late 1970s, a number of companies had been established to build the new microcomputers, but their machines were sold with little or no software. Users had to create most of it themselves. The Altair was supposed to be programmed by setting switches on the front panel. Another computer called the Cosmac VIP had a hexadecimal keypad on top of its boxy CPU. You could program it in machine language by typing hexadecimal codes, an arcane skill not many people developed. The appearance of programming tools, beginning with BASIC, helped a lot. Many users, those needing applications that BASIC couldn’t handle fast enough, learned to program in assembler. They were greatly helped by Editor/Assembler programs that allowed for easy input of symbolic codes and then assembled the code into numbers the computer could run.

Early authors like Don Lancaster and Bill Barden wrote books that helped hobbyists learn the ins and outs of their hardware and how to program. Independent vendors sold hardware add-ons such as keyboards, video displays, and disk drives that let the S-100 kit computers take on real capability. The biggest weakness continued to be lack of application software.

The same problem, lack of software, plagued the TRS-80. Radio Shack planned to sell software, but in the beginning there weren’t many useful programs for sale at Radio Shack stores even as customers were clamoring for programs to run on their new machine. Ed Juge told us Tandy could not evaluate programs fast enough; they were interested in any software with wide appeal. He remembers telling the evaluators not to be too choosy.

Games

Many of the early programs were games, following what had already become a tradition of electronic gaming that had begun with Pong. The original TRS-80 Model I came with two games on cassette, Backgammon and Black Jack. The TRS-80 was not a great game machine because it lacked color and real graphics. Some game creators got around this by using text characters as graphics. Others used the built-in blocky graphics, but these blocks painted on the screen very slowly. For example, a Checkers game, which had to fit in 4K, successively painted each white square for the checkerboard. This was a slow process, but after all the time it took to load the game from cassette, waiting for the screen to paint didn’t seem so bad. The game was maddeningly slow, but it worked.

Some popular books with BASIC program listings from the late 1970s.

Games written for Level II BASIC were a bit zippier than those for Level I, and a lot of imagination went into them. The 1979 book BASIC Computer Games, TRS-80 Edition, published by Creative Computing Press, had 96 games with names like Bagels, Bunny, Civil War, Digits, Hockey, Mugwump, Poker, Stock Market, and Tower. Most were for 16K Level II. David Ahl, Creative Computing editor, had put together the first edition of Basic Computer Games while he was still working for DEC. Published in 1973, that first book was called 101 BASIC Computer Games and the games listed were for six different versions of BASIC. When Ahl left DEC in 1974, the company retained rights to the book and reprinted it, omitting Ahl’s name as editor and not even crediting him with the 14 games in that edition which Ahl himself authored. However, David Ahl’s name will forever be associated with BASIC games because variations of the book went through numerous editions published by Creative Computing. Almost everyone who had a microcomputer in the late 70s probably had or had seen a copy of one of Ahl’s books with game listings.

A lot of the early computer owners were kids and these TRS-80 enthusiasts especially wanted games. If you could get program listings, you could type the program and get the game for free. But getting the program into the computer was a lot of work. Brian Hanks was one of the young men who loved to play games. He remembers how much effort it took to get those games into the TRS-80s he used at the Los Angeles Center For Enriched Studies:

Well, it wasn’t long before the school upgraded to Level 2 BASIC, and we were on our way. One kid’s older brother was attending a university, and he would bring in stacks of green-bar paper that had actual GAMES on them, written in BASIC! We would spend all lunch trying to type them in. The shorter ones we were able to do easily, but the longer ones took a bit of trouble. We would have to break out the cassette recorders and load (remember cload?) the previous attempt onto the computer, then type in some more lines, running it to see what the new lines did, and finally saving what we had back onto cassette. This went on for several days until the program was finished.

[from an email from Brian Hanks]

Games on Cassette tape for the TRS-80 Model I

Spacewar is generally credited with being the first computer game. Written for a DEC PDP-1 that required a terminal and produced crude graphics. It is attributed to Steve Russell who is said to have written it in 1962 when he was a graduate student at MIT. Many versions subsequently appeared, as programmers passed the game to each other and made improvements to the original. Spacewar was a harbinger of a new influence on the previously serious matter of computing. As an article in the New York Times recalled the event, “Spacewar demonstrated that sheer fun would become a driving force underlying progress in computing technology.” Only people with access to a University or company computer had a chance to play, but fortunately one of those people was Nolan Bushnell (father of Pong) and the rest, as they say, is history.

The first TV game system was called Odyssey, sold by Magnavox. The system was invented by Ralph Baer, working for Sanders Associates, and they had prototypes working in the late 1960s. It was not a success, but Magnavox did not give up on video games. More systems followed, but a crucial element for success was the use of LSI (Large Scale Integration) which Magna-vox was slow to adopt. Into this void came Nolan Bushnell’s Atari, which became the must-have electronic toy of the 1970s, only to be clobbered in later years by Nintendo. Other systems of the time were the Bally Professional Arcade and Mattel’s Intellivision.

Young people liked to hang out at commercial arcades, those noisy palaces full of coin-operated games, and leave their initials in the machine when they were the high-scorer. Space Invaders from Midway was especially popular. Versions of this game later turned up on all the popular microcomputers, including the TRS-80. Another all-time favorite was Pac-Man, the little mouth that gobbled up dots. A version for the TRS-80 was called Scarf Man, sold by Cornsoft.

Here’s an early version of TicTacToe on the TRS-80 Model I.

One of the earliest TRS-80 games was Microchess, written by a Canadian programmer, Peter Jennings, which was for sale at Radio Shack stores. It fit into only 4K of memory and had nice graphics (much better than the before-mentioned checkers game). The chess pieces actually moved on the board as the computer challenged the human player. Microchess was only an average player. It had different levels, but even the advanced levels could be defeated by a good opponent. Jennings originally wrote Microchess for a KIM-1 kit computer with less than 2K of memory, which he had purchased at a computer show in 1976. Jennings was offered $1000 for all rights to Microchess by Chuck Peddle of MOS Technology, maker of the KIM-1 (and later the creator of the Commodore PET), but Jennings turned it down because he believed he could make more money selling the game himself. It was a bold belief because there was no real software industry at the time, but Jennings ported his program to all the popular microcomputers and it became well known. The biggest thrill for him was when he answered the phone one day and found himself talking to famous chess master Bobby Fisher. Fisher wanted to play against Microchess. This was great publicity for Jennings’ program, even though the subsequent game was no contest — Fisher easily clobbered Microchess.

Another popular chess game that followed it was Sargon, which was a better chess player, but required more memory. Programmed in Assembler by Dan and Kathe Spracklen, a talented husband and wife team, it competed successfully in tournaments against programs running on mainframes.

Another game that appeared early was Oregon Trail, a game wholly invented for playing on a computer. Early TRS-80 versions of Oregon Trail had no graphics at all, just words that told you where you were and what was happening, along with your options. Players had to buy supplies, ration bullets and other items, and hunt for food. They typed their actions and the game responded by telling them they had shot a deer or their child had fallen ill or some other response. The game could be played by multiple players who each tried to reach the end of the trail first, with everyone still alive. More elaborate versions followed, complete with multimedia, and the game never stopped being popular, with a 25th anniversary version offered in 1998. It may be the longest-selling computer game of all times.

One very popular program came from the world of mainframes. It was ELIZA, programmed in the 1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum. ELIZA simulated a therapist by reflecting back and/or commenting on whatever you typed. For example, if you typed “My father doesn’t care about me.” ELIZA might answer “Why do you say that?” You might then type “Because he never talks to me; he’s always too busy.” ELIZA might answer ‘How does that make you feel?” And so on. Weizenbaum never took ELIZA seriously and was alarmed when versions of it showed up on various computers and some people thought it could substitute for real therapy. Others thought ELIZA had actual feelings. Although it is considered a forerunner of Aritificial Intelligence, ELIZA relied on rules. For a while, everyone with a computer seemed to have an ELIZA program, but as more useful software became available, ELIZA faded away.

The Adventure games began in 1972 when Will Crowther developed a game on a PDP1 in Boston which was expanded by Don Woods at Stanford University in 1976. These were the inspiration for the master of adventure games, Scott Adams, who released his first Adventure game in 1978, called Adventureland. A year later, he founded Adventure International to produce game software. The package for Adventureland reads: “You wander through an enchanted world trying to recover the 13 lost treasures. You’ll encounter wild animals, magical beings, and many other perils and puzzles. Can you rescue the Blue Ox from the quicksand? Or find your way out of the maze of pits? Happy Adventuring...”.

Scott Adams wrote a series of adventure games, with fanciful names like Strange Odyssey, Pyramid of Doom, and Savage Island. Adams began programming his games using a TRS-80 Model I, but also converted his games for use on other popular microcomputers like the Apple II, the Exidy Sorcerer, Texas Instruments and even CP/M. He had worked on a number of computers and languages before starting Adventure International. These games were extremely popular and featured impressive full-color packaging. Adams became a celebrity who used pictures of himself in his ads. He also endorsed other products, including Snappware, whose ads featured a suave-looking Adams and the words “I bought it.” His riveting stare also confronted the reader of an ad for Wayne Green’s Instant Software, with a text balloon that said “In all my dealings with software houses the one company that has always impressed me with its high quality service has been Instant Software.” Both his programs and his face became well-known among TRS-80 aficionados, many of whom were fanatically attached to their adventures.

Scott Adams, whose popular Adventure games were a big success with TRS-80 users, became well-known partly through his endorsements, as in this ad for Wayne Green’s Instant Software.

One visitor to Ira Goldklang’s Revised TRS-80 web site, related “The Scott Adams games were played amongst my whole family, with frequent long distance phone calls from brothers, sisters and parents which went along the lines of Have you tried throwing the beef jerky at the iron pharaoh? etc.” Another visitor left this comment, about an Adams adventure: . “... that little text game riveted me... and I remember spending dozens and dozens of hours trying to find the Pharoah’s Heart (it was a red herring in the game - not a treasure per se, but often hinted about).”

Adams was able to make deals with some of the early manufacturers, among them Commodore. He used what he calls a “game engine” to create adventures for the Commodore VIC-20 that were very successful; he remembers his first royalty check amounted to $150,000, but Commodore, shocked at the high total, didn’t want to give him the money. He had to send someone to pick up the check and Commodore tried to renegotiate his license fees. He had little fondness for Commodore or its products, which he says he was glad to see “sink back into the dust.”    [email from Scott Adams]

A cover from one of the Scott Adams Adventure games.

Despite the popularity of Scott Adams adventures, Adventure International shared the fate of a lot of other software sellers, eventually finding itself in financial trouble. It went bankrupt in 1985. Adams blames some of his problems on giving dealers product on credit, then having a lot of it come back. But he also was hit hard when the Texas Instrument 99/4A microcomputer died. He told us “We had a lot of expectations on the Return To Pirate’s Island graphic cartridge we had developed and licensed to them. Only a few copies ever made it out.” He freely admits to not being a great manager. He and his wife, Alexis, made the decisions for the company. At one point, they had a geodesic dome built in an industrial park and moved Adventure International into it. Later, they moved out when they needed more space, leaving the dome to another tenant.    [email from Scott Adams]

Adams had six children and had to earn a living. He took a job with Avista in Plattville, Wisconsin. But during 1999, Adams began working on a new adventure game for modern Windows computers. His old games became shareware, and he placed this notice at his web site:

The Scott Adams original text Adventure games are still copyrighted by Scott Adams and are not Public Domain. They may be freely downloaded and enjoyed though. They are shareware but the contribution is strictly voluntary and the amount left to your own discretion. Please note that international checks (in small amounts) are usually more expensive to cash than their face value is worth so please do not send same. If you are unable or unwilling to pay for these games you may still freely enjoy them.

[from Scott Adams web site]

Another company that sold games for the later TRS-80s was JMG Software, whose owner, George Geczy, remained in the game business. Like Adams, he revived a game he once sold for the TRS-80 called Supreme Ruler. Geczy also operated a retail store until 1999 when he and a partner opened BattleGoat Studios to create a modern version of Supreme Ruler. The new version, of course, features a lot more glitz and graphics, but his promotion for the game credits its origins as a popular TRS-80 strategy game.

Another early game wizard was Leo Christopherson, who did amazing things with the TRS-80’s limited graphics capability. Where Scott Adams had begun with games that consisted of text and did not rely on graphics, Christopherson delighted his users with cute pictures. The TRS-80 screen was black and white (but many users added a green glare filter); by selectively making pixels on the screen white, you could make pictures. Christopherson’s first game, programmed on a Model I in 1979, was Android Nim featuring fully graphical androids. He went on to create Cubes (1980), Snake Eggs (1980), Lifetwo (1980), Dancing Demon (1982) and Voyage of the Valkyrie (1982). He was perhaps most famous for the lovable Dancing Demon, a Nim-like character whose legs moved to music and who was truly hilarious to watch or program. The user could control the Demon’s dance and the music.

Christopherson, like a lot of early programmers, was also a musician who had played professionally in a band. The TRS-80 could make sound through its cassette port, thanks to Radio Shack’s cheap approach to reading data on tapes, and the game writers made use of it. Christopherson was possibly the first programmer to incorporate music into a program.

How did Leo Christopherson make his animated characters with so little to work with? Here’s an account of how he did it, from the March-April, 1979 issue of 80-US magazine:

The original Android was a tight squeeze in 16K; how could you add more animation plus sound? After the oils of many midnights burned low, Leo found a way to pack string elements into about one third less space than they previously occupied. Then he introduced a unique method of inserting machine language routines, same way as he did with the strings.

The article provides more details of how he made this work with Level II and TRSDOS on a Model I. Programmers of this period spent a lot of their time trying to overcome limitations. Figuring out how to pack more program into less memory was a major challenge. It was a challenge programmers like Christopherson could meet, and they proudly put their name on their programs.

Duel-N-Droids was one of Leo Christopherson’s early games for the TRS-80.

There were no big software companies at this time, so programmers often became marketers. But Christopherson’s work was noticed by Fort Worth and in 1982, Tandy contracted with Christopherson to write games for them, mainly for the Color Computer. According to Creative Computing, Radio Shack tried to sign Leo full-time a year earlier, but he had already signed a teaching contract. He worked as a Junior High School math and science teacher who used TRS-80s at school with his kids. As an added inducement to the school district to give Leo a leave of absence, Radio Shack donated 17 TRS-80 Model IIIs to the district. The magazine also reported that Atari had also tried to sign Leo. Working at home at his own pace and on his own ideas once he signed with Radio Shack, Leo Christopherson was an early example of a high tech telecommuter.

Christopherson did not stay with Tandy. Oliver Bailey, who worked for technical publisher Sams, said Leo wrote Voyage of the Valkyrie for their software division and they marketed it exclusively. He says Radio Shack did not pay enough attention to their independent software authors, since they thought of themselves as first selling hardware and only secondarily selling software. Christopherson, with a desire to teach and explore the limits of creativity in computing, had no special allegiance to Tandy.

Leo Christopherson’s games sold for $10 to $15, so they were inexpensive fun for those who bought them, many of whom would have as much fun taking apart the program as they had playing the game. Most TRS-80 owners tried to learn something about programming and their knowledge of how it was done added to their admiration of those who, like Leo Christopherson, were expert at it. His programs were innovative in every way, in their conception, their execution, and they provided a lot of fun for their users. His contribution to the world of computing is enormous.

Of course, there were the shoot ‘em up games too, with ideas borrowed from the dedicated arcade machines so popular with the youth of the day. Our early distributor, Soft Sector Marketing, sold some games that had been programmed by Larry Ashmun. One was Alien Defense, based on the arcade game Defender. Soft Sector sold a book called Alien Defense Commented for programmers who wanted to know how it was put together. Ashmun, who was entirely self-taught and financed his Model I out of money he got from winning the lottery, went on to have a successful career as a contract programmer working on embedded systems in automobiles.

One company that sold games was Big Five, which had Robot Attack and Defense Command; its founders appeared on ABC network’s program, Good Morning America, as examples of the new computer entrepreneurs. Acorn was another company that began in a basement and went on to success. But there was plenty of carnage in the marketplace as companies born in optimism died in bankruptcy and the public moved on to the next great thing in gaming.

Business Programs

Computers gave their owners many hours of amusement, but the hardware companies of the 70s and early 80s, Tandy included, thought they could make most of their money off business. The TRS-80 seemed better suited to business uses than to games, since it lacked color or good graphics, but had a strong version of BASIC. Early users were hobbyists or business people or, as was often the case, both. Some of the hobbyists became business people when they decided to sell the programs they’d created for themselves. Serious business programs really took off after disk drives became available. Writing data out to tape was too slow and unreliable, so business owners mainly bought disk programs.

Typical of the TRS-80 business users was Theresa’s dentist, Dr. Steve Crocker. He used his TRS-80 for accounting and patient lists. He sent out a dot-matrix-printed newsletter called Ain’t it the Tooth to his patients, and Theresa recalls that when she’d go to get her teeth checked, he’d chat about the latest hardware and software upgrades. A dentist office could not afford and did not need the big computers from IBM, and even a dedicated word processor might have been too costly, plus it would not do the accounting. A TRS-80 was the perfect solution for this type of small office.

In his 1979 book Running Wild: The Next Industrial Revolution, computer pioneer Adam Osborne predicted and foresaw many of the innovations that have come to pass (digital cameras, digital music, ebooks, and more). He also saw that small computers would reach far beyond their hobbyist beginnings and literally revolutionize the way we all live and work. He wrote:

Personal computing conjures up the image of hobbyists building computers at home for the sheer pleasure of it. Such people do exist, and in fact the industry had its origins catering to their needs, but today companies that started out building computers for hobbyists are generally building small business computer systems, and doing a job established companies could have done but were not farsighted enough to anticipate.

Word Processing — The Most Wanted Application

One type of program everyone wanted was word processing. Radio Shack misjudged the demand for word processing when they went with an all-upper case machine with the Model I. Once they realized their error, they corrected it with a lower case kit and began work on their own word processor, Scripsit. Their later Model III came with lower case, but was still limited to 64 characters across the screen. It wasn’t until the Model 4 that the screen expanded to 80 characters.

Those of us who sold word processing found a ready market. In the beginning, you did not need slick ads or a typeset manual. You just needed software that worked. Beginning with Michael Shrayer’s Electric Pencil, word processing became competitive.

Word Processing for Everyone

One of the main excuses we had for getting into microcomputers was our desire for word processing. Since there was no real option for people like us who had a limited budget, David finally created his own. That’s really how it happened.

Word processing software existed, but it was either expensive or wouldn’t work on a cheap micro like the TRS-80. There were dedicated computers that cost a lot of money that did word processing, like the Wang or the Lanier, but these were not for geeks or the penurious. Their marketing was aimed at big business, with slick salesmen and hand-holding training sessions.

But lots of people who didn’t have $20,000 to spend wanted word processing, and the software that filled the need was created by amateurs like us who couldn’t afford the big-bucks alternatives. Electric Pencil, created by Shrayer, a former cameraman for the Candid Camera TV program, was available for the TRS-80 for $100. We didn’t buy it because we weren’t sure there was a disk version or that it would work with the cobbled printer interface we had to our Qume daisy wheel printer. And, of course, we were cheap.

Electric Pencil became famous and its author converted it to many different early computers. He later regretted using his name as the name of his company — Michael Shrayer Software — because he got tired of devoting his life to his product and began to yearn for anonymity. Among its users was columnist John C. Dvorak, who wrote in a retrospective column on February 19 2002, “I got my first desktop computer in 1977, and the first thing I did was get a word processor for it called Electric Pencil. I’ve never looked back.”

The only other program we knew about was an early word processor called Docuform that was written in BASIC. A listing for it was in the August 1978 issue of Kilobaud, but you had to type the entire program into your computer. The problem with a TRS-80 word processor in BASIC was the “garbage collection” done by BASIC. The program would freeze from time to time while BASIC did some cleaning up of string variables. Later versions of BASIC had less obtrusive garbage collection (and there was a program called Trashman that improved on the garbage collection routine), but we didn’t think Docuform would satisfy our needs. Besides, it hadn’t been created for a TRS-80, so it wasn’t clear it would work.

In 1979, word processing was an idea whose time had not yet come. There was always something missing. If you had the software, maybe you didn’t have a printer that made acceptable output. Or if you had the printer, you didn’t have any software that could operate the printer. The comments in the Docuform program state “The equipment needed to utilize the full capability of the DOCUFORM system can be purchased for less than $12,000.” That price range was still in a league not inhabited by the average TRS-80 buyer (although much cheaper than the dedicated Wang).

The Level II upgrades —better BASIC, extra memory and use of disk drives — gave programmers more to work with, but writing programs that required Level II or more memory or a disk drive would also limit the potential sales. Programs written for Level II BASIC could only be sold to customers who had Level II. Programs requiring a disk drive could only be sold to customers who had disk drives. If use of your program required more memory, that would limit your buyers. This created a dilemma for programmers who wanted to sell their software. Word processing was an application almost everyone wanted, but it required something beyond a low-end system. From the beginning, we planned our product for TRS-80 owners with at least 32K of memory and a disk system. The first version would actually work with 16K, but only if the user was content with one page of text. The memory problem was less significant as the price of extra memory dropped.

Bob Johnson, a lawyer and avid Lazy Writer user, posed with an employee for this picture at his office; he was typical of early adopters of word processing.

Printing and Word Processing: A world of Trouble

Printers were a major problem for computer owners. They could spend hundreds of dollars on a dot matrix printer that made wretched-looking type, or spend thousands of dollars on a daisy wheel printer, which imitated the look of an IBM Selectric typewriter, the standard for every business office. While the Selectric used a ball head with type characters, the daisy wheel was a circular piece of plastic that had characters out on spokes. It snapped onto the print head.

Early “letter-quality” printers were really typewriters or teletype machines. We had a good laugh the first time we saw a device that sits on the keys of a typewriter and connects to a computer. Substituting for your own fingers, this device pressed down the keys. Watching these robot fingers work was both funny and exciting. In this interim technology, Theresa could see the end to her days of retyping and plying liquid paper to her numerous typing mistakes. The device we saw at a computer show was called the Dynatyper and was made by Rochester Data. In a review of the Dynatyper that appeared in the July 1981 Creative Computing, Jim Cavuoto says “For about one fifth the cost of a letter-quality printer, it is possible to turn your typewriter into a component in your computer system.” He explained that by getting the Dynatyper, a writer did not have to give up his or her typewriter. He gave the device an excellent review. It cost $700, an extra $200 if you wanted the serial interface. Interestingly, Cavuoto says his first reaction to seeing the device was the same as ours, to chuckle. This was clearly a temporary solution to accommodate people who already had typewriters and couldn’t afford $3000 for a letter-quality printer.

Micro Computer Devices was another company that sold printers; they had what was really an IBM Selectric that connected to your computer for use as a printer. It had a full keyboard as well and could be used as an electric typewriter. It could be bought for under $2000, but there were a lot of “extras” that could run up the cost. Radio Shack tried to satisfy this market as well by bringing out the TRS-80 Daisy Wheel printer. They advertised it as having “clean and readable printing, like the very finest electric typewriter.” It cost $3000.

Printing was not handled by the operating system the way Windows would do later. To use any but the most basic features of a printer, you had to have a specific piece of software that communicated between your program and the printer. Printer manufacturers did not provide this. What they provided was a lot of technical information on how the printer worked. That meant we had to get and test all the popular printers and create software — printer drivers — for those printers. This used up a lot of David’s time. We had good luck getting free loaner models from the printer companies, so we always had a lot of printers around our offices. Some of those printers remained in boxes in our basement until recent years. A number of the printer companies never asked for them back and at least one went out of business before we could send theirs back. Another time we tried to ship a printer back, but it was returned to us, the company apparently dead.

Dot matrix printers like the Paper Tiger made print that consisted of small dots; these printers were slow, noisy, and produced print that many found unacceptable for business use.

One of the most popular printers was the Epson MX-80, an extremely capable and inexpensive dot matrix printer that was later upgraded to do graphics (with an add-on called the Graphtrax-80). The MX-80 manual was written by the same David Lien who had authored the Model I manual. The MX-80 was heavily marketed to TRS-80 owners since it incorporated the so-called “TRS-80 block graphics.” These were simply blocky shapes that occupied the ASCII character set above the regular typewriter characters. With Lien’s excellent tutorial, users were able to make use of Lazy Writer’s ability to embed codes; these codes, when sent to the printer, printed graphic characters. A number of our users sent us incredibly complex pictures they’d made by manipulating these block graphics, which were also called “bit plot graphics.” It was painstaking work making graphics this way, and there was no “what you see is what you get.” But it was the beginning of combining words and pictures into one file. IBM later marketed the MX-80 along with their IBM PC, but they took out the TRS-80 block graphics and added their own extended character set.

Printer operations in general were controlled by “escape codes” that directed movements of the print head. Dot matrix printers were more fun than daisy wheel printers because they could do more. Most had a “double-wide” mode that let you make fat characters; some had a small font as well. You could usually do bolding and sometimes underlining as well.

There were numerous companies making printers. Some, like Smith-Corona, were typewriter companies trying to hang onto their customers. Others were totally new companies entering a new market. We tried to keep up with how all these printers worked and support as many as we could. One printer company contacted our distributor, Victor Andrews, for information on how to activate various effects in Lazy Writer and Theresa wrote this in a reply:

I can’t finish this letter without telling you how impressed I am with your Sanders machine. I’ve been looking over the (printer) manual and its capabilities are astonishing. The beautiful appearance of your letter to Vic is the best evidence of that capability. Two kinds of type in one paragraph!!!

We don’t know what happened to the Sanders printer, but the difficulty of getting printers and software to actually work together, then letting potential users know about it, was a marketing challenge at which most companies failed. Like the microcomputer business, the printer business had many entrants and few winners.

The Quest for “Letter Quality” Printing

Daisy wheel printers made nice type but were a major headache for us. While ordinary typewriters used monospacing type — where each character takes up the same amount of space — the really top quality typewriters such as the IBM Selectric let users use proportionally spaced type, where the space used by each character varies with the width of the character, so that an “i” uses less space than a “w.” Daisy wheel printers came with a variety of wheels. High-priced daisy wheel printers like our Qume were capable of proportional spacing, with the right wheel and the right software.

Some dot matrix printers, notably the C. Itoh Prowriter, also did proportional spacing, but they used a totally different technology and the output, though good, still looked like little dots…just not good enough for business letters. Besides, you had to use fanfold paper and tear off the perfed edges, which made the paper look tacky. There was no way to print on letterhead, unless you had fanfold paper specially printed with your letterhead stationery. The only real choice for business was a daisy wheel printer. Of course, we wanted to support proportional spacing, but coping with daisy wheels proved to be much more trouble than we expected.

An ad from Kilobaud magazine, September of 1978.

Many law offices would not adopt word processing until they could get proportional spacing. Law offices were a good source of business for us and we wanted to give them the same kind of great-looking documents they got from their IBM Selectric typewriter. But it was not easy. First, we needed to get proportional wheels. They generally had to be special-ordered and there wasn’t much choice of typefaces. Then, David had to work with a look-up table for that wheel which gave the amount of movement for each character to achieve the right spacing. Users had to match up the right proportional spacing driver with the right daisy wheel. We had a huge three-ring binder with all the look-up codes for the various wheels for the different daisy wheel printers. When we released our first proportional spacing driver, we thought we had achieved something wonderful. But then we realized that the look-up table we’d used worked with only a few wheels. Most of the wheels used a completely different look-up table. It was back to the drawing board for us. Users had so much trouble finding the right wheels that we later sold them ourselves to help our users get the proportional spacing wheels that worked with Lazy Writer. David finally added a way for users to generate their own look-up table.

The problems with printers generated a lot of user mail and phone calls. The exact method by which a printer could do bold face or underlining was always a deep mystery to users. The July, 1981 newsletter tackled this problem, explaining that there were three ways to do it: By backspace, by two-pass, or by code. Backspacing was a method used by printers that could move backwards, to a character it had just typed, and type over it again (for bold) or type an underline character. Two-pass meant the print head would finish a line, then return to the beginning of the same line and either print over the word or add underline characters; this could be done if the printer could do a carriage return without doing a line feed. By code was a popular method, but the codes were different for each printer. The method generally required one code to turn on the feature and another code to turn it off, so to underline a word, for example, you’d embed the “turn on” code before the word and the “turn off” code just after.

Lazy Writer could be customized to do some of the work internally with an extension called PRINTGEN, but users had to know how their printer worked in order to enter the right codes into this extension. For some of the most popular printers, we supplied customers with a driver, which we customized with PRINTGEN, that already had the right codes. We also suffered because we didn’t realize that Radio Shack had altered the ROM in their Daisy Wheel printer and we had based our tests only on the newer ROM. Customers who had the old ROM couldn’t get bolding or underlining with the Lazy Writer commands for these. The problem for us was that we had no way of knowing when these kinds of changes would be made. We heard about these things from our customers, who would call and say this or that feature doesn’t work. Then we would have to sort out exactly what was going on.

Later, as printer technologies settled down and more powerful operating systems appeared, more of this was done in the background. The concept of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) was still years away. The best we could do was let the user know where lines and pages would break. We had something called The Formatter that would display the text showing the exact line breaks you’d get when you printed, but of course it could not reproduce the typeface. Control over the appearance of the printed page was quite limited and there was no ability to add pictures.

Inserting codes may seem slow and awkward, but professional typesetting has been even slower to adopt WYSIWYG methods. Many publishers continued to ask authors to separate text and graphics, as well as tables, even years after good desktop publishing systems existed. They used “compositors” to add words, tables and graphics back based on an author’s instructions.

In fact, computerized typesetting existed in the days of Lazy Writer. Theresa typeset our ads in the later years by learning a system of typesetting codes, which were embedded in text, then we sent a disk with the text and codes to a typesetting place in Virginia called Intergraphics. Their machine typeset the text according to the codes and they sent back the typesetting on a continuous feed high quality paper rolled into a tube and mailed to us. We then used scissors or a paper cutter to cut the items apart, then used rubber cement to paste them down on a board; that’s how we made up the ads. Theresa always wished she had a large layout table for this kind of work, but it never happened. In the years before our software business, we sometimes did newsletters for some of our writing/photography clients, always working in some overcrowded space. The office in Dearborn was no different. Theresa’s office was full of stuff sitting all over the desk and book case. We had brought in a large and ancient wood table that had once belonged to a friend, that might have served as a layout table, but it was always full of flyers, addendums to the manual, printer information sheets and the like. Boxes of manuals sat on the floor as they came from the Kwickie print shop we used. There was a lot to manage and to get done and there was never enough time or enough space.

Theresa wrote this article about the Qume Sprint 5 and the MX-80 for the December, 1981 issue of Desktop Computing.

Dealing with users took up a lot of our time. We frequently found ourselves on the phone with untutored users who, like us, wanted to make their life easier and were willing to try using a computer, but it was uncharted territory for all of them. Whether you were selling or buying, it was all new. When our staff couldn’t answer questions from customers, they’d give the call to one of us. Theresa was in the office every day and talked people through a lot of procedures. One customer called up and was upset because, as he put it, Lazy Writer had “just stopped.” He wanted to know what was wrong with our software. Theresa questioned him and found he was using a daisy wheel printer. She asked if he’d checked the ribbon to see if it was out. There was an awkward pause before he said in a shocked tone of voice, “It can run out of ribbon? The salesman at the store didn’t tell me that!” Theresa told him how to check his ribbon and, sure enough, it was out. She told him to go to the store and buy another ribbon. Once the new ribbon was installed, Lazy Writer would resume printing.

Theresa remembers another woman calling and wanting to know the “stop codes.” We had never heard of stop codes and asked what she meant. It turned out she had used a different word processor before and it had codes to stop the printer so the user could change the daisy wheel. Lazy Writer didn’t have stop codes, but we decided to add them. It was a feature we later used ourselves so we could stop the printer, then pop on an italic wheel, print the italic part (another embedded stop code would halt printing again), then put back the original wheel.

Print wheels did not last forever and would eventually deteriorate and begin making poor impressions. You had to keep a supply around and store them carefully. There were metal wheels that were hardier, but they required different programming because they hit the paper with more impact.

The “running out of ribbon” problem was another one we had along with our users. When we would reprint the entire Lazy Writer manual, the Qume would use up more than one ribbon. We used to set it up printing, then go out to dinner and come back later in the evening when we knew it would be out of ribbon and change the ribbon so the printer could keep going. In the morning, we’d have the complete copy.

The dream was there of having a computer show you the layout of complex documents on the screen and a printer that would quickly and reliably print it as it appeared. But it was not realized, nor could it have been, on a TRS-80 with the crude printing machines available to us. During one of our last years in business, we wrote a short book for our users called Productive Word Processing. Here’s what we said about “electronic publishing:”

…electronic publishing as it is evolving will not be done on a TRS-80…The system of the future will have a huge choice of typefaces in all sizes, a complete collection of clip art that can be viewed on the screen, the ability to integrate graphs and charts, and will allow you to create the layout on the screen. You will be able to change the size of any type or art and move elements around on the screen. When it is as you want, your printer will reproduce it into perfect copy, ready to run on an offset press.

That was the vision, but it would take some additional years and a new generation of computers to make it a reality.

Lazy Writer: A Capable Word Processor

Lazy Writer actually pioneered features we now take for granted. We had macros (we called them “x-keys”), headers and footers, an undo, and an online Help file before anyone else. If your computer accidentally rebooted, you did not lose your text. You had only to reload Lazy Writer and your text would still be there. You could also customize Lazy Writer to have the cursor shape and speed you wanted and you could set up printer defaults for your particular printer. We also gave users the ability to redefine a character from one they didn’t need to one they did need. For example, they could make the \ (backslash) key be a copyright symbol.

Lazy Writer was designed to use what we called “extensions,” extra programs that added capability. We sold an extension called LazyDraw that took advantage of the TRS-80 block graphics, ASCII characters number 128-191 that were peculiar to the TRS-80. These codes worked with many dot matrix printers (like the MX-80), but were not available with the more expensive daisy wheel printers. We also sold LazyMerge which would merge data from a mailing list with a letter for doing mass mailings, LazyComm (written by Mark Barlow) for sending files over a modem, LazyFont (written by Don Elmore) for using fancy fonts, LazyCalc (written by Bill Neville) that summed columns of numbers, LazyDoc for preparing standard documents by inserting text into the correct spots, and LazyType, a special version that would print as you typed, handy for using preprinted forms and quick notes. For court reporters, we created another special version that numbered each line. We had to maintain master disks for all these programs and versions.

In the September, 1982 issue of 80 Micro, their word processing issue, the reviewer of the “deluxe” word processors says of Lazy Writer “Author David Welsh of ABC Sales has packed every feature he could think of into the program and the result is a highly sophisticated piece of software in both Model I and Model III versions.”

InfoWorld reviewed Lazy Writer in 1982 and called it “… one of the most sophisticated TRS-80 word processing packages around.”

An ad for Lazy Writer. Soft Sector Marketing, the distributor at the time, created this ad for 80 Micro magazine.

We sold a lot of Lazy Writers to lawyers and we owed some of those sales to Bob Johnson, an engaging guy whose busy law office in Muskegon Michigan offered legal services and soap — he was also an Amway dealer. Johnson, a graduate of Harvard Law School, was capable of an incredible amount of energy and enthusiasm for something he believed in. Fortunately for us, he believed in Lazy Writer and used some of his energy to create template documents that any law office could use. We later sold sets of these on disk, which we called Lazy Law, to other lawyers. They were standard kinds of documents to which the user could add the right names and dates. Lazy Law was reviewed in a publication called The Lawyer’s Microcomputer, in which the reviewer states:

It’s hard to separate Lazy Law itself from the environment in which it works, Lazy Writer. To put it briefly, Lazy Writer is my word processor of choice… Bob’s form system seems to be well thought out and extremely complete. It should be able to cover almost any imaginable estate planning situation, and is obviously the product of a lot of thought and experience. He even includes sample billing forms, questionnaires, releases, letters of transmittal, and memoranda to clients with regard to the estate planning process.

The reviewer pointed out that these documents could save many hours of secretarial time as documents did not have to be typed over and over. Word processing was attractive to lawyers once printers existed that provided output comparable to that of an IBM Selectric typewriter. This was a technology with the power to greatly increase the productivity of any law office, and Bob Johnson saw that early on. He jumped on the microcomputer bandwagon and was an enthusiastic pitchman for our products.

Johnson inspired one of our extensions, called LazyDoc, and he posed for an ad we used, under the heading “The Johnson Law Office Depends on Lazy Writer.” LazyDoc made it simple to auto-insert text that was used in numerous places into a standard document. Users could set it up so LazyDoc would ask questions a secretary could answer and the answers would be inserted in the appropriate places in the document. For example, every time the word “defendant” was there in a generic document, it would substitute the name of the actual defendant. It was from Johnson that we first heard the word “boilerplate” which means a standard paragraph you use over and over (our customers were an endless source of learning for us) . Legal briefs contain many such paragraphs and LazyDoc would let you pull them from disk when you inserted appropriate symbols. Document creation was automated with this process.

Johnson and his wife once let us stay at a home they owned on Michigan’s beautiful Leelanau peninsula. They had lived there, but were unable to earn enough money in such a remote location and had moved to Muskegon; they were trying to sell the house, which had almost no furniture in it. But we didn’t care. The place was gorgeous, up on hill with a wonderful view of Lake Michigan. We loved the area so much that when our daughter was little we spent many summer vacations at a nearby family resort. We appreciated the Johnsons’ generosity and had occasion to visit them a number of times in Muskegon, one time staying with a friend of theirs who owned a computer time-share business.

Johnson’s wife Judy was an entrepreneur too and was into “draping” women with fabric to determine their “season” (Spring, Summer, Autumn, or Winter) and based on the result, give advice on which colors to wear. She charged a hefty price for this service. The Johnsons once tried to emigrate to Australia, but were turned down (it seems Australia already had too many lawyers). We still have a large coffee table book about Australia they sent us as a gift. The last we heard, they were living in Hawaii and Judy had changed her first name to something more exotic-sounding. The Johnsons were not your ordinary couple.

As to their Amway business, it too was powered by TRS-80 software. Programs to keep track of Amway sales were popular.

Bob Johnson with his Lazy Writer manual in his law office in Muskegon, Michigan. We used this picture in some of our ads.

Business Computing in the 1980s

We were not alone selling a word processor; many others came on the market and magazines used to regularly run reviews of our program and all the others. Our main competition was from Radio Shack, which sold a program called Scripsit. We never tried to get Radio Shack to carry our program because they already had Scripsit and, in truth, Radio Shack must have sold a lot more copies of Scripsit than all the rest of the word processor sellers combined. They sold only programs that carried their own label and Scripsit was developed in-house, apparently to save money. In his “Inside 80” column in the November 1980 issue of 80 Microcomputing, Ed Juge states “We talked to several word processor authors, but it quickly became apparent that a good software program at a Radio Shack price would require an in-house development effort.” This effort was well underway before we ever got Lazy Writer to market. Of course, we didn’t know Tandy was creating their own word processor.

Our other competition was from a company called ProSoft, which sold Newscript (later they sold All Write) which they introduced in 1981. ProSoft was located in glamorous Hollywood; the author of their software was Chuck Tesler, brother of Larry Tesler who had once been at Xerox PARC and was later Apple Computer’s chief scientist. Prosoft introduced a font program with font files that could be used by our LazyFont program and we actually became a dealer for their fonts.

There was also LeScript, which appeared after NewScript, sold from a company in Florida. Simutek, a company out of Tucson Arizona, made a word processor called CopyArt that incorporated as much graphics capability as was possible. There was also a Canadian company called PensaDyne that had a word processor and there was Wordsmith, The Word Machine, and Clean Slate, none of which gained much popularity. Of course, there was also Electric Pencil, the oldest, which was updated over the years. Radio Shack came out with another word processor they called Super Scripsit. In addition to the purely TRS-80 word processors, we also later competed with the CP/M word processors, many of which could be run on the Model 4.

For the well-heeled business user, there were those dedicated word processors, special purpose computers that combined with a letter-quality printer. IBM led the way here too with its DisplayWrite machine. It wasn’t until well into the 1980s that word processing software on a microcomputer was considered as good as a dedicated word processor.

The July 1984 issue of Personal Software magazine carried a big review of word processing software, publishing a huge matrix of products and features. Their list had 113 different word processors! The switch from typewriters to word processors had become a stampede and many companies were trying to cash in. Big companies were giving up their expensive dedicated machines and buying small computers with software.

By this time, we were trying to hold on, unable to get any attention for our product amid all the noise. That long list in Personal Software did not include Lazy Writer. A story in an April 1984 InfoWorld stated that worldwide sales of word processing software had reached $300 million, which was one quarter of total software sales. The top selling product was MicroPro’s Wordstar, followed by Apple Writer, and number three on the list was Radio Shack’s Scripsit with 13% of the worldwide market. Lazy Writer got great reviews, but never made it to the top ranks. However, even the best-sellers of that era were destined for extinction, wiped out first by Word Perfect, then by Microsoft Word.

Word Processing was a most-wanted application, and many companies competed for the large pool of customers. With each passing year, more typewriters ended up in junk yards and rummage sales until typewriters became pretty much worthless except as antiques.

Spell Checkers

TRS-80 users could buy spell checkers to go with their word processor. Phil Manfield, who wrote and sold Electric Webster (first called Microproof) had created the tool because someone had told him you couldn’t fit a dictionary on a microcomputer. He took up the challenge and produced a fine piece of software that would check your document against all the words in a standard dictionary of the English language. In keeping with the obsession about fitting data into limited memory, his advertising flyer says “uses only 2 ½ bytes per word.” He later added a grammar checker that could identify 22 types of common grammatical errors and suggest changes. The program also did auto hyphenation.

Phil Manfield created the Electric Webster spell checker when someone told him it couldn’t be done on a microcomputer.

Manfield and his wife were therapists by occupation, and they ran their software business (Cornucopia Software) out of a spare bedroom in their home in Berkeley California. We got to meet them when we went to the West Coast Computer Faire in 1983. They had one employee, a young lady named Tandra with whom we frequently talked on the phone. Many early software entrepreneurs hung onto their day jobs, never really expecting the big score in their side business. In Manfield’s case, it almost ended when he found himself facing a lawsuit over the name of his product. The publishers of Webster’s Dictionary felt he had infringed their copyright. Manfield finally settled with them and they withdrew the suit. He told us “it was a near thing” as far as staying in business; defending himself had nearly cost him everything he’d made, and he’d come up with the name Electric Webster in total innocence. The settlement let him keep the name, but he had to change the logo he was using since it closely resembled the red circular design of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary.

Spreadsheets & Accounting Software

Word processing was not the only business program. Once VisiCalc appeared, TRS-80 owners wanted it. VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet program, was ported to all the popular systems of the day, including the TRS-80. Later, the term spreadsheet became a generic term for this kind of software. Thanks to Dan Bricklin’s decision not to patent his original design, imitators soon appeared. When MicroPro introduced Word Star, they soon after brought out Calc Star, their own spreadsheet program. Then there was the “Perfect” family of software — Perfect Writer, Perfect Calc, etc. They were successful for a while and had a huge glitzy display at the 1983 West Coast Computer Faire.

Among the most wanted software were programs needed to run a business, such as accounting, general ledger, and inventory. One company that advertised heavily was Taranto and Associates which generally featured a picture of Irwin Taranto holding up floppy disks. One of his ads (July, 1980, Microcomputing) has this headline: “A year ago when nobody had ever heard of me, I said these disks could turn a TRS-80 into a serious computer. Now they tell me I’m ‘the standard of the industry.’”

The ad went on to say that learning to use a computer in business takes time and patience. “You have to hang in there for a month, make a few phone calls, and have somebody who really understands the system help you work it out. That’s why I still answer my phone…” Taranto sold Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Invoicing, General Ledger (with Cash Journal option), Payroll, and Inventory Control. All modules were $99.95.

Irwin Taranto appeared in his ads, usually holding up floppy disks like this.

Taranto constantly upgraded his software and ported it to other systems. By 1983, he was running ads that offered an upgrade to the current version of any of his software for $25, even if the user had changed platforms. In a sign of the times, his ad in the October 1983 80 Micro says “If you’ve gone from a TRS-80 Model I to a Model II/16 or an IBM PC, say, you get a full credit for whatever you paid me for your Model I systems. Just send me your old disks and I’ll send you the new ones.”

Data Base Software

Data base programs were another popular type of early software. Radio Shack sold a program called Profile III Plus for the Model 4 for $200 that let you create records and get back data in a number of formats. Other programs that did the same were Data Writer, Maxi Manager and another program with the unfortunate name of AIDS. That was, of course, before the disease by the same name became well known.

Mail Lists

Another type of business program was mail list software, which was really a dedicated data base program. All of us who were in business needed a way to store the names we collected. We used a program sold by our early distributor, Soft Sector Marketing. The program was called Postman and we had our staff use this program to type names of buyers as well as the names we got from our magazine ads, people who requested information about our products. In later years, our mail list was our main source of sales. Another popular mail list program was PowerMail, created by Kim Watt. These programs originally did little more than store names, sort them, and print them on labels, but became more valuable in later versions when they could merge names with a word processor file, so you could print custom letters. Eventually, a lot of the functions that were separate programs in the early days were rolled into ever-bigger programs. As software evolved, word processing came to encompass mail list, mail merge, forms-creation, spell-checking, grammar checking, and other functions.

Lazy Writer with LazyMerge and Postman was a complete package for any business sending out letters to prospects.

The Million Dollar Accounting Software

While most of the vendors who sold products for the Model I/III/4 had small operations that produced no great wealth, there were a few people who made real money. We heard about Gary Simon from Oliver Bailey, the Sams Publishing agent during those years. Gary Simon got out of the Air Force (where he apparently was running a software business using Uncle Sam’s equipment) and wrote an accounting program for the TRS-80 Model I called Plus Accounting. Recently divorced, Simon’s girl friend financed his software venture. They spent their last $1500 on a full page ad in 80 Micro magazine.

The president of Wilson Jones, a stationery company, was on an airplane reading 80 Micro and saw the ad at a time when things looked dismal for his business. Companies making traditional paper forms were threatened by use of computers which could print forms directly. Excited by the possibilities of getting into electronic forms, the Wilson Jones executive got off the plane in Denver, even though he was on a flight from LA to Chicago, and called his office. He told them he was going to see the man behind this accounting program, then called Simon and arranged to see him. Simon got his manual back from the printer only 30 minutes before this man was at his door. The Wilson Jones president took a look at the software and the newly-printed manual and said he’d like to have his executives come and take a look. Within a week or so, these executives showed up and they began discussing an exclusive deal. They flew Simon out to an office products show in Chicago. At that show, a rumor (possibly started by Simon) went around that another company was discussing exclusive rights to this software. So Wilson Jones quickly offered Simon one million dollars for all rights to the software.

Later Simon talked to Oliver Bailey, who knew him through a girl who had worked for Bailey, but now worked for Simon. Simon’s company subsequently hired Bailey. Meanwhile, Wilson Jones hired a manager who made a lot of changes, getting rid of people, but not accomplishing the goal of selling electronic forms. Finally, after Wilson Jones had spent millions of dollars to try to get a foothold in software, they fired the manager and decided to divest themselves of the accounting software. Gary Simon bought it back from them for $100,000. The next day, he sold it to Boise Cascade, another forms and paper company, for a second one million dollars! Boise Cascade sold it as Silver Plus Accounting.

It is not clear if anyone ever made money off the accounting software, other than Gary Simon. We never heard of this software package and the entire story is astounding. Gary Simon must have been the shrewdest wheeler-dealer in the TRS-80 world.

Bulletin Boards: the Beginning of Online Services

Modems, which let computers talk to other computers over phone lines, were around almost from the beginning, moving bits at the lightening speed of 300 baud (less than 300 bits per second compared to 53,000 bits per second by the 1990s). They were big clunky-looking devices that sat next to your computer, connected by a serial cable. Also available was a type of modem called an Acoustic Coupler, a device that worked with a regular phone — you placed the phone headset into the device. This saved you the work of connecting to a phone line in the days before modular jacks, and the device could be moved around. Either device took over your phone line, which was too bad because they worked so badly, you almost always had to break the connection and call the person you were connecting to and talk over why the computers weren’t communicating.

Both users had to have “terminal” software to communicate. When our computer called your computer and we both got the “handshaking” right, you could see words that I typed appear on your screen — appear v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. If we didn’t get the “handshaking” right, you might see only some of the words I typed or only the words you typed. It was a clunky way of talking to one another, a bit like “instant message” software that appeared years later when fast networking and simple interfaces made it feasible.

An ad for a financial service through CompuServe from the January, 1982 issue of CompuServe’s Today magazine. Note the accoustic coupler and telehone at left.

In the early 1980s, there were four basic uses for modems: 1) sending files to someone else, 2) calling a Bulletin Board System (BBS), and 3) downloading files (usually from a BBS or a commercial service) and 4) communicating with a mainframe or timeshare account. Of course, there was no point in sending a file unless the other person had software that could read it, but for users of compatible systems, files could be passed back and forth this way.

Many TRS-80 users bought modems from companies like US Robotics, Lynx and Hayes. To get their Model I or III to talk to another computer, they needed special communications software, sometimes called terminal software because it let their computer act as a front end for another computer, just as time-sharing terminals did. A 1981 article on communications software calls these programs “smart terminal programs” and says they “allow a TRS-80 (with a disk drive) to access another computer by telephone or radio.” [“Smart Terminal Software” by Bill Everett, 80 Microcomputing, September, 1981] The smart part has to do with the ability to transfer files back and forth, not just view material on the other computer.

Many of those early pioneers used ST-80, a program written by Lance Miklus, who sold it himself, beginning in 1979. His story is typical of the companies that flourished in the early 80s: Programmer writes program, goes into business, hires some part-time help, takes out magazine ads, gets orders, boxes up product, collects checks. Miklus authored an article for The Eighty magazine that appeared in the February, 1980 issue. It was called “Going Into Business” and he wrote “Had it not been for my experience with two other part-time businesses, I am certain that Lance Miklus, Inc would have gone down the tubes by December 1979...” He goes on to advise the reader that being a good businessman is more important to software success than being a good programmer. Miklus’ business lasted until 1984, a better success story than many.

The word telecommunicating made its way into computer vocabulary, and some thought it would be an important part of computing. In a 1983 book, Things To Do With Your TRS-80 Model 4 Computer, the authors devote a chapter to telecommunications. They say:

Telecomputing is one of the fastest-growing areas of personal computer use; many Model 4 owners use their computer to talk to other computers. Telecomputing is simple, you need only four things: your computer, a special device called a modem, a telephone system and a telecommunications software package.

[by Jerry Willis, Merl Miller, and Cleborne D. Maddux, New American Library]

In September 1983, Link-Up magazine appeared. In the first issue the editor explained that their purpose was to keep users informed “about developments in the burgeoning field of small computer communications, a field that encompasses personal, home, desktop, portable and professional computers.” The introduction went on to talk about the need for standards now that communications was “fast reaching a mass market, a market that will demand easy communications for all people to use for recreational, business, and informational purposes.” The issue was full of ads for modems and terminal software. The articles were varied, most quite technical (including a “chip of the month”) but others of general interest like “A History of Data Communications.” The back page color ad was for a service called NewsNet, which provided “instant easy access to full-text electronic editions of hundreds of business newsletters.” The idea for getting and sharing information online was there, but the technology was still too arcane for the general public.

There were plenty of people who did not think as highly as the editors at Link-Up of this new thing called telecommunicating. The 1984 book Digital Deli contained an article by David Nimmons called “10 Computer Applications to Avoid” in which he listed “telecommunicating with friends over the phone” as one of the things to avoid. He accurately reports the ludicrous nature of this communication:

The first step is almost always to think of people you know who 1) have a modem that allows them to communicate with computers over the phone, and 2) you have any desire to “chat” with. The next step is to call them up to see if they want to talk to you. Usually you talk for a few minutes to answer a few basic questions: will you communicate in full, half duplex, or simplex mode? What baud rate will you use? What kind of parity check? Who’s in transmit and who’s in receive mode?

Nimmons goes on to describe a typical computer “conversation” consisting of words with dropped characters and endless repetitions of ARE YOU RECEIVING THIS? Using the computer as a means of talking over phone lines was far less efficient than simply talking over phone lines.

Modems, of course, would go on to become faster, and much better uses would be found for moving data over those phone lines, which themselves would be challenged by cable and wireless. But back in the early 1980s, America was not wired for cable TV and the internet was just getting started, in use only for government research labs and big universities and it did not yet include the World Wide Web, which did not make an appearance until 1990, invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland. Later, computer owners would almost take it for granted that the purpose of a modem was to use the internet, but in the 1980s, the modem was often a solution in search of a problem.

Bulletin Boards Systems (or BBS) were in may ways the precursor of the internet, but they could be found only by people who knew the phone number for a particular service. When the user connected by phone line to the BBS, he could remotely operate the other computer or access files on the other computer. Some Bulletin Boards were for members only or charged a fee for use of the content. Many listed files that could be downloaded and some of the amateur operations gave away software illegally. Some gave access to large data bases used by researchers and writers.

By 1980, there were a few dial-up business services that offered serious content. The two earliest were CompuServe and The Source. Later, there was Delphi, Genie and much later, Prodigy. Tandy sponsored a service called Link that was a precursor to America Online (AOL). These services could support a lot more simultaneous users than the lowly BBS. They were commercial ventures hoping to attract a large number of customers. All eventually disappeared or became internet providers. AOL, which took the concept and added ease of use, became one of the biggest and most successful companies in America, so successful it eventually bought Time Warner.

During the early years, there were always new sources of sales out there as the world discovered personal computing. The Carter campaign in 1980 was one of the first political organizations to extensively use computers, including use of modems to keep in touch. One of Jimmy Carter’s sons was part of a three-person Information Services staff which used microcomputers to keep files on staff and volunteers. The Carter family checked their schedules daily through the early dial-up service, The Source, and used the New York Times Infobank available on The Source to research the activities of the other candidates. [from “Campaign Applications: Did Computers Influence Voters?” by Debbie Marshall, 80 Microcomputing, December, 1980]

A 1980 ad for The Source says:

Through your telephone, you can get instant access to the United Press International wire service, all major stock exchanges, the New York Times Consumer Data Base…and dozens of other useful and powerful information resources through an easy-to-use keyword and key term indexing system.

[from Byte, February, 1980]

It wasn’t the internet, but it was a start down the road of computers being indispensable research tools. Jimmy Carter also used a computer to write his memoirs after being defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1981. He wrote in the Introduction: “This book is my own work, typed by me at home on my trusty word processor.”    [Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President by Jimmy Carter, Bantam Books, 1982]

Robots

The early 1980s also saw another revolution that enthusiasts thought would go on to change everyday life, but they were wrong about this one. This was the robot revolution. Little robots would be guarding our houses, serving us drinks, and vacuuming our rugs, so said the supporters of these cute gadgets. An early proponent of robots was someone who had brought electronic gaming to the cultural forefront and thought he could do it again with robots, none other than Nolan Bushnell, the father of Pong, who also founded the Androbot company. Androbot was one of a number of companies funded by Catalyst Technologies, a venture capital company operated by Bushnell. Androbot’s BOB (Brains On Board) was the highlight of the January 1983 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where it fetched cans of Budweiser for fascinated onlookers.

Androbot also built the three-foot tall Topo, a white plastic robot on wheels; he had a definite body and a head with light-up eyes, but no arms. Like many of the robots of the early 1980s, Topo could be fed programs created with a microcomputer. He could also talk! The computer communicated with Topo via a remote infrared link. Once he had his instructions, Topo could carry out his owner’s commands, which were given either via the computer keyboard or through a joystick.

Topo from Androbot

BOB looked a lot like Topo but had more capability. He had an internal 8086 microprocessor and three megabytes of memory and talked in a human-like voice, using stored phrases. He came with the Androbot Control Language, which could be used to program BOB for custom purposes. BOB could be connected to an Androcart, a little wagon that could hold items you wanted BOB to ferry around. If you wanted BOB to bring you a beer, you had to buy the Androfridge; this was the only refrigerator BOB could open. He didn’t use an arm either, but had a little box on his side that had a claw-like hand that could hold a can.

Bushnell expected robots to be part of everyday life by the year 2000. But early Topos had a high failure rate and BOB wasn’t ready to sell until 1984. By then, the company was already in trouble. Androbot had planned an Initial Public Offering (IPO), but its sales were so poor, the IPO never happened and the company was forced to lay off much of its workforce.

Androbot was in the news a lot because of the celebrity status of its chairman, Nolan Bushnell, who was an industry icon. But there were other companies out there making robots too. Just like the late 1970s had been a time when the idea of microcomputers took hold, the early 1980s saw the rise of this idea of the smart machine that moved about the home. Arctec made a powerful robot called Gemini, that could speak and accept voice commands. The company’s literature suggested parents buy one for their children — “You can program the robot to tutor your children in most any subject, such as spelling, reading, history, music or math.” The claims for Gemini are impressive, but most, like the quote above, are preceded with “you can program…” That was the problem; as with the early microcomputers, there was a lack of ready software.

Hubot, the robot every household would want.

Toy companies got into the act too. The Tomy company produced the Omnibots, which were kid-sized robots with blinking red eyes and arms. An optional tray could hold drinks that Omnibot could bring its owner. More than a toy, Omnibot could move about the room without bumping into anything and grasp objects in its hand. Radio Shack also offered a robot arm that was mainly for fun and experimentation.

A toy robot from Tomy had a tray that could bring drinks.

One company that thought every affluent household would want a robot was the Hubotics company. Their Hubot was introduced at the 1984 Winter Electronics Show. Hubot was unique among robots in being a black and white TV, a radio, and a computer. His “face” was a computer screen. Inside, he operated on CP/M and used the SpeakEasy programming language. The company billed Hubot as “an automated home appliance.” A book by Texe Marrs, published in 1985, has this caption under a picture of a Hubot in a kitchen, with a smiling lady nearby: “Hubot is a functional household robot that appeals to housewives, working parents and children alike.” [Texe Marrs, The Personal Robot Book, TAB Books, 1985]

The Androbots, Hubot, and Gemini were very expensive, but another company made a more affordable hobbyist robot that had wide appeal. This company was Heathkit, which was well known at the time for its electronic project kits. Heathkit would sell you kits for building TVs and stereo systems that had a good reputation among technical people. They also sold kit computers. So when they came out with their cute little Hero robot, it enjoyed brisk sales. Heathkit eventually made four robot models but the Hero I was the most popular. Hero looked more like R2D2 than like a man, but it did have a “trainable” arm. It could detect sound, light, motion, and obstacles and travel over a preprogrammed course. Heathkit did not create Hero to be a household appliance; instead they offered it for educational purposes. Like other Heath-kits, you had to assemble Hero. The little robot needed no external computer to program it and was quite a hit with kids. It offered them a chance to learn about robotics while doing something fun.

Robert Doerr, a Michigan resident who built an impressive collection of robots and became possibly the only antique robot repairman in the country, says he got interested in robots in high school when he helped put together a Hero. “After that,” he says “I was hooked.” When we visited Doerr, his basement was full of Heros needing repairs. He was doing all the repair work for an educational company that offered seminars for grade school kids using robots from the 1980s. Our daughter took the seminar some years back and loved the robots! The kids had a blast competing for the remote controller that controlled the Omnibot and making him chase after other kids. Personal robots are as much fun today as they were when people like Nolan Bushnell thought everyone would want one.

Robert Doerr, with his friend, the Sony robot dog.

ROBOTS: The New Industrial Revolution?

So what went wrong? The microcomputer revolution just kept rolling along with personal computers increasing in power and popularity each year, but the robot companies all went out of business. Yet in 1981, a magazine called Robotics Age was publishing and advertising itself with these words:

ROBOTS: The New Industrial Revolution

Intelligent machines are rapidly appearing in factories, offices, homes, and automobiles. The face of the industrialized world is changing. Vast opportunities exist for those with a knowledge of this explosive field.

[ad in May/June, 1981 Robotics Age]

This magazine also sold T-shirts with the slogan “I live in the Robotics Age.” As an Age, it never took off and was short-lived. Only two companies were making personal robots by 1999: the RB5X from the General Robotics company, and the little Rhino Robotic arm. The RB5X followed the strategy of Heathkit in making its robot for educational purposes. They could be fed programs in BASIC written with any computer and downloaded into the robot via serial cable. The technology in the RB5X was not state-of-the-art. There was not enough money in personal robots for the company to do much upgrading.

It was not just Nolan Bushnell who thought robots would be big. Ed Roberts, father of the Altair, did an interview with Personal Computing for their January 1978 issue in which he said “We are probably five years away from seeing really serious robots in the sense of robots in the home but not much more than that.” In a sense he was right; five years later, in 1983, there was a flurry of investment in robots, but it was a quick spike on the chart, then a downward spiral.

Why didn’t the public buy robots the way they ultimately bought microcomputers? Robert Doerr says robots need to be easy to use, like turning on a light and none of the robots he’s collected are anywhere near that easy. The robots made in the early 1980s were conceived as household appliances, but in fact, they required quite a bit of technical knowledge to operate successfully. They may have resulted from the same kind of misconception that computer makers later made about “home computers.” Remember the IBM PC Junior? IBM thought people would want a smaller, less powerful computer in their home than the one they used for work. But the PC Junior was a dud, and so was every computer aimed at the so-called “home use.” It turned out that people wanted just as much power and often more at home than they had at work. At home, they played graphics-intensive games and used dial-up services (and later, the internet) that required peak performance. No one wanted a wimpy computer.

Microcomputers had followed mainframe and mini computers into the marketplace. Business people had a previous model — earlier big computers — that gave them a clue to the uses of smaller computers. They knew computers could do accounting, calculations, and text processing. These were general applications that would be of use to many small business owners. But robots had no prior model for doing anything useful in a home. There were 19th Century automata, which had been mainly for entertainment, and there were industrial robots that performed rote tasks like welding parts together. What parallel uses were there in a home? With computers, there were known uses, and buyers who were motivated to recreate those functions on an inexpensive microcomputer. But people didn’t know what to do with robots and they couldn’t imagine anything useful enough to be worth spending long hours programming.

There were also technological limitations. A robot in your home would have to be able to navigate inside the house and be able to carry out the unique tasks you would like to have done. Its programming would have to be custom or the robot would have to be easily teachable. None of the robots of that era could understand English, or simply be shown what to do once and then carry out the task. These are the capabilities that could have produced a robot revolution.

The main buyers of those early robots were hobbyists, who were also the first buyers for microcomputers. Perhaps if there had been a company with the resources and reach of a Tandy Corporation that might have created and sold a personal robot, this field might have flowered in the same way as microcomputers. But there was no Tandy to “prime the pump” for personal robots and no IBM to go after an emerging market. The personal robot was not to be.

There are advocates for a new robot revolution in the 21st Century. Rodney A. Brooks, head of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, declares in the pages of his book, Flesh and Machines, “Mankind’s centuries-long quest to build artificial creatures is bearing fruit… we are starting to see intelligent robots that can operate in unstructured environments, doing jobs that are usually thought to still require people.” [Flesh and Machines by Rodney A. Brooks, 2002, Pantheon Books] In the book, Brooks stated his belief that human and machine will merge as we develop artificial enhancements and replacements for human body parts. Humans, he says, will eventually accept robots as being like ourselves.

This prediction has certainly not come true. People have always been somewhat conflicted about use of robots. In past decades, there was a great fear that “automation” would put people out of work. No one wants to feel useless. Having a human-like machine do our work at home sounds good — or does it? Would it make us feel useless? Or worse, would we begin to fear our machine helpers? Could robots become so smart they might decide they don’t need us? Robots gone amok and eliminating humans has been a constant theme in science fiction. Is it a coincidence that the most successful of the robots, the Heathkit Hero and the RB5X were little canister-type robots that were cute and totally unintimidating, designed only for education and fun?

Robots were a big item at the 1983 West Cost Computer Faire. The guy in the motel room next to ours had a room full of robots. When he opened the door to his room, there inside was an army of little round R2D2-like robots, just waiting for their turn to fascinate visitors at the big computer show. Like everyone else who saw them, we loved watching the robots do things. Everyone did, but few bought. Androbot sold only a few hundred BOBs and sold Topos at fire sale prices before going out of business.

In retrospect, it seems amusing to think that these robot companies thought housewives would want a clunky piece of plastic lumbering around the house speaking stored words and doing…what? Could it wash the dishes, cook dinner, dust the furniture? It might amuse the children, but could you leave your kids alone with BOB as a babysitter? (Although Isaac Asimov’s robot stories postulated babysitting as an early robot function.) Could BOB stop the kids from playing with matches or call the Fire Department if a kid set the couch on fire? What were these companies thinking?

Our daughter Amy with a Hero robot at the Vintage Computer Festival in 2000.

Scams

In any new frontier there are the good guys and the bad guys. The TRS-80 world was mainly populated by good guys in white hats, but there were a few scoundrels who tried to take advantage of the public’s desire for new products. We’ve pointed out that most of the companies selling leading edge items were small and many ran unsophisticated-looking ads. So how would the public distinguish between these programmer-run microbusinesses and someone out to cheat them? It didn’t take much to look like you were in business.

One of the earliest computer companies was Sphere out of Bountiful, Utah. They actually made a self-contained computer that included a video monitor two years before the TRS-80 Model I appeared on the market. However, according to Stan Veit, who got the first Sphere for his Computer Mart store in New York City, this early machine was poorly designed and never worked right. When he displayed one in his booth at the Trenton Computer Show in 1976, he says, “lots of people had bought Sphere computers and computer boards direct from the factory and almost every one had a complaint. They all headed to my booth to express their ire in no uncertain terms.” But at least the computer existed. Later, Sphere advertised something called the Micro-Sphere, but, says Stan Veit, the Micro-Sphere “was a complete fraud. The pictured computer was made of plaster, and Sphere never built the real thing.” But Veit, who finally sent back all his Sphere parts before the company went under, adds this: “So Sphere passed into history with their contribution of the first all-in-one desktop personal computer. The first real computer to use that idea was the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III.” [Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer, WorldComm Publisher, 1993]

Sometimes the scam involved selling a working computer, but the buyer was not getting what he thought. In 1984, a Taiwan company began manufacturing phony Apple II computers; at $300 to $500, they outsold the real Apple II by ten to one in Taiwan. But trouble came when the perpetrators tried to sell these machines in the US. Federal customs service agents and the Philadelphia police nabbed some of the people involved and charged four men and three companies with violating the copyright act, smuggling, and sale of counterfeit machines. The phony Apples had been smuggled into the country with the ROM chip and motherboard removed to try to prevent identification, but the feds were still able to seize $9.2 million worth of phony computers over a 15 month period. That’s a lot of Apples! ! !  [“Counterfeiters Convicted” by Peggy Watt, InfoWorld, May 14, 1984]

The most famous of the computer crooks was a guy who called himself “Colonel David Winthrop” or “Colonel Whitney” who bilked the Southern California Computer Society out of thousands of dollars in a group purchase scheme. The subsequent lawsuits destroyed the club. By the time he got around to running a scam on TRS-80 users, he was a veteran of dishonest scenarios. In 1977, he had started a company called DataSync that offered computer products in national magazines, but did not deliver. Sent to prison for fraud, he broke out of Chino State Prison in February of 1978. He went by a number of different names, but the Santa Maria California police department believed his real name to be Norman Henry Hunt, Jr. They issued a bulletin seeking information on his whereabouts that was printed in Kilobaud magazine. The bulletin explained his mode of operation, which turned out to be an accurate description of what he did to his next group of victims, many of whom were TRS-80 owners. [“Around the Industry” by John Craig, June 1978 Kilobaud] Incredibly, though the magazine printed a warning (with pictures) of the scam artist, they themselves were running his bogus ads less than a year later. Creative Computing, no wiser than Kilobaud, published a center spread ad that was never paid for.

In 1979 Hunt had moved to Tucson Arizona and was using the name Jim Anderson. He and a wife, Lee, organized a business with Perry Pollack, incorporating as World Power Systems. They rented an office, hired employees, bought a lot of electronic equipment and took out ads in Kilobaud Microcomputing, Byte, and other magazines.

An ad in the April 1979 issue of Kilobaud Microcomputing showed a smiling and innocent-looking young man sitting at a work bench with a component board in his hand. The headline next to it read “HELLO FELLOW COMPUTERIST…” Another picture showed an attractive young woman in jeans sitting at a table that held a TRS-80 Model I and some electronic testing equipment. The ad was in the form of a homespun letter from Perry and Korinne Pollack. Mr. Pollack promised “to supply you with the most for your investment and the highest quality possible.” In the next paragraph, readers are put at ease by an astounding offer by Mr. Pollack to be available 24 hours a day. “I have a telephone answering service that will put your call through to me anytime day or night or if you wish you can call me at home at (602) 886-5037. If you have a problem, question, or just want to talk, give me a call.” One has to wonder when Mr. Pollack would have time to design the boards his ads touted.

The World Power Systems ad. Their products were too good to be true.

The products advertised by World Power Systems were amazing add-in boards, at extremely reasonable prices. Maybe a little too good to be true? World Power Systems targeted the owners of S-100 bus computers, running a fuzzy picture of an interface board called the 3 S+P Interface Card. This appeared in a full-page ad stating the card had three serial ports and one parallel port and would work with any software and any configuration. There was enough technical-sounding information to fool users into thinking it was legitimate. In a user-group discussion some twenty years later, a writer remembering the scam commented that “if you looked REAL close at the pictures of the boards in the ad, you might notice that while there were components on the boards, there were NO traces on the boards!” Another writer replied that “There were traces. There just weren’t enough traces. And the components were packed too densely on most of the boards they showed in the photographs. Sure, you could make boards that dense by going multi-layer, but not for the prices they were asking. Back then multilayer boards were very expensive." But the product looked good to thousands of computer owners and orders poured in.

Another too-good-to-be-true product was their Serial Parallel I/O Module which offered eight serial and eight parallel ports in one small box. Each of the eight serial ports supposedly had dip-switch selectable baud rates and could be configured for RS-232 or current loop operation. The price? $129.95 as a kit or $149.94 assembled, low enough to attract many orders. Also popular were the TRS-80 to S-100 bus cable adapter and an S-100 EPROM programmer. Incredibly, they ran pictures of everything. The perpetrators knew enough to assemble something that looked believable to most people.

The way the scam worked was that early buyers got products and initially suppliers were paid, often with cash. But as the company established credibility, it began to ask suppliers for credit, even as it ordered more product. The employees at World Power Systems could see the company was not shipping most of the orders, but they were told suppliers were behind in providing the parts. As the company shipped fewer orders and failed to pay suppliers and complaints were coming in, the crooks would select a “fall guy,” someone who would be promoted to president. The schemers would then say they were going on vacation, load up vans with the products and equipment that had not been paid for, clean out the bank account and leave town. The product would then be sold in another town at low prices.

There were a few people familiar with the microcomputer landscape who were suspicious of World Power System, a company that appeared from nowhere with such fantastic-looking products. One was electronics dealer Bill Godbout. Another was magazine editor John Craig of Kilobaud, who called to do a story on the company — the same John Craig whose name appeared under the information in the June 1978 Kilobaud on the scam artist. That was the signal for Anderson to fold up shop.

The man who called himself Jim Anderson made the mistake of taking two young ladies, employees at the company, with him in the van as he fled town, telling them they were going to computer classes in Florida and that they were not to tell their parents where they were going. He said the trip was top secret. One of the girl’s parents was suspicious and checked with the parents of the other girl. They also asked a friend who worked in the highway patrol to look into it. The police put the Anderson home under surveillance and watched as Lee Anderson made trips to three banks. Eventually the police got search warrants for the Anderson and Pollack homes and found merchandise and records relating to World Power Systems.

Meanwhile, one of the girls traveling with Anderson learned that she was not going to computer classes after all and that the stuff in the van was going to be resold. She managed to escape and call her parents, who told her to stay where she was until local police could pick her up. She was returned safely to Tucson where she helped police locate more of the equipment, over half a million dollars worth. Some was found in lockers the company had rented. Perry Pollack was arrested, but Jim and Lee Anderson were not apprehended until months later when they were picked up in Hawaii, thwarted from enjoying the fruits of their crime on the beaches of Waikiki. [“Anatomy of a Scam” by Terry Kepner, Kilobaud Microcomputing, October, 1979]

What were these peoples’ real names and who were the nice-looking people whose pictures appeared in the ads? Apparently they were duped by Anderson or “Colonel Whitney” or whoever he was.

6   Selling it in the Magazines

Why Magazines Were Important

The glue that held together the TRS-80 user community was the magazines. What was interesting about this was that none were sponsored by Radio Shack or sold by Radio Shack. Radio Shack had as many as 6000 stores across the country which sold the TRS-80, but the stores offered little in the way of support. Some had knowledgeable salespeople and some didn’t. For example, the March/April 1982 DOSPlus newsletter had a review of the Eighty/Apple Computer Show in New York City which stated that “during a visit to a Radio Shack Computer Center on Fifth Avenue in NYC, the store manager seemed totally unaware that the single largest TRS-80-oriented show was happening five blocks from his store.” This kind of ignorance of the resources available to users was typical.

ROM was an early computer hobbyist magazine. This issue is from February, 1978.

The field of personal computing was new and the traditional magazines that covered what was then the “data processing” business were not paying attention to the new microcomputers. The magazines that covered the new hobby computer kits were the electronics magazines and Wayne Green’s ham radio magazine, 73. The two largest hobbyist publications were Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics, both of which had sponsored computer kit projects for their readers. It was Popular Electronics, of course, that was responsible for the introduction of the Altair, the seminal event that triggered the personal computer revolution. These magazines, however, aimed their content at people who liked to put together projects. With the introduction of complete computers like the TRS-80, the Apple 2 and the PET, personal computing moved beyond the audience served by electronics magazines.

The July 1978 issue of Wayne Green’s Kilobaud magazine

Magazines began appearing that were targeted to users of specific computers like the TRS-80. As an indication of the explosion of magazines aimed at TRS-80 users, a little publication called The Eighty editorialized in its premier issue of January, 1980, “What, another new TRS-80 publication? Aren’t there dozens already?” This magazine, printed on cheap newsprint, stated it would be free to TRS-80 owners and have low ad rates. It promised not to inflate its circulation numbers as it insisted other publications were doing.

An article by Stan Veit for the 1984 book Digital Deli (Veit owned an early computer store in New York City and was later editor of Computer Shopper) also mentioned the large number of publications: “To fill the information vacuum left by poorly written manuals and uninformed salespeople, the computer magazines have increased with rabbit-like speed. At last count there were some 450 titles to choose from, up from just two magazines in 1975.” Some of these magazines, like 80 Micro, were for users of a specific computer, but others were targeted to a particular use or market, like Computer Retailing or Link-Up.

Once users bought the computer, they wanted software, help with programming, and information about how they could use their computer. User groups and computer clubs formed to meet these needs, but they could not do it all. To a great extent, the user groups helped spread the word about the magazines. Users would never have found computer magazines by visiting a Radio Shack store because Radio Shack did not stock them. Ed Juge, who was the Tandy Director of Computer Merchandising, says Radio Shack was simply not set up to distribute time-sensitive material like magazines.

But that explanation did not satisfy publisher Wayne Green who maintained a hostile relationship with the company whose product made his magazines possible. Green started in publishing with 73 Magazine for ham radio operators and went on to publish Byte. Juge had written an article on the TRS-80 for Green’s Kilobaud magazine that was later chosen by readers as “article of the year.” Juge was also writing programs, mostly games, which he initially offered to Tandy, but was turned down. He later found the Tandy buyer had not even looked at them. So he offered his games to Wayne Green for Green’s Instant Software. Green liked what he saw and began marketing Juge’s games. One popular item was Space Trek, based on Star Trek.

Juge came to the attention of Lew Kornfeld, who was president of Radio Shack, because of his “article of the year” piece on the TRS-80. As Juge explains it, “He (Kornfeld) thought I did a good job of explaining the technology in an understandable fashion and offered me a job.” Once Juge was working for the Radio Shack chain, Wayne Green contacted him wanting Radio Shack to carry Green’s software. He also wanted Radio Shack to carry 80 Micro magazine, but neither ever happened and Juge got stuck in the middle of numerous disputes between Green and Tandy management.

As Juge tells it, “When Wayne initially approached us, we told him to pick a half-dozen or so of his best programs and submit them for consideration. We would have been quite happy to buy them. But Wayne insisted we take everything he had and refused to consider just a few.“ Wayne Green was a hard man to deal with, stubborn and opinionated. Juge would find dealing with Wayne Green one of his major tasks in the years to come as spokesman for the Radio Shack TRS-80 and as a sometimes columnist for Green’s magazine.

Desktop Computing was another publication from Wayne Green.

TRS-80 owners were looking for hardware add-ons and useful software and they were not buying it all from Radio Shack. Entrepreneurs jumped into the void created by Radio Shack’s inability to produce products fast enough and the growing demand. Computer magazines became an important source of information, both from articles penned by knowledgeable hobbyists and the ads that filled the pages. By the last month of the 1970s, Kilobaud magazine, which a year before had averaged about 150 pages with the Table of Contents on the cover, had become a fat 220 page magazine called Kilobaud Microcomputing bulging with ads for all kinds of computer products and with a slick color cover.

One of the ads in that issue was for another publication just making its debut, Computer Shopper. Here was a publication that would consist almost exclusively of ads. One of its mainstays would be the classified ads, where individuals could buy and sell. It was the beginning of a period of prosperity for the microcomputer industry and the TRS-80 in particular. With Tandy building computers as fast as they could and working on upgrades, there was plenty of room for enterprising people to create hardware or software products for the growing ranks of TRS-80 owners. The magazines gave these entrepreneurs a place to sell their products.

A number of routine practices of the early magazines seemed a bit short of high ethical standards. One was the marriage between magazine publishing and software publishing. Some magazine publishers had software divisions and sold their own software in their magazines, competing against their advertisers. For example, Wayne Green had Instant Software and Creative Computing had Sensational Software. A magazine from H&E Computronics declared itself on a cover banner “The original TRS-80 Magazine” but it gradually became a catalog for Computronics software. Another magazine that was really a collection of ads was Micro-Line, which was also a software company; their publication had an ad on the cover and very little in the way of content. Even so, the newsstand price for each issue was $1.75.

It seems a natural connection, software and magazine publishing, since magazines review software and there’s a lot of overlap in the skills needed to create magazine content about a specific computer and the skills involved in evaluating software. But did it give the magazine publishers an unfair advantage? Would they review competing software offerings? The answer was never clear.

Kilobaud magazine morphed into Microcomputing, with a color cover. The May 1981 issue featured word processing.

Wayne Green also sold books in the pages of his Kilobaud magazine under the banner of KB Books; no less than four pages of books on computers and amateur radio appeared in an ad in the May 1979 issue. In the same issue, Green pushed subscriptions to his 73 Magazine, with a pitch that read “Every month there are computer articles in 73…a lot of them. Fact is, since February 1976, 73 Magazine has published articles directed to the Computerist or Soon-to-be Computerist. There are also a lot of articles that computer hobbyists will be needing to read which are not exactly computer articles, such as on regulated power supplies…on making printed circuit boards…on how various circuits work…”.

Green started Kilobaud (later called Kilobaud Microcomputing, then just Microcomputing) after losing Byte magazine to his ex-wife. Green had put the magazine’s ownership in his wife’s name because he was having tax problems, a decision he no doubt later regretted. Kilobaud was widely read by hobbyists. His other magazines were Desktop Computing (to cover business computing), 80 Microcomputing (for TRS-80, name later shortened to 80 Micro), Microcomputing Industry (for people selling computer products), Load 80, a cassette magazine that consisted of pre-typed programs that appeared in 80 Micro, Hot Coco (covering the TRS-80 color computer, based on the 6809 chip and introduced in 1981 along with the Model III). He also started a magazine for the Apple II called InCider and later started Pico for owners of portable computers. In addition to his magazines, he operated Instant Software and KB Books (later Wayne Green Books).

Initially, Kilobaud covered the TRS-80 as well as the other popular microcomputers, but Green saw an opportunity to create his first computer-specific magazine. What would become the most influential medium in the TRS-80 world, 80 Micro, premiered in January 1980 — a new decade, a new magazine. Writing in his Publisher’s Remarks in the April, 1980 Kilobaud Microcom-puting, Wayne Green explained his reasoning: First, there was too much TRS-80 material and it was pushing out the other content in Kilobaud Microcomputing, and second, he wanted to keep ad prices down so new vendors would have a place to sell their wares. “High ad costs keep many new and small firms out of the business. Splitting the coverage of the market into two magazines allows us to keep ad rates for each low enough to encourage new firms to start and flourish.” And 80 Micro did just that.

80 Micro

For us and other software sellers, 80 Micro was extremely important. Our ads every month generated most of our sales. Each month we got back a list of names of people who had completed the Reader Service Card and requested information about our products. We would then send them a packet of information about Lazy Writer and other products we sold, along with an order form. Just as Wayne Green was locked out of selling through Radio Shack, so were we and hundreds of other small companies with good products. Despite his rough edges, Wayne Green had a symbiotic relationship with the companies that made his magazine fat and prosperous; everyone benefited.

Green’s Instant Software, which was already in operation when he started 80 Microcomputing, also distributed product in computer stores. An ad in a 1979 copy of Kilobaud Microcomputing shows some of the distributors were the Computerland chain, Byte shops, and various independent stores. But it always rankled Green that Radio Shack would not do business with him. Early issues of Kilobaud, from the 1970s, had Radio Shack ads. But the pages of those later fat issues of 80 Micro were devoid of ads from Tandy. It didn’t matter. There were so many other pitchmen out there selling software and hardware add-ons for the TRS-80 — us among them — that Green once wrote ‘It’s not the ‘trash-80’; it’s the ‘cash-80.’”

Ed Juge says Green couldn’t forgive Tandy for not carrying his software and magazines, even though he was making loads of money. He says Green once told him he understood Radio Shack’s reasoning, but he didn’t care and intended to use his editorial power to pressure Radio Shack. Juge quotes Green as saying to him one time at a trade show “I tried my best to work with you (meaning the company) but you were too stupid to buy my software and sell my magazines. I don’t need you. Now I’m going to do my best, editorially, to break you.” Juge countered that he didn’t want to hear any blackmail threats. Green replied that it wasn’t blackmail, it was a promise.

In fact, Green rarely wrote anything complementary about the Tandy crew. In his 80 Remarks column in the number one issue of 80 Microcomputing, Green started out this way:

First, I want to make it clear that this magazine is not connected with Radio Shack or Tandy. I call ‘em as I see ‘em and don’t pull the punches. Where Radio Shack deserves credit, they’ll get it. Where I think they are screwing up, I’ll be blunt about that. I don’t ask that you like me — that’s your problem, not mine. I like you and I will be working for your best interests…and so will the magazine.

Green went on to list the drawbacks of the TRS-80 — “yes, I know about the keyboard bounce problem and the crummy cassette-loading circuit… yes, the monitor has the bandwidth of a cheap black and white television set instead of clear and crisp graphics, but hells bells, it is a cheap black and white television set…yes the keyboard needs more air blown into it to keep it cool, and the power supply is marginal.” But, in his characteristically schizophrenic way, Green adds “What it is is a damn good computer at a fantastic price.” He also invited his readers to write articles, which, over the years, many of them did.

Wayne Green's 80 Remarks column was always full of outrageous opinions.

That first issue carried a large two-page color ad from Radio Shack. By this time, the name “TRS-80” was being applied to what the ad called “a growing family of cost-effective computers, peripherals, and software.” It also makes the claim that over 100,000 TRS-80s had been sold. There was evidence of a real effort at servicing the computers they sold. The ad states “We’ve opened 50 specialized Computer Centers, 100 expanded computer departments in Radio Shack stores, plus 105 service centers in the USA alone.” At this point, the only computers they had were the Model I and the Model II, but they offered disk drives, printers, and extra memory.

Tandy benefited from a forum like Green’s magazine that reached TRS-80 owners and showed the add-ons they had to offer, but it was apparently an uneasy truce that didn’t last. The Radio Shack ads dwindled and disappeared from the pages of Green’s magazine. In response to our questions, he emailed us these comments about Radio Shack ads in 80 Micro:

For most of 80-Micro’s life in my hands I refused to let Radio Shack advertise. I did at first, but Roach [Tandy CEO John Roach] quickly started trying to throw their weight around. After a year of prohibiting their ads Ed Juge and a couple of other Radio Shack VIPs came up to talk me into letting them advertise again. I said okay, but only if they didn’t try to pull the 600 pound gorilla stuff. A couple of months later I got another note that they were upset over something, so I said okay, NO MORE ADS. Ever. They responded by stopping all promotional information, or inviting me (us) to any Radio Shack previews, etc.

Ed Juge remembers it a bit differently. He says “After a year or so of putting up with monthly editorials from Wayne in which he bad-mouthed Tandy about everything imaginable... including much based only in Wayne’s fertile imagination... we decided it just wasn’t productive to continue any kind of relationship with him, including advertising.” He also says he quit writing a column for 80 Micro because he got tired of replying to Green’s denunciations. He adds that after the magazine was sold to Pat McGovern at CW Communications, “that as long as Wayne didn’t write further editorials, we would reinstate advertising.”

Wayne Green was never modest about the role of his magazine, which he says in this pitch for subscriptions, is "the best thing that ever happened ot the TRS-80."

Juge also recounts Green’s attitude about spreading rumors, even when Juge says Green knew them to be untrue. He says Green once explained that “rumor is the only way a writer has to influence public opinion without suffering lawsuits.”

Wayne Green’s dislike for the Tandy decision-makers was blatantly apparent to the readers of 80 Microcomputing. In a tongue-in-cheek editorial blast at Tandy in 1982, Green wrote about the “fair” policies of Radio Shack by saying “rather than force TRS-80 owners to buy anything more than the basic unit at Radio Shack stores, Tandy has arranged it so over 90 percent of the software available for their system must be purchased from independent computer stores or mail order firms. What could be fairer than that?” He continued in like manner, castigating Tandy for not carrying magazines in their Radio Shack stores. “You want a magazine?” he asks rhetorically from the pages of 80 Microcomputing, “None whatever are available at Radio Shack…even this publication which takes up Radio Shack documentation where their own documentation leaves off, is only available outside of Radio Shack stores.”

He also takes jabs at the lack of service and knowledge at Radio Shack stores by pointing out the better service at independent computer stores: “These [independent] stores are often a valuable source of information as well, since they are in the computer business 100 percent, not just carrying a small shelf of computers in amongst hi-fi, auto sound, CB and so forth like most Radio Shacks.”[80 Remarks column by Wayne Green, 80 Microcomputing, March 1982]

The May 1981 80 Microcomputing with Wayne Green at the helm.

Wayne Green’s 80 Micro magazine provides a history of the problems, interests and concerns of TRS-80 owners. The first issue had articles on a program to eliminate the notorious keyboard bounce, several articles on overcoming problems loading files from cassette, an article explaining what’s involved in getting a disk drive, an article on how the video memory is mapped and why lower case cannot be displayed, an electronic file card system for disk drive owners, and an article on how to get use of extra variables in Level I BASIC. It was 146 pages of helpful information written by TRS-80 enthusiasts.

Most important for those of us who sold TRS-80 products were the ads. We advertised in each issue of 80 Micro and would get an early copy before the magazine hit the newsstands. We would eagerly look at the ads to see who was introducing a new product, who was making new claims or had new versions of their product. While the articles illustrated the users’ concerns, the vendor community of which we were part, was intensely interested in who was selling what and for how much. If there was anything new for the TRS-80, there would be an ad for it in 80 Micro.

Through the early 1980s, 80 Micro was a magazine written by computer zealots, with colorful characters as columnists. Jake Commander was one of those columnists. Born in Birmingham England, after dropping out of school, he had been in a rock band called the Andycaps playing in raunchy British clubs. In an article about him in 1982, Jake recalled a classic barroom brawl that began with an unhappy patron wobbling the microphone in front of one of the band members. Jake explained “I took my real nice semi-acoustic guitar and went bolting over there at the speed of light and just cracked this kid over the head with my guitar. There was this terrible splintering crunch and this kid flew — like he was running backwards— because of the momentum with which I hit him. His gang parted like the Red Sea and the kid went flying through them landing in the seats.” Chairs began to fly and the fight ended with Jake’s head inside the base drum as the police were called and the place finally cleared.

Jake later lived in a hut he built on public land set aside for gardens. But he and friends were not doing any gardening; they were building radio equipment to bounce signals off the moon, an obsessive idea of Jake’s, but his equipment was wrecked by vandals. In a twist of fate, the only thing the vandals left intact were the pages of a programming course that Jake had sent for. He moved into the band’s van, but later quit the Andycaps for another band while working in a paint factory. At that time, he discovered the book, Digital Computer by D.D. McCracken. As he describes it, “That book taught me everything I needed to know about programming until this day…it started to pull me in. I started getting a kick out of it.”

Jake Commander wrote a popular column for 80 Micro.

He looked for a job as a programmer, but found he could only get hired as a computer operator. His employer soon discovered he could program and he took on more duties. After he got an insurance settlement for a Reliant Scimitar car that caught fire as he drove it, Jake used the money to visit the United States. While in the US, he got a job as an engineer for a band’s tour. He also toured in Australia where he first saw ads for the TRS-80. Returning to Los Angeles with the band, he immediately bought a TRS-80 and started programming. Going back to England after the band tours were over, he discovered his old company had closed down and he bought a bunch of their used terminals cheap and sold them as printers to microcomputer owners. Using the money from those sales, he bought a plane ticket to return to Los Angeles with the idea of working as a record producer.

But Jake found jobs hard to come by, so he switched his focus to selling programs. He sent programs to Tandy, but months went by with no word. He tried Wayne Green’s Instant Software, with better luck. Green bought all the programs Jake sent. But he needed a source of income right away, so he asked Instant Software for a job and was offered an interview. With his last $50 in his pocket, he flew to New York and met with two Instant Software representatives. He got the job. But soon after that the editor of 80 Micro discovered Jake and engaged him to write his infamous column. He later left 80 Micro and became a contributing editor at Creative Computing, writing a column about the TRS-80.

The September, 1982 80 Micro covered word processers - prosperous times for the magazine at 402 pages.

Dennis Bathory Kitsz was another columnist who was not your ordinary magazine writer. Like Jake Commander, Kitsz was a musician who got into computers through his interest in synthesizers, learning electronics so he could build and maintain his music equipment. He bought his first TRS-80 when he took a job at a Radio Shack to support himself while working on music compositions. In 1977, he produced an opera called Plasm Over Ocean. He wrote the script, made every instrument, composed the music, played the lead character, and designed the wardrobe. His production company was called the Laszlo Toth School of Music, named for the man who attacked the Pieta statue with a hammer in the Vatican. He once took a job as a typist because the job included use of a copy machine and he had a lot of musical compositions he wanted to copy. He came to the attention of 80 Micro when he offered a mail order assembly language program through a free ad in On-Line magazine. The editor of 80 Micro called him and asked if he had more programs. Kitsz said yes and also said he’d like to write a column. His 80 Applications column became one of the magazine’s most popular. He wrote the best selling of the “Mystery” book series on the TRS-80. Later, he opened a software business, selling his own work and that of others. Once the TRS-80 faded, Dennis Kitsz remained a musician, selling music on MP3.com (including a wonderful composition he made up using sound clips from an interview he did with Bill Gates). He continued with his first love, writing and performing operas.

But things changed at 80 Micro. In late 1983, Green sold his magazine operation to IDG (under their CW Communications division) and the character of 80 Micro underwent a radical shift. Instead of being written by a bunch of weird fanatics who loved their TRS-80s, the staff mutated into publishing professionals who worked for a big company. Instead of Wayne Green pontificating in the front of the magazine, we got polished and politically-correct comments from editor Eric Maloney. The last issue to feature a Wayne Green column was the September 1983 issue, in which he tried to explain why he “sold out.” Green stated that the previous spring, “some chaps from one of the bigger banks” called to say they had a potential buyer for his magazines. Green says he wasn’t that interested because “I enjoy what I’m doing more than anything else I can imagine. But what would it cost to listen, right?” He says his growth in sales was “around 50 percent a year for the last eight years, limited only by all growth being 100 percent self-financed.” He says the word got out that he might sell and “new suitors started calling every few days.” When one of the suitors “mumbled vaguely about $50 million” it got Green’s attention. He sold. But he claimed it was only so he could start new magazines at a faster rate. Although he called it a merger, Wayne Green never again voiced his views in the pages of 80 Micro.

Green says he signed a preliminary agreement with Pat McGovern, who was then publishing Computerworld, on May 22 and the date “was significant to me because it was eight years to the day when I called the editor [Byte’s first editor, Carl Helmers] of a small micro newsletter to come up and discuss starting a magazine… and we agreed to give it a try. Five weeks later the first issue of Byte went to the printer.”

Green was never afraid to be himself, no matter how divergent his views or beliefs from the mainstream. He was an early advocate for smoke-free environments and would only hire non-smokers. He refused to move to Silicon Valley, preferring the quiet and pristine environment of Peterborough, New Hampshire. He explained it thus: “The quality of life is wonderful and the cost of living is far less than New York or Silicon Valley… we’re working out of old houses, converted motels and barns, and so on. This is not IBM.” [80 Remarks column by Wayne Green, 80 Micro, September 1983]

At a website he later started, he promoted a book that says the moon landing was a hoax. Whatever you may think of Wayne Green, one thing is irrefutable: He was (and is) an original. With Wayne Green gone from the magazine, it began to change into something different. Like the computer it chronicled, its days were numbered.

We received an email from editor Eric Maloney in which he states “80 Micro had never been exclusively a I/III/4 magazine, but dealt with other Tandy lines as deemed necessary.” However, that ignores the fact that the I/III/4 was a specific family of computers, an upwardly-compatible progression. The MS-DOS Tandy machines were a different family, incompatible with the Models I/III/4, serving a different audience and serviced by different vendors. 80 Micro ceased being the glue holding together a real community with shared interests, but now tried to reach two distinct business eco-systems and increasingly reaching neither.

By December 1985 80 Micro had shrunk to 152 pages, was covering MS-DOS and the new kid on the block, Windows. Instead of BASIC, programmers were now using C.

The magazine did not prosper after its sale. We remember when Wayne Green ran it each year he would send his advertisers a large jug of maple syrup from New Hampshire, where he was located. In one of those later years, we got our yearly jug of maple syrup, but instead of getting the usual big jug, we got a very small jug. We knew the end was coming when we saw that tiny jug of syrup.

Professionals whose livelihood was not dependent on the Models I/III/4 could easily lump all the Tandy machines together, but that was not the reality for those of us whose lives were tied up with the I/III/4 family, and the demise of that family was painful for us. Wayne Green had started 80 Micro to be a computer-specific magazine, a concept he pioneered. Once you folded in the MS-DOS Tandy computers, it was no longer computer-specific, nor could its ads pull customers like they once did. It went from being computer-specific to company-specific.

When we found ourselves unable to afford any more ads in late 1984, we owed the magazine about $10,000. Our lawyer friend Walter settled with their lawyer for about $500 on the grounds that the magazine did not deliver what they promised — users of the Model I/III/4. We were not alone in finding 80 Micro no longer delivered the goods. George Gezcy, who owned JMG International, wrote us that he remembers having, in 1985, “a large 80 Micro bill that we eventually could not afford to pay....”

Editor Maloney went to work for a new IDG magazine in 1987. It was called PC Resources and employed the 80 Micro staff to put out the first issue which was dated April 1987 and published from Peterborough. Some of the regular advertisers in 80 Micro ran ads aimed at MS-DOS users in that issue. PowerSoft, a company known for its popular Super Utility program for TRS-80s, had a third of a page ad opposite the Table of Contents. They were selling other companies’ off-the-shelf software, but also offered a program called Super Utility/PC and TRSCROSS to move files from the TRS-80 to a PC. One of our rival word processors, LeScript, had a full-page color ad for an MS-DOS version of their word processor. It must have been a big effort for them to port their code to the PC, an effort we could not complete, and they must have paid some real money for that ad. Cornucopia software, Phil Manfield’s company that sold Electric Webster for the TRS-80, had an ad selling Whoops!, a spell checker and thesaurus; they were also selling LeScript. Another of our competitors, Prosoft, took a full page ad for Fontasy, which they euphemistically billed as a desktop publishing program for MS-DOS, but was a warmed-over version of their old Dotwriter/GEAP program for the TRS-80. However, none of these companies survived. In the TRS-80 world, they were big fish in a small pond, but in the ocean of IBM-compatible users, they were not even noticed among the sharks and whales. Computers, once used by geeks and a few brave small business people, were going mainstream and the TRS-80 eco-system had broken down. Computer-specific magazines, the glue that had held together the TRS-80 community, no longer existed, at least not for the TRS-80 family. Magazines now covered the “Intel- MS-DOS” world, which was splintered among many different hardware companies.

The idea that the Tandy MS-DOS machines were a kind of upgrade from the Model I/III/4 was false. It was no upgrade at all and Tandy, which had once had its own factories and own unique products, was reduced to being one retailer among many trying to make a splash in the new world of PCs. That same first issue of PC Resources had a huge section on PC clones. It listed 149 companies making “IBM-compatible” machines. Among those pages was Tandy, lost in the ocean of competition and destined to finally disappear from lists of companies that manufactured computers.

Computer User

The main rival to 80 Micro didn’t appear until November of 1983 and its introduction was a mistake that hurt the TRS-80 community. We first heard about it when we began getting large glitzy postcards and other mail pieces from the publisher of Interface Age magazine, all with the heading The Excitement is Just Beginning. These mailings told of a new magazine for TRS-80 users that would supposedly deliver great value to its advertisers. Looking at the high prices on their rate card was not very exciting and, for us, full page ads would mean doubling our monthly ad costs. We began to ask some of the other vendors we knew if they planned to run ads. No one was excited about this magazine, but we all felt we had to run ads. It seemed obvious to us that Computer User, the new magazine, would just reach the same audience as 80 Micro and would net us nothing. That turned out to be correct, but the first issue carried ads from all the major players in the TRS-80 world, including a two-page front inside cover and facing page ad from Radio Shack, still calling itself “the biggest name in little computers.” The ad prominently featured the Model 4 at $1999.

Computer User launched in November, 1983, but it was too late for another TRS-80 magazine.

Again under the banner of The Excitement is Just Beginning, publisher Robert S. Jones wrote in his Viewpoint column, “We believe the computer industry has been lacking a publication that effectively caters to the needs of you, the TRS-80 user, and many prominent people in the industry obviously agree.” We don’t know who these “prominent people” were and it surprised us that this publisher, who also published a fine magazine like Interface Age, could be so wrong. Magazines are supported by advertisers and the TRS-80 vendors were all tapped out.

We purchased only a small quarter page ad, but Prosoft and Logical Systems both ran two full page ads in that first issue which was 192 pages. By April of 1984 — just six months after the magazine’s introduction — both of those companies were absent from the now-96-page issue. David Lien’s company, CompuSoft, had an ad for Lien’s latest book, called Learning TRS-80 Model 4/4P BASIC. Articles covered the Model 4, the Model II and the Color Computer. But Computer User just kept losing advertisers. The June issue still carried a big two-page inside front cover spread from Radio Shack, but it was an ad for its MS-DOS computer, the Model 2000. The magazine’s size had dwindled to 80 pages and the advertiser list was slim, with few of the regular players listed. Ads for software for the Model 4 were virtually absent.

By August of 1984, Computer User had slimmed down to the size of a pamphlet, too skinny to print its name and issue number on the binding, which was simply a center staple. The 44-page issue had the smell of death. There was never room for this magazine in the TRS-80 world. The magazine was probably spawned by anti-Wayne Green sentiment; Green was the kind of person who brought on strong feelings, but there were not enough prosperous companies that hated Wayne Green to support Computer User. It died a well-deserved death, and we never paid all our ad bills. David argued to their lawyer that Computer User never delivered the customers they promised with so much ill-advised fanfare when The Excitement was Just Beginning. The lawyer said he had heard the same story from many other advertisers and settled for pennies on the dollar. Another advertiser, George Geczy (owner of JMG Software) called Computer User “a complete waste of money …we never received decent response from our ads...”

The November 1979 issue of Interface Age covered lots of different systems and though its focus was on business, its articles were quite technical.

Interface Age, the magazine that had spawned Computer User, had started as the newsletter for the Southern California Computer Society. Under the direction of Robert S. Jones, it became a business-focused magazine that covered the major microcomputers of its time. By the time Jones tried his hand at a computer-specific magazine, it was too late for another TRS-80 publication.

80-US Journal

Less important was 80-US Journal, which began as a regional publication in the Pacific Northwest, but which exclusively served the users of the Model I/III/4. This publication was for much of its life a coverless black and white small size rag written by enthusiasts. But it eventually grew into a slicker looking full size publication with a color cover and some inside color ads. It was read by TRS-80 die-hards and ran articles on programming, hardware, and computer people. The cheaper ad rates let small software companies reach their target audience. 80-US Journal always understood that TRS-80 really meant the model I/III/4, not the Tandy MS-DOS machines.

By June 1982, 80-US had become a slick publication with color cover.

True to the stereotype of early computer pioneers, 80-US Journal was born in a garage. Mike Schmidt, its founder, said in an editorial that he “gave up what might be called a ‘semi-lucrative’ job as a computer maintenance person and jumped into publishing with both feet.” He did it all himself at first, then added another person and a year into it, bought an old building to house the magazine. As he describes it, “It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. We had one phone line and it was busy most of the time.” [Editorial by Mke Schmidt, September/ October 1981]

80-US Journal served the hobbyist and small business market and was viable as long as that market and the TRS-80 product line existed, but would not survive its downfall. Like the other magazines, 80US Journal combined magazine publishing with selling software.

Creative Computing

Creative Computing was the very first magazine aimed at users of small computers, started by David Ahl, who had worked at Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) on its educational product line. It ran articles and columns on the TRS-80 as well as Commodore, Apple and other popular micros. The “TRS-80 Strings” column was the first and longest-running column on the TRS-80 in any magazine. Ahl, its publisher, had a degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University, an MBA from Carnegie-Mellon and later earned a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology. While he was at DEC, Ahl had promoted the concept of a small inexpensive home computer, but DEC waited until Ahl was gone to try to market such a product.

Ahl was able to push that vision through the pages of Creative Computing, which he founded in 1974, a full year before Byte. The magazine covered important events in the computer world, did interviews with well known computer industry people, reviews of new hardware, and articles about programming. It was a general interest computer magazine, a perfect place for computer retailers to advertise, especially mail order operations that carried software for all the popular micros. Many TRS-80 companies took out ads in Creative Computing.

By the July-August 1978 issue, Creative Computing had absorbed ROM magazine.

Ahl himself was familiar with most of the microcomputers of the time and was always an advocate of the idea that computers should be for ordinary people and they should be fun to use. When Ahl worked for DEC, his job was to promote minicomputers to educational institutions. He started a newsletter called Edu, which he expected to circulate among DEC owners, but he discovered non-DEC owners wanted it too and its circulation soared to 20,000. That gave him the idea for a computer magazine that would not be dependent on any one brand of computer. But he stuck around DEC long enough to hear his boss, Ken Olson, say he couldn’t see why anyone would want their own computer. Olson dropped a project to market a small computer.

Ahl left DEC to become Education Marketing Manager at AT&T, but he also began pursuing his idea for a magazine. He got it started by doing prodigious amounts of work himself, writing, taking photos, contacting authors, getting mailing lists, and designing the look of the magazine, which he christened Creative Computing. When he was finally ready to go with the first issue, he had only 600 subscribers. He took half the money he had and printed 8000 copies. He had not sought any advertising, so his only revenue was from the subscriptions. It was October 31, 1974. The 600 copies for the subscribers went to the post office the next day, but it took him three weeks to paste labels on the rest and sent them unsolicited to libraries and schools around the country. He repeated this process for the next three issues.

By August of 1975, Creative Computing had 2500 subscribers, but another event had occurred that shifted its focus. The Altair had appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics. Ahl saw opportunity in writing about this new phenomenon, the fulfillment of the idea he had once presented to Ken Olson at DEC. Where he had sought educators as subscribers, he now saw hobbyists were a major new source of readers. By late 1976, the magazine became slicker-looking and was running ads. Ahl hired Ted Nelson as editor and moved the operation into a two-family house in Morristown, New Jersey. Ahl recalled those days in an interview for the Tenth Anniversary edition of Creative Computing:

Ted used to come in at 5 p.m. or so and work all night long. That was okay, except his word processor had a noisy Qume printer, which was located in the kitchen directly below my bedroom. I’d tell Ted every night to wait until morning to print his stuff out, but Ted would forget and almost without fail, the printer would start up at 3 a.m. The other problem with having the system in the kitchen was that the IMSAI computer developed a habit of resetting itself whenever the refrigerator door was opened. But the house was fun. It gave us a feeling of camaraderie and it was a nice place for our Friday afternoon wine and cheese parties.

In a November 1982 review of the DEC Rainbow 100, a not-very-successful attempt by his old mini computer company to finally market a micro, Ahl talked about his own computing environment:

In my office I have a TRS-80 Model III which I use mainly for word processing with Electric Pencil and essential chores with VisiCalc. At home I have an Apple on which I run mostly VisiPlot, Executive Briefing System, and games. My kids have a TRS-80 Color Computer on which they are learning to program. At Creative Computing, we have one or two of nearly everything else — Atari, IBM, Vic-20, Pet, Sinclair, NEC, and a bevy of S-100 CP/M systems.

True to his roots, Ahl encouraged kids to learn about computers by publishing books on learning to program; one book was called Computers for Kids. He also allowed any school to reprint copies of articles from his magazine free of charge. Creative Computing sometimes published special editions, such as their annual Software Buyer’s Guide. The 1982 edition carried a review of our Lazy Writer program in which reviewer George Bond gave it high marks. The same issue carried a review by publisher David Ahl of a new version of the venerable Electric Pencil. He revealed his roots when he wrote “Users of Pencil on the Altair, IMSAI, Sol-20 and other early S-100 bus computers will remember the friendly personality of Pencil.” The issue was full of reviews to help users decide what to buy.

Like other magazine magnates, Ahl also founded a software mail order company, Sensational Software. Creative Computing Magazine, Creative Computing Press, Sensational Software, SYNC Magazine, and the Computer Education Center were all operating divisions of the parent company, Ahl Computing, Inc. Magazine publishers like Ahl who also sold software had to have enough credibility to get away with printing software reviews that their advertisers and readers believed were objective. In explaining how he tried to be fair in reviewing software in his publication, Ahl stated, “In treading a thin line like this, integrity is the best policy and I directed our reviewers to be as honest and objective as possible.” Ahl mainly succeeded in this, and Creative Computing was a popular and well-regarded publication.

The books published by Ahl’s company were also informative and helpful to new computer users. We still have a copy of Programmer’s Guide to CP/M edited by Sol Libes, published in 1982. This soft cover book is a collection of articles about CP/M. We also have the best-selling BASIC Computer Games, a book of program listings complete with cute cartoons, edited by David Ahl. This book is a revision of an earlier book published in 1973 while Ahl was still working at DEC; it has listings for 101 computer games that run in Microsoft BASIC.

Ahl bought up some smaller publications that were sinking to add to his subscriber list, including ROM, another early entrant into the computer magazine business, but he eventually found he lacked the capital to keep expanding. He finally sold out to publishing giant Ziff-Davis in 1981. Ziff-Davis promptly closed down Sensational Software and the educational division. Software still in inventory was sold off at computer fairs or remaindered in stores.

The December 1983 Creative Computing was 368 pages of great articles and ads.

Creative Computing itself survived until 1985, when Ziff-Davis decided the market once again dictated machine-specific (or maybe more accurately, OS-specific) magazines, basically, PC or Mac. They closed down Creative Computing and offered its 400,000 subscribers other magazines to complete their subscription. Most chose PC Magazine, which had been in a rivalry with PC World. PC World was started by the former staff of PC Magazine, whose owner, Tony Gold, had also sold out to Ziff-Davis to get the capital he needed to keep going. The staff quit as a group because they had believed they would be given 40% ownership of the magazine, but they were told that was a misunderstanding and only Gold got any stock. To get their revenge, the entire staff quit and started PC World. But that influx of Creative Computing readers pushed PC Magazine into the lead.

In its last year of publishing, Creative Computing got a lot skinnier and incorporated material from Computers & Electronics, which was what was left of Popular Electronics, the magazine that had played a key role in promoting enthusiasm for microcomputers. The interest in computers had been so intense it had eaten the market for electronics hobbyist material. Popular Electronics was later resurrected, but Creative Computing did not get a second chance.

David Ahl went on to pursue non-computer interests, working as a financial advisor. He also started another magazine having nothing to do with computers — about buying, restoring, and operating older military vehicles. That magazine lasted until 2001 when Ahl became an editor-at-large for an internet website covering the same topic, older military vehicles.

Computer News 80

The last bastion of the TRS-80 I/III/4 family was a little publication called Computer News 80 that, incredibly, survived into the late 1990s and began a website for TRS-80 buffs. While no one was making money off the TRS-80 any more, this little black and white coverless newsletter continued to serve those people who refused to give up the computer they loved. It had become something of a retro market, reverting back to the hobbyists who were its early users. Published from Casper, Wyoming, Computer News 80 ran articles on programs and where to get them, along with information on how to keep your TRS-80 going.

Computer News 80 was also the last known vendor for TRS-80 software. Their web site continued offering programs and documentation for TRS-80 along with a service to re-ink ribbons for old Radio Shack printers.

Other Magazines

There were many, many computer magazines and, as has always been the case in the publishing business, most of them did not survive for long. Some of the biggest and best tried to cover all the popular computers, including the TRS-80.

Personal Computing

Personal Computing was an early entrant into the ranks of computing magazines. It was started by David Bunnell, who had worked for Ed Roberts at MITS, publishing a newsletter for Altair users. Personal Computing covered all the popular computers, with news and articles that were not overly technical. They also published listings of simple programs in BASIC, mostly contributed by readers, that anyone could type into their computers. The title foreshadowed the new term for small computers as they went from “microcomputers” to “personal computers” and finally, to just being called PCs.

The January 1978 Personal Computing, the first since going monthly, featured an interview with Ed Roberts, who created the Altair.

Personal Computing covered the TRS-80 as one of the popular computers of the day. The February, 1979 issue ran an article with program listings called “Me and My TRS-80.” The author, Marolyn Pinney, had recently purchased her TRS-80. She wrote: “Recently there was an open house where I work. The big computers were running biorythms and drawing Snoopys. I brought in my Radio Shack computer for people to play with and was absolutely amazed at the response. I only had five games available, but everyone enjoyed them. Kids from about six years old, teenagers and one grandmother all tried their hand at Blackjack, Guess-a-Number and Friend.” Her comments typify the type of reader that bought Personal Computing. They were fond of their computers, but they weren’t hackers.

Ads in the 1979 issues of Personal Computing were heavily TRS-80 products, with multiple pages of ads from Radio Shack. Other ads were from RCA, which sold the tiny COSMAC VIP computer, 3M which was selling its diskettes, Altos computers which were Z-80 based and ran CP/M, and ads for the Commodore PET and products for it. There were also many ads for computer books and other magazines. By the end of 1981, Personal Computing was running ads for the Osborne I portable computer, the Sinclair ZX81 computer, Hayes modems, Okidata printers, and lots of software ads. The balance had shifted from hardware ads to software ads.

The December 1981 issue ran on its back cover a picture of a smiling William Shatner, TV’s Captain Kirk, holding a Commodore computer, the 4016. This successor to the PET is a serious-looking machine. The built-in tape recorder of the PET was gone, replaced with dual five and a quarter inch floppy disk drives. Unlike Radio Shack, Commodore promoted its outside developers. The ad states: “The Commodore Software Encyclopedia is a comprehensive directory of over 500 programs for business, education, recreation and personal use. Pick up a copy at your local Commodore dealer.”

David Bunnell had no background in technology, but was interested in computers as a new way of getting work done and wanted to know more about the people who were buying computers. He felt other computer users would also want to know more about how others were using their computers. As he said in an article for Creative Computing’s Tenth Anniversary issue, “I created the magazine I wanted to read.”

Like other neophyte publishers of the time, Bunnell ended up selling out to a big publishing house, Hayden Publishing. But Bunnell himself was not finished with publishing. He was also involved in the founding of PC Magazine, PC World, and Macworld magazines.

Popular Computing

Another magazine that covered the TRS-80 was Popular Computing, a McGraw-Hill publication that debuted in November, 1981. It was a successor to a quarterly publication called onComputing. McGraw-Hill decided they needed a monthly and conceived a magazine that would explain computers to ordinary people. Popular covered computers more from the users’ than a programmer’s point of view. They ran hardware and software reviews and industry news. As editor Chris Morgan wrote in the first issue, “Once relegated to basement tinkerers, the popular computer has emerged as a media star, the topic of prime time commercials featuring such luminaries as Dick Cavett touting the Apple II. People are beginning to believe that in its new miniature incarnation, the computer can solve problems instead of creating them.”

Popular Computing covered the popular systems of the day. This September 1982 issue features the Sinclair ZX Spectrum on its cover.

That premier issue featured a Radio Shack ad on the back cover. Above a picture of a Model III, the headline read “Low-Cost Computing Starts at Radio Shack With TRS-80 Model III.” The price for a 48K version with two floppy drives was $2495. The ad proclaimed “Dollar for dollar, the TRS-80 is your best buy in personal computers. And it’s available at 6100 Radio Shack stores and dealers and 160 Computer Centers — with 160 service centers nationwide.”

The second issue, December 1981, had a big article full of color pictures on the Model II. The reviewer wrote in glowing terms about Radio Shack’s business computer, alluding to the company’s schlock image by pointing out that those who laughed at the idea of a business computer made by Radio Shack had stopped laughing since the Model II was a winner in the marketplace. The article even praised the TRSDOS operating system by suggesting users did not need to buy CP/M for their Model II.

The December issue also featured a full-page ad from The Source, an early online service. The ad featured YES and NO check boxes; next to YES, it said “I want to turn my microcomputer into a powerful information and communications system. Send me your free information kit.” By the NO check box, it said “Thanks anyway, I’m already on-line with THE SOURCE.” Readers could get a free information kit by calling a toll free phone number. On the page that faced the ad was an article headlined “Telecomputing: Hooking Your Computer to the World.” It gave examples of a businessman getting flight information and the text of a news article, a farmer getting weather information, and a researcher finding information by connecting to a remote data base. It says all these services are actually available now (“now” being 1981) through telecomputing. Popular Computing rightly deduced that using the computer as a tool to quickly locate information would indeed be popular. The popularity of the early services foreshadowed the development and rapid growth of the internet; magazines like Popular Computing let users know about this exciting use for microcomputers.

Popular Computing grew and prospered. By September of 1983, the magazine was a healthy 240 pages, still sporting a Radio Shack ad on the back cover. This time it was for the Model 4, running hard against IBM with a chart comparing the features of Model 4 against the IBM PC and the Apple IIe. The chart, of course, made the Model 4 the clear winner, especially on price. What cost you $1999 when you bought a Model 4 would cost $3013 for an IBM PC or $2959 for an Apple. The ad also touted the backward compatibility: “We designed the Model 4 to be completely compatible with our existing line of word processing, time management, electronic filing — in fact all TRS-80 Model III software.”

Other Publishing Efforts

As the 1980s got going, microcomputers became a popular topic for books and special issue guides to fuel the growing public interest. There was an explosion of publishing around microcomputing.

The “Mysteries” Series of Books

In addition to magazines, there were numerous books published during the TRS-80 glory days, including the “mysteries” series published by IJG. IJG was an acronym for the International Jewelry Guild, an organization operated by Harvard C. Pennington who simply used the same business for his computer publishing efforts. Pennington, who lived in California, had worked for Hanna-Barbera Productions as a background painter for The Flintstones and other TV cartoon shows. He bought his TRS-80 to work on a program for diamond dealers that he originally created to run on a calculator.

Pennington wrote the first book of the series, TRS-80 Disk and Other Mysteries, himself, although he had first talked to Randy Cook, the TRSDOS creator, about writing it. Cook was too busy with other activities and turned down the proposal. However, the book sold so well that Pennington went into publishing full time and recruited other authors.

The “mysteries” series of books delved into the technical nuts and bolts of the TRS-80. TRS-80 Disk and Other Mysteries was followed by Microsoft BASIC and Other Mysteries. The best-seller of the series was The Custom TRS-80 written by Dennis Bathory-Kitsz. An ad for the book promised it would teach you “to do things to your TRS-80 that Radio Shack said couldn’t be done,” such things as reverse video, high resolution graphics and how to turn an 8-track tape into a mass storage device.

The most popular of the “mysteries” series of books was The Custom TRS-80 by Dennis Bathory Kitsz.

Pennington had a talent for impressing people. One person who knew him was Laurent Martres, a transplanted Frenchman who was acquiring rights to computer games back in the 1980s. Martres said at his web site that at their first meeting, he and Pennington talked non-stop for 11 hours about many subjects and ended up in Pennington’s private plane, flying above L.A. at three in the morning. About Pennington, he says “the man had a prodigious intellect combined with great imagination, artistic talent and sense of humor. He oozed genius and had left a lasting impression on everybody he touched.” One person he left a lasting impression on was Dick Miller, the consultant who trained Radio Shack store personnel. Miller said in an email “I also liked and was very impressed by Harv.”

The “mysteries” books published by Pennington may have imparted a lot of wisdom to their readers, but they didn’t please all the authors. Dennis Bathory-Kitsz had a completely different story about Pennington, stating that he never got paid for all the copies of his best-selling book. His complaints begin with the way his book was put together in 1980, recalling that an “English editor without a command of American English” had ruined the manuscript and he spent a month in California re-doing it. He says he got royalties for about 18 months, then never got any more, despite the fact that the book went through three printings. The last printing was the largest, and Kitsz says IJG went bankrupt after printing the books. He alleges that Pennington “sold the books as ‘scrap’ to a company out of state (hence, no royalties on those, a small clause in the boilerplate). The ‘scrap’ books went on sale at full price ... and the company was owned by, yup, the same folks who had owned IJG.“

The “mysteries” series of books from IJG were popular with TRS-80 users who wanted to know more about the innards of their computer.

The books sold for $29.95 and were available mail order or at book stores. IJG did a lot of advertising in the magazines for these books. IJG also became the last distributor for the venerable Electric Pencil, the first serious word processor for micros. In a full color, full page ad that appeared in Computer User in December of 1983, a screaming headline read: “50,000 bootleggers can’t be wrong.” And there was a personal endorsement under the signature H. C. Pennington. The text said “There are many word processors. Electric Pencil is one of them. I know. I use it every day, including Saturday and Sunday. It satisfies every need I have as a writer. We also use it at IJG…” The dark background of the ad featured a lightning flash reminiscent of the wizard with the lightning flashes from his fingers featured on the covers of the “mysteries” books. Electric Pencil author Michael Shrayer mentions Pennington in an article Shrayer wrote for Creative Computing’s Tenth Anniversary issue., referring to him as “…my old friend Harvard Pennington of IJG.”

After the TRS-80 era had passed, Penington wrote a book about astronomy and messier objects, working on it until his death in 1992. The “mysteries” books, like Pennington himself, have passed into the realm of history and legend.

List

List was a different kind of magazine that first appeared in the spring of 1983. Printed in gorgeous full color on glossy paper, it was a huge list of software companies. In the front though were articles, professionally written and illustrated, interspersed with loads of ads. The actual list in the back was divided by type of application, and listings included the address and phone number of each company. The listing was free to the company, but for a fee you could insert a description of your product. List was aimed squarely at business. The Editor-in-Chief was Ted Leonsis, who later became president of the Interactive Properties Group at America Online and principal owner of the Washington Capitals hockey team. His wife, Kim Perry Leonsis, was List publisher. Their company, Redgate Publishing Company, was later purchased by International Thomson Business Press, a heavyweight publishing organization that was behind Consumer Electronics, Computer Merchandising, and many other business-specific magazines.

Leonsis is credited with coining the phrase “new media” and was the first to package a CD with a book in the mid 80s. He also worked with Apple Computer Company on the introduction of the Macintosh, with IBM on the PC launch and with Wang on office automation.

List was a beautifully done publication, based on the idea that businesses wanted information packaged in an easy-to-access format. Its articles were mainly on how to use your computer for business purposes or how to choose a certain type of software. While it targeted the business customer, it recognized the value of the small software shops that were creating some of the best software out there. In the premier issue, publisher Kim Perry Leonsis wrote “we intend to become your conduit to the well of new software being written daily by America’s greatest cottage industry — the independent personal computer software vendor.”

The magazine’s bias toward software was apparent from that first issue, whose first article, on page seven, written by publisher Leonsis, was called “Why Software Comes First.” They did not publish program listings and there was never a mention of a byte or a bus. By the time List appeared, the IBM PC had carved out its place in the business world. There wasn’t much of the TRS-80 in List, but they used to send us their forms to complete to have our company listed with them. We’re not sure it ever did us any good. List was really too slick for the TRS-80 users.

The January 1984 List was a whopping 498 pages.

Software Guides

List was not the only attempt to print a guide to software. There were many guidebooks published to help the computer owner find software. One such effort was a book called Microcomputer Programs in Prin, following a bookish approach to software publishing. Published in 1983, it was an alphabetical listing of companies who were asked to send information about their software. Our company, which at the time was still called ABC Sales, was the number one company listed. They also ran our logo. This kind of a book combined advertising with serving the customer. The information about each company was simply what the company supplied, so the reader got no independent evaluation of anything.

We were never sure what to do about all the companies that wanted to list us in their guides. Some weeks we’d get several forms from these organizations, often wanting someone to hand write information in tiny boxes. Completing these forms was a royal pain and we always wondered if it was worth it. On the one hand, the listing was usually free. Who could knock that? On the other hand, how many TRS-80 users could any of these sources deliver? We never knew, and Theresa would usually take pencil in hand and, grumbling as she worked, try to write in those little boxes, thinking it was probably just a waste of time.

Magazine-sized guides, like this one from Creative Computing, helped users choose software for popular systems like the TRS-80.

Newsletters Sponsored by Companies

The need for information and technical tips was so great that many software companies sponsored newsletters. LDOS had its LDOS Quarterly and DOSPLus had its DOSPlus News Information Center newsletter. We also published a newsletter for Lazy Writer users. These publications were generally thin black and white newsletters printed on cheap paper. But the information in them was extremely valuable to the people who got them. The newsletters served as a way to let users know about bug fixes and upgrades. They also let programmers communicate directly with their users. Both of us wrote for our newsletter — we ran a regular column on the back page (called The Back Page) written by David.

Radio Shack also published a monthly newsletter for TRS-80 owners. It was simply called TRS-80 Microcomputer News. In the front was a column by Jon Shirley, Vice-President of Computer Merchandising, called “View From the Seventh Floor.” This is the same Jon Shirley later hired away by Microsoft. In his column, Shirley covered what was new for current owners, sometimes explaining why products were late. This newsletter, which was usually around 50 pages, also included a lot of technical information and program listings. The newsletter published user-written reviews and articles. This little publication tried to cover all the TRS-80s, not just the I/III/4 family. This included the popular Color Computer, the Model II, Model 100, and the Pocket Computer. It served as a forum to let TRS-80 owners know what Tandy was working on and for Tandy, it was a means of dispelling rumors and getting out information on new products they were planning to release soon. Sometimes it was also a way to respond to the unflattering remarks of Wayne Green. When Green wrote in the pages of 80 Microcomputing that Radio Shack was getting ready to dump the Color Computer, Shirley countered with “...it seems you have the power to print virtually any personal opinion of yours as well as any unsubstantiated rumor... in the past we have tended to ignore your monthly misinformation about Radio Shack as it did no one harm except, perhaps, yourself.”

Radio Shack published TRS-80 Microcomputer News. This April 1982 issue shows a “digitizer” in use.

Magazines for Specific Industries

Magazines published for a specific audience sometimes covered use of computers in their industry. For instance, Lazy Writer was reviewed by The Engraver’s Journal, a printing and engraving industry publication. We were happy to see the highly favorable review in a publication read by thousands of printers. We were also favorably reviewed in The Lawyer’s Microcomputer, a small publication for the legal profession that focused on making the work more efficient through use of a microcomputer.

Writers were another natural market for computers, and Writer’s Digest solicited us and other software companies to take out an ad. We ran a Lazy Writer ad in the 1984 Writer’s Yearbook. We ran a photo of a smiling Bob Johnson holding up a Lazy Writer binder; the headline read “Bob Johnson Depends on Lazy Writer.” Despite their obvious need for word processing, writers did not seem to be in the leading edge of computer users. Perhaps because their clients — magazines and book publishers — were slow to adopt new technology. Or perhaps it was because writers are poorly paid and just couldn’t afford it, especially the cost of a letter-quality printer.

The educational market was interested in computing from the very beginning and became the last market for the TRS-80 in the mid-1980s. In January of 1984, we took out an ad in a magazine called TLC: The Educator’s Guide to Personal Computing. Teachers and school district officials were trying to educate themselves as to what kind of hardware and software they should buy. We thought advertising to them might bring us some sales.

There were also magazines that covered some aspect of computing, such as CompuServe’s Today. This was a slick-looking full-color magazine that showed users how to get the most out of their CompuServe membership and brought them the latest news on telecomputing.

CompuServe’s magazine covered its networking services.

The Road to the Future

The advent of the microcomputer spawned a huge publishing industry that has continued into the new millennium. But the Internet has changed publishing, moving us away from wasting enormous quantities of paper (half the computer magazines that used to clog newsstands were thrown away) to publishing electronically. Incredibly, David Bunnell predicted the new age of publishing in his article for Creative Computing’s Tenth Anniversary issue. Here’s what he wrote in 1984:

The majority of today’s mainstay publications, including Creative Computing, should survive until the end of the century. Beyond that it depends on how well their publishers transfer them to entirely electronic media. Once personal computers have super screen resolution and massive amounts of memory, we’ll find ourselves realizing the long-held vision of reading our newspapers and our magazines on screen. The printing business will cease to exist except for the novelty of printed greeting cards and business cards.

While he was wrong about how long Creative Computing would last and about the printing industry disappearing, he did see that publishing would be driven online by technological innovation.

That same online revolution would reduce the need for magazines as a means to sell products or get out information. The Internet came to serve these purposes. Wayne Green felt an important reason to have computer-specific magazines was to help fledgling companies sell their wares (and of course to make money for Wayne Green) and they certainly did that. But, publishing was on a course that was unstoppable, moving from paper to electronic formats.

7   TRS-80 and the IBM PC

A Developing Standard: The IBM PC

When the IBM PC appeared with its Intel 8088 processor, many computer companies felt the IBM clout would make it the most popular choice, and other platforms would erode against the IBM juggernaut. In response, most began building computers like the IBM.

Some companies did not do this. Apple resisted, believing it offered a unique, high quality product. Apple wanted to continue marketing to the same people who loved their Apple II, which they sold in various versions until 1990. Like other computer companies, they eventually had to move forward with newer, more powerful microprocessors. A major player in the early days, Apple was always concerned with customer loyalty, and backward compatibility was important to keeping customers. One of their major moves was going from the 68000 chip in the popular Macintosh to the PowerPC chip; they used software emulation to let users run their old software.

Tandy did not try to imitate IBM either. Not right away. Their surveys showed a substantial business market and they’d tried to address that market with their Model II. They followed that with the Model 12 and the Model 16, which ran Microsoft’s UNIX variant, Xenix, as its operating system and could support up to three users. But they also thought their company’s image was keeping them from getting more of the business market and that inspired Roach and company to build computers that had the Tandy nameplate, not the TRS-80 label. When they decided they needed an MS-DOS computer, they brought out the Tandy 2000.

In our local area, Radio Shack invited some active TRS-80 club members to a store to see the Model 2000. From what we saw, this new entry into the computer arena had “improvements” that made it incompatible in important ways with the IBM PC, plus it was too expensive for the small business/hobbyist market that supported the TRS-80. It didn’t seem to be a threat to the TRS-80 line except that it was clear that Tandy was moving away from the original TRS-80 as fast as it could.

Many TRS-80 owners we knew who were looking for an MS-DOS replacement for the TRS-80 were talking about the Sanyo. The Sanyo 550 was not completely compatible with the IBM either, but at least it was cheap. We bought one for about $2000 with the intention of putting Lazy Writer on it. It turned out to be a poor choice because falling prices soon put much better IBM clones within reach. Like the Tandy 2000, the Sanyo had “improvements” that were interesting, but also made it less compatible with the developing standard, which was the IBM PC.

Near the end of 1984, Tandy produced the MS-DOS Model 1000 which was almost 100% software compatible with the IBM PC, but not completely hardware compatible. This was a less expensive machine based on the 8088, and sold better than the 2000 (we don’t know why the 1000 was released later than the 2000 — seems like they got the numbers reversed.) Tandy finally gave up making computers in 1993, selling their computer division to AST, and over 500 people lost their jobs, including spokesman Ed Juge.

Problems at Tandy

A 1984 InfoWorld article suggested that Tandy had deeper problems than its “schlock image.” They had lost some key people — Charles Tandy had died, Lew Kornfeld had retired and Jon Shirley had been successfully courted by Microsoft — and their direction with the Model 2000 seemed flawed. A Radio Shack ad in the March 1984 Computer User shows the Tandy 2000 with two disk drives selling for $2750. While Radio Shack was touting the MS-DOS software packages that would run on the 2000, it was also true that much of the MS-DOS software base would not run on the new Tandy machine.

The InfoWorld article mentioned that Tandy’s stock prices had slid by $25 per share in the previous year and had been dropped from the recommended list of many brokerage firms. That must have been heavy on Roach’s mind when he decided to abandon the old base to try to improve the company’s image and its bottom line.

Tandy was trying its hand at getting a different kind of customer, but the game had changed. The new customers they wanted did not know Radio Shack. A 1983 InfoWorld review of the IBM PC echoed the old refrain of realtors about “location, location, location” by saying there were three things corporate buyers liked about the IBM PC: it’s name, it’s name, and its name. Imitating IBM was not on Tandy’s original agenda, but they were finally forced into it by the loss of their old customers and their inability to get enough new customers. It seemed the IBM name was magic and whether Tandy called its new machine a Tandy computer or a TRS-80 computer, what mattered to customers was that it was not an IBM.

When the IBM PC first appeared, not everyone thought it would be the marketplace winner. Mark Lautenschlager of Micro Systems Software, which sold DOS-Plus, says he and Steve Pagliarulo went out and bought an IBM PC for $3600 right after it came out. They brought it back to the office and set it up next to Lautenschlager’s TRS-80 and he recalls “I had a machine that had a 10 or 15 MB hard drive, internal double-sided 80 track drives, speed kit, custom monitor… this machine was tricked out, a state of the art computer and we looked over at the IBM PC and we said, ‘this machine has no chance.’”

The December 1984 issue of 80 Micro featured John Roach on the cover plugging the new Model 1000. The “TRS-80” label had been dropped."

The TRS-80 was a mature product, with all kinds of add-ons and loads of top quality software while the IBM PC had none of those things. But the business world did not seem to care about that. The magic of the IBM name and the IBM clout was drawing customers away from anything Tandy offered. It was a gloomy time for those of us who had poured years of our lives into producing TRS-80 software. For the software-makers, the magazines, and the user groups — the eco-system that kept us all going — time was running out.

In 1984, Tandy hired Bill Bixby, an actor from The Incredible Hulk on TV, to be their spokesman, hoping that, like the Hulk who changed from a mild-mannered guy into a monster on the show, Tandy Corp. could transform itself from a collection of stores for electronics hobbyists into powerful business centers catering to corporate leaders. But no such transformation was possible; eventually all the Computer Centers were closed and Tandy went out of the computer manufacturing business, its schlock image intact.

Tandy kept a hand in the retailing part of the business though and in 1991 started the Computer City superstore chain which eventually lost $100 million, according to a 1997 article in Business Week. The magazine called the 1990s, with John Roach still at the helm, “Tandy’s lost decade.” Roach retired from Tandy in 1998. The TRS-80, which only the determination of Don French and Steve Leininger had turned into a reality, was Tandy’s big winner in the computer business and once it was played out, Tandy could not get to the summit again.

Part of a double-page ad promoting use of the Model 100 and Model 4 together; note the small picture showing the 100 cabled to the 4. The first part of the ad said “Prepare your reports, notes and letters anywhere with the TRS-80 Model 100 ...” and showed a businessman sitting in a corporate jet working on the Model 100.

- from the December 1983 issue of Computer User magazine.

Model I/III/4 Software Vendors — What Options?

Companies selling software for the Model I/III/4 faced these choices: port their software to other platforms, continue selling only to Model 4 customers and accept a declining situation, or just close up shop and go out of business while they still had a few bucks. Porting software to other platforms was a difficult and expensive proposition. Software for IBM-compatible machines was mostly not in the higher level languages that later became the tools of choice for developing application software. Porting to a new microprocessor meant putting in a lot of time and work and betting scarce resources on something that would not make any immediate income. For the small shop with one or two programmers, this was indeed risky. The risk was compounded by the fact that the IBM PC seemed such a marketplace winner that all kinds of new, well-financed companies were also trying to get those customers.

Tandy had never been friendly to outside software developers. They did not inform developers of future plans or provide development tools so programmers could write software for their models. It was only in the pages of the magazines that information sometimes leaked out. The December 1984 issue of 80 Micro has an Ask Tandy page in which a Tandy spokesman states:

The Model 4 was designed to accept a Z800 adapter board for expandability. Due to development problems, Zilog has never produced the part. If the Z800 is ever produced, we’ll consider an expansion board for an upgrade.

The source also says “The Model 4 is one of the best-selling products in our computer family.” This would seem to indicate Tandy might have built a follow-on computer, but Zilog, the chip maker, never got its next generation microprocessor to market. Somewhere, in an alternate universe, Tandy built a Model 5 and we all went on to fame and glory. In that universe, Bill Gates had competition from another powerful DOS, the one Bill Schroeder went on to create, and Microsoft was never a monopoly. The talent that existed in the TRS-80 world had an upward path and the products it contributed were celebrated and acknowledged… in another universe. Not in ours. In our universe, Tandy had the most popular computers, a built-in distribution channel, and lots of vendors selling software and add-ons. It was a fantastic base and they let it die so they could build another IBM-type computer their customers could just as easily buy somewhere else.

Even with the move to MS-DOS, Tandy could have helped software vendors like us who had products with recognized names to make the move, but they didn’t do that. Their customers might have bought Tandy MS-DOS machines in greater numbers had they been able to buy new versions of software they already knew. Most TRS-80 software vendors had many requests for MS-DOS versions, but the development effort was just too great and none of them became players in the new IBM era.

In a 1985 mailing labeled “Five Year Anniversary Edition,” Powersoft, responding to many rumors among TRS-80 owners, pitched the idea that the Model 4 was not dead. The front page article says, “Almost every day we get a call from a frantic user who was informed that the 4 has been dropped and he/she better get a 1000. This is not true In fact, according to our sources the 4 is selling very well at its reduced price. When the price was reduced, sales shot up, and as long as it is profitable, Tandy will sell Model 4s. At any event, we first heard that they would be sold through Christmas ’85, but a high source inside of Tandy recently told us in no uncertain terms that the Model 4 and 4p will be sold on into 1986. It is in no danger of extinction any time soon. It is their top-selling computer these days in terms of units sold.”

It may have been true that the Model 4 was still the top seller. Tandy had cut the price in half, which probably produced a spurt of sales. The PowerSoft writer goes on to quote a John Dvorak InfoWorld column in which he quotes a memo from Tandy Vice President Ron Stegall asking everyone to “do your part to eliminate the speculation that the Model 4 is being dropped…” Those rumors were fueled by the marketplace, in which the IBM PC and Apple’s Macintosh were the hot machines. Tandy wanted to sell the TRS-80s it had in its warehouse, and while the Model 4 was not “dropped,” they were not doing much to promote it either.

The next paragraph in the PowerSoft mailing deals with the slimmed down look of 80 Micro and quotes editor Eric Maloney who claims the thinner magazine, rather than indicating a lack of advertisers for TRS-80 products, was the result of findings that a skinnier magazine was more profitable than the old two-pound 80 Micro. Maloney was also quoted assuring readers that “80 Micro is here to stay.” PowerSoft urges its customers to subscribe and points out that 80 Micro is the last TRS-80 magazine.

This rambling article reeks of rationalization. It is a disingenuous explanation of why PowerSoft was still doing the same old thing, while other software makers had given up or moved on. They claimed their strategy was about loyalty to the TRS-80 and to its faithful customers. The article states: ”It is very easy for a company to say, We are leaving the TRS-80 market. We’ve heard this many times. This statement reduces all of you down to a single entity to be forgotten about without conscience, but we know that each of you is an individual purchaser with needs. We wanted to let you know that you will not be abandoned by PowerSoft.” Despite this high-minded sentiment, no company can stay in business without sufficient sales.

The next page has a lot of puffery about the company’s products that have lasted for five years (“and five years is a LONG time for any program to be on the market…”). It states the obvious, that “We, like many of you, started out using a 4K Model I with cassette tape. Things have changed a great deal in five years, that’s for sure!” The article referred to original Model I users as “old-timers.”

But unlike the user who started out with a 4K Model I, PowerSoft could not easily make the shift to a new system, and there was clearly a level of denial in their insistence on the viability of the Radio Shack product. PowerSoft’s best-selling product, SuperUtility, was a fantastic piece of software, but PowerSoft was fighting forces that were unstoppable. The computer business was moving from infancy to adolescence and the TRS-80 products belonged to the past, especially compared to what the new, big-money players were bringing to market.

PowerSoft’s Catalog #6, issued for 1985-1986 continued to reflect the changes in the market as well as the desperation felt by companies which sold TRS-80 software. The catalog’s introduction referred to “much flutter in the industry” and commented on “…all the talk of companies going out of business, shake-outs, takeovers, mergers, top-management shuffling, planned obsoletion (sic) and changing standards… .” They made sure the reader understood they were straddling the old world and the new, trying to please everyone with their new products for PCs and their Super-Cross/XT that let users move files between the TRS-80 and a PC. They optimistically talked about “LOTS of new Mod 4 and 4P owners in our ranks now, due to Radio Shack’s drastic price reductions. A great time to pick up a new computer and really a great buy, if you want the latest in TRS-80 technology…”

But the cheap newsprint of the catalog and the almost desperate pleading for sales, even offering to send users copies of magazine reviews of their products in return for a self-addressed stamped envelope, pointed to the real situation. It was twilight time for companies that were well-known in their own sphere, but unknown in the new larger world that was discovering small computers.

Another catalog printed at about the same time revealed the same death rattle. Logical Systems, which once printed a fancy journal with a glossy color cover as well as a fat catalog of products, issued a cheap newsprint combined catalog and journal in 1985. It was only slightly thicker than PowerSoft’s. The cover said it was “for users of TRSDOS 6, LDOS 5.1. PCDOS/MS-DOS.” Their welcoming text also assumed they might be talking to new users and asked readers to send the names of others who might want the catalog and offered back issues of their journal for sale. The once-proud LDOS Quarterly was reduced to being offered at “new closeout prices” along with one of the “Mysteries” books. The contents of their catalog, which despite the cover reference to MS-DOS, appeared to be totally TRS-80 stuff, was much too technical for many of the new people attracted to computing. Increasingly, new buyers were looking for a computer to fill a specific need, and most did not want to muck around in the innards of their machine.

This 1985 Logical Systems Inc combined journal and product catalog was printed on cheap newsprint.

Many buyers of the newly discounted Model 4D were educational institutions attracted to the low price. The educational market did not need the latest thing to introduce students to computing, and they generally lacked a budget for higher-priced PCs. They also did not buy a lot of highly technical or sophisticated software.

Micro Systems Software was experiencing the same deadly decline, but its principles — Mark Lautenschlager, Larry Studdard, and Steve Pagliarulo — had opened a retail store under a different name and were selling hardware. They had some other products besides DOSPlus that were selling well and they ported these to the IBM PC. Lautenschlager says they received “thousands of requests” for a version of DOSPlus for the IBM. Pagliarulo, the programming whiz, thought a new kind of software would be a better use of his time. His programming talent was the guts of the company. Following his instincts, he created a super macro language that could access information from other sources using a modem, then dump the data into popular applications like word processing and spreadsheet in a kind of foreshadowing of how people would one day use the internet. Using this core software, Micro Systems created a specific program that got stock quotes and pulled the data into spreadsheet charts. They called this The Wall Street Miracle.

Believing they had a fantastic product, Micro Systems Software was ready to go for the big game and prepared to issue an Initial Public Offering (IPO) and go public. They spent $100,000 of the money they still had from the successful TRS-80 sales of DOSPlus. But when it came time and the IPO was offered, it failed to attract investors. Without the money they knew they needed to play in a bigger field, their horizon was narrowed. They did not want to give up on their product though and when another agent appeared who urged them to try for another IPO, they borrowed $100,000 and tried again. Again, it failed and Micro Systems was left broke and heavily in debt.

Larry Studdard, the businessman whose money had started Micro Systems, was ready to give up. Even their new product, The Wall Street Miracle, no longer looked as good since Lotus had come out with Symphony and it could do a lot of the same things. Studdard called Lautenschlager into his office one day and told him to brush up his resume. Lautenschlager and Pagliarulo took the last $25 from petty cash and went to a local Chinese restaurant. On their way back to the office they passed a computer store. In the window was a computer they had never seen before and it was making some cool graphics on its monitor. They went into the store and discovered the Commodore Amiga. The store manager advised them not to buy it, telling them “It’s a great computer, but there’s no software for it.” Pagliarulo and Lautenschlager looked at each other and both were thinking the same thing. Pagliarulo bought one on the spot, using a credit card. The same day he ported over some of his programs and sent them to Commodore. The very next day Commodore sent by overnight delivery five Amigas, with an urgent message to “please write software for our computer.” Micro Systems Software was back in business!

But the future did not offer much to Larry Studdard. He was stricken with Crohn’s Disease. Mark Lautenschlager says he watched as Studdard just wasted away. Studdard liked to go to the beach and sit in the warm surf. One day he just didn’t come out. He was pronounced dead from drowning, but it was possibly not an accident. Lautenschlager had quit Micro Systems by this time and went on to a successful career as a computer consultant. Later, he co-hosted a computer talk program on national radio. He says his years at Micro Systems were wonderful years and his only regret is that he didn’t keep any of the money he made. Studdard had always urged him to invest, but, he says, “I spent it all.”

By the middle 1980s, the Model 4 and 4p were targeted almost exclusively to the educational market. We managed to get Lazy Writer included in Tandy’s educational catalog, which was circulated to schools. The small number of copies we sold through that catalog was the only time our product was sold by Radio Shack. Our method of getting customers had been ads in computer magazines and direct mail, using lists we developed and the names we got from people responding to our magazine ads. With Tandy relegating the Model 4 and its software to a niche market, sales for our product withered.

The programmers who were the source of the best software for the TRS-80 often lacked the qualities needed to sustain success in business. The very passion that led them to create such great software kept them trapped in the TRS-80 world. Many did not want to move on, and even when they saw that the TRS-80 era was ending, there was not enough pull from the newer systems for them to abandon the system they knew so intimately. For talented people like Vern Hester it was not about the money or the success, but it was always about their love for the TRS-80. In 2003, with Hester a year from retirement from his management career, he emailed us: “Would you believe I just finished MULTIDOS 5.0! And, I created another DOS to use the keyboard and video banking similar to TRSDOS 6.x/LSIDOS 6.x (I wanted to get another 2K for BASIC). I must be crazy. The TRS-80 is still my primary hobby...” .

The Model I manual taught a lot of people the elements of programming that launched careers for many.

Could Tandy have developed a successor to the Model 4? The essential quality it would have needed was backward compatibility with the huge collection of software that ran on the Model 4. Better, faster hardware, but the ability to run software users already had… and a chance for the same companies that sold them the software to sell them a new version, tailored to the new machine. This compatibility could have been done in hardware with dual processors, or it could have been done in software through emulation.

The best way to have an upward path would have been through an upgraded processor had Zilog ever brought its Z800 to market. This chip was based on the Z80 instruction set, but with more features. They did produce a Z8000 that was too little too late and never got much use. Zilog remained in business, with the venerable Z80 continuing to find work in embedded systems in such products as mobile phones, digital cameras, and portable printers. Zilog became the number one producer of microcontrollers for remote control devices such as the one you use to change TV channels or control a stereo system.

What it Meant to the Users

The legacy of the TRS-80 is not what it meant to Tandy or their stock price or its impact on the careers of John Roach or Ed Juge but the impact this early microcomputer had on the lives of the people who bought it. Oliver Bailey, who was the representative for Sams Publishing at the time, says “The Radio Shack computer line did more to familiarize the consumer with home computers than any other brand because it was offered in retail outlets.” Radio Shack brought a fully-assembled microcomputer to the public in 1977 and by virtue of their distribution through thousands of stores in small towns and big cities, kicked off a revolution in computing.

There were always critics who pointed out the product’s list of deficiencies, but there were so many more who loved their TRS-80s. One of them was Stephen B. Gray, who wrote an article for a Creative Computing book called “Why I Like the TRS-80.” He opened the article by citing those who insisted on calling it the “trash-80” and countered that “Radio Shack has somehow managed to sell over 200,000 (maybe over 250,000 by the time you read this) of these ‘poorly-designed and inadequate’ computers. How did Radio Shack manage to fool so many people?” He then supplies the answer: “[they] provided what many people out there wanted, at a price they felt was right, and at thousands of outlets all over the country where a person could go try it out before buying.”

Another early user, Howard Brown, describes his fascination with the TRS-80 in these words:

At the time the TRS-80 came out, I was programming IBM mainframe computers. Computer jobs were submitted via punched cards at that time, and you typically had to wait an hour or so to get back the results. With the TRS-80, as soon as you pressed a key, the results were right there. While this is so commonplace these days, it was fascinating back then, and I became instantly addicted to my TRS-80, spending many hours writing code of no commercial value and little practical use. Since that time computer usage has become very routine, is more of a tool than a toy, and is a lot less fun.

[email from Howard Brown]

Similar stories come from former TRS-80 loyalists. Here’s how Pat Barren began the long tale he left at a TRS-80 web site:

When the TRS-80 hit the scene in 1977, I was in junior high school. I had already had some access to computers and BASIC programming - our school had three ASR-33 Teletypes, that we could use to dial up to an HP minicomputer at the School District headquarters, at a blazing 110 baud, with most programs saved and loaded to/from paper tape.... I had gotten seriously into programming on the HP’s. Spent many hours each week sitting in front of those ASR-33’s, dialed up - skipped lunch hours, stayed after school, came in early before school started - I was clearly hooked. But the TRS-80 and other microcomputers seemed a quantum leap to me; you could have your own machine, and you could do graphics and all instead of this ‘hardcopy-only’ output thing. On weekends, I would often go to the mall, and spend time playing with the TRS-80 in Radio Shack, until the salespeople would kick me out ...

He went on to tell about his high school years and his love of programming, including disassembling the ROM of the TRS-80 cassette system he was finally able to buy, and writing a program that dealt with the limitations of a cassette-based Editor/Assembler that required both source and object code to fit in memory. He once wrote an article on creating a random number generator for tiny Pascal that was accepted (but never published) by Byte magazine. He concludes his lengthy rambling discourse with these words:

And as for that TRS-80 ... it’s still there, in my mother’s house. After I finally moved out on my own, she carefully packed up the machine, and all of the software, so they’d be ready for me to pick up - which I have never gotten a chance to do …for 13 years, it has been awaiting its resurrection, in its little tomb of cardboard, with it’s little cassette drive, and it’s hacked-up 16K upgrade (never did replace that one chip...). But now that I’ve finally bought a house, I am planning to get it as soon as I can, as well as all of the books and the software (if the tapes will even still read) that go with it. I already have a place ready for it to be set up. It will be there when I have children of my own - children who will probably grow up with 750 MHz Pentium VI’s running Windows 2010 - for me to show them, and tell them “let me show you something Daddy did when he was ... well, not much older than you are, really.” (and they’ll probably say “You used a language without objects, prototyping, and full polymorphism?? Jeez, how did you ever get anything done?” And once in a while, it’ll be there to just fire it up, and look at that screen that says:

MEMORY SIZE?

RADIO SHACK LEVEL II BASIC

READY >_

and think to myself, Wow, wasn’t that a time....

Another user with an equally lengthy story of his love affair with the TRS-80 has this to say:

Being a child of a single mom and not even middle class at that, the idea of getting a computer was as remote to me as those machines in the brochures. I could only dream of what promise they offered. Later on, a wonderful private school (Avon Old Farms in Avon Connecticut) gave me a full scholarship to attend their prestigious institution. And lo! They had these computers! A PDP-8/e with 2 DECWriters, a smart term, a blue pig (Lear Siegler ADM-3A), and one paper tape punch machine and 2 TRS-80 Model I Level II (16k) w/cassette storage. With vivid clarity, I remember touring the school and when we got to the computer room, I couldn’t resist! At last!

What an introduction I had, though!

MEMORY SIZE?10

MEMORY SIZE?9999

MEMORY SIZE?HELLO

?SN ERROR

MEMORY SIZE?

RADIO SHACK LEVEL II BASIC

READY

HELLO

?SN ERROR

READY >_

WOW! A real live computer! Halting first steps, but damn, I could TALK to this MACHINE!! Well, I loved the school (which is an all boys school built out of red sandstone with slate roofs - the place looks like a Mediaeval English Castle — if you’re ever near Avon, it’s worth a visit). Anyway... fast forwarding a bit. I had this insatiable curiosity to learn how to talk to this thing! My advisor, the Dean of Students actually (H. B. Pennell), was also a computer nut and had hundreds of pages of hand-written materials he used as a textbook for his computer classes. He was a very patient older man, who must have sensed my massive hunger to understand these things. Every day, he’d hand me another dozen or two photocopied pages of his “textbook” — even though I was just a freshman kid, and not in any of his classes... He fed me all of his textbook, day by day until it was exhausted... It concluded on some pretty advanced stuff, and stopped just shy of assembly language. WOW! I remember my first program... of course it was the probably universal two-liner that everyone must write...

10 PRINT “Hello there!”

20 GOTO 10

This user too went on to soak up all he could learn about computers and became an avid game player. He describes his experience in glowing words:

That summer of 1980... I’ll always remember with fondness. Atari VCS2600 gaming, hacking on my TRS-80 (experimenting with animation, sound, all sorts of mischief)... I was in my own world — and through the computer, it seemed so vast and wonderful. There didn’t seem to be any limits. I never looked at the thing and said aww, only 16k, can’t do anything with that I always looked past it. When I started to exceed the symbol table limits for my programs, I’d assemble them in stages and write ‘multi-loaders’ to piece them together. I’d always find a way to make it work.

[from “Robert” at Ira Goldklang’s TRS-80 web site]

The appearance of the TRS-80 screen, with its simple cryptic words, remain in the memory of these and so many other users. Everyone remembers their first program, kind of like remembering your first real love or your first kiss. It was for many a simply unforgettable experience. Those experiences led many to careers, as expressed by Walt Fles, who left this comment:

I still kind of miss my ’80. The amount of software and documentation available for it was outstanding. You can’t find out that type of info for Windows from a $19.99 “and other mysteries” book. I’ll always remember how that little TRS-80 got me a fun hobby and led me to a great career.

[comment left by Walt Fles at Ira Goldklang’s TRS-80 web site]

Radio Shack stores all seemed to have their regulars, mostly kids, who hung out to use the computers that were on display. The store managers often made use of these people and exploited their skills, but these ‘store-front programmers’ never seemed to mind. Here’s what Brian Hanks had to say about the new Radio Shack that opened in a mall in Santa Monica California:

I started hanging out at the Shack, because they had a TRS-80 model 3 and a color computer. The CoCo was ok, because it had sound, but I liked the Mod 3, because the keyboard was real. After a few weeks of hanging out on the weekends, I made friends with two other kids, Derek and Vincent. We would trade stories, swap 80 Micro, write programs, and play games. Afterwards, we’d always go down to McDonalds and get something to eat.

After a year or so doing this, one of the employees at the Shack (they sure were nice to let us use their machines for so long) told us that a new Shack — a Computer Center — was opening down the street. Whoa! We must’ve been there the first week it opened. The place was Nirvana. First they had several of every TRS-80 model on the main showroom (ok, so at first, that was only a CoCo, a Mod 3 and a Mod 2 and the portable model 100), then they had a training room and a repair room.

We would spend practically all day there, especially during summer. To help out, we wrote a demo program that showed off the (ahem) Mod 3’s graphics capabilities. Man, were we proud when the manager told us to load the demo on the computer in the front window!

Eric J Rothfus, who also started using a TRS-80 as a kid, had this to say about its effect on his life:

My first computer was a TRS-80 back when I was 14 years old. At 34, I’ve started four computer-oriented companies and can honestly say that the TRS-80 was the spring-board for a career. In fact, I have an old picture (2 actually) of me in front of my TRS-80 after I won 2 different programming contests as a kid. So I have a BIG soft spot for the TRS-80!

[email from Eric J. Rothfus]

Eric J. Rothfus working on his TRS-80 as his teacher looks on.

The unflattering comparison to Microsoft Windows comes up often when people talk about their early computers. We got an email from a former Lazy Writer user who wrote:

…seeing a mention of LW brought back a lot of memories. I bought a copy in about 1980 and used it heavily. Nothing I have used since has really been an improvement. Only WP 5.1 for DOS was as fast and simple.

[Email from Paul Resch]

For many people, computers have not really gotten better, only more powerful. Their relationship to their first computer was more personal than the one they use today. The term “personal computer” was made famous by IBM, but using a computer in a totally personal way was invented by the people who bought those early models and saw the possibilities.

Michael Swaine, co-author of Fire in the Valley, commenting on the differences between now and then, said “Back then, it was fun even when it didn’t work. Now, it’s not fun when it does work.”

Are Computers Liberating or Controlling?

Having a TRS-80 was the fulfillment of the dream that Ted Nelson had when he wrote Computer Lib, the first book about personal computers, which he self-published in 1974. Nelson wrote in the pages of Digital Deli [“Why I Wrote the First Personal Computer Book” by Ted Nelson in Digital Deli, 1984]

I sought to create a best seller and reach the masses with the True Word on the fun, excitement, and personal challenge of the computer… I wrote for the simple ideal of freedom: the short-term freedom of people to do their own thing with computers, a flower that was about to open, and the much deeper sense of freedom that has to do with long-term political issues.

Although there were always people who feared machines, many early computer owners had Nelson’s vision of computers providing a new sense of power and mastery. Computer power was not just for the guys in pin-striped suits, but should be available to everyone. A little bit of “power to the people” thinking left over from the 1960s.

Big business had not yet discovered small computers when the TRS-80 was getting itself born in the stock yards of Fort Worth. The same Ted Nelson quoted above wrote in a column in ROM magazine in 1977 about attending the National Computer Conference in Dallas. He said it was the first year they acknowledged the existence of small computers, which they relegated to the lower level, while the big stuff was upstairs. He said the big news upstairs was the new laser printers, while the big news downstairs was a new microcomputer called the Commodore PET. Nelson said the attendees downstairs were a mix of those already involved with micros, those who might get involved, the curious, and “others who had obviously been sent. Worried-looking, usually middle-aged, these guys took most of the notes; it seemed to me that their function was to report back to somebody what personal computing was about. But from the faces and the style of note-taking, it was clear that the big picture wasn’t getting across.” Nelson went on to say he was at a buffet for speakers at which two guys at his table “couldn’t imagine what personal computers could possibly be for. They worked in large-scale simulation: the computer for them is something at the office they work on, like a drill press.”

Just what was it that made the computer “personal?” Consider the words of Don Estridge, who managed the original PC team for IBM. He wrote:

The reason they are called personal computers is that there is no ‘one size fits all’ in personal computing. Each person is unique and has different needs, habits, income, and desires. It is the element of choice that personal computing offers to people that insures the continuing appeal and acceptance of personal computers.

[“What Makes a Computer Personal?” by P.D. Estridge, Creative Computing Tenth Anniversary issue, November, 1984]

Estridge, a product of the quintessential big professional company, essentially is saying the same thing Steve Wozniak expressed in an article for Digital Deli. Wozniak concludes his story of the founding of Apple Computer with this thought:

Back then, the small computer scene was based on the belief that we were all on top of a revolution. Everyone attending the [Homebrew Computer] club in the early days knew there was a big computer revolution occurring and the rest of the world wasn’t aware of it yet. That’s why there was so much excitement and spirit. We were finally going to get control of our own computers. It wasn’t a million dollar thing that belonged to the company you worked for. This big thing that had so much value, and that we wanted to use and control, we finally were getting close to. Look at how many companies have sprung out of our Homebrew Computer Club. At last count, it was something like twenty-one! We managed to bring the computer revolution home.”

[“Homebrew and How the Apple Came to be” by Stephan Wozniak, from Digital Deli, 1984]

The Homebrew Computer Club may have birthed more companies than any others, but computer clubs all over America were breeding grounds for businesses. In our Detroit area club, our own company and Vernon Hester’s Cosmopolitan Electronics were two software ventures. Victor Andrews was involved in starting two retail operations, Level IV (which at its height was a string of stores in Michigan) and Soft Sector Marketing, which was both a distributor and a store for hardware and software.

The early days were characterized by a playfulness about computers, the feeling that anyone should be able to do whatever they want with a computer. When the first Alto was brought to life in 1973 at Xerox PARC, it’s initial task was to display an animated image of Cookie Monster. This seemingly frivolous use reflected the belief of its creators that computers should be fun. Using a computer should set you free to create.

But in the offices of corporate America, the computer was not liberating the workforce. Companies regarded computers as a commodity and tried to build a uniform environment for all users in order to lower support costs. Some companies began disabling certain features on their Windows PCs, like the ability to change the appearance of the desktop, and many issued standard software, sometimes with standard defaults set. Computers are liberating when the user is in control and, in the workplace, users began losing control.

Columnist John C. Dvorak had this same view of what’s happening to computer users. His February 1, 2002 column states:

…the computer as a tool has stagnated into a dedicated Win-Word machine or a Win-Excel machine or some other combination of software and Windows… The computer has become an expensive typewriter. The inherent versatility is lost. The average computer user is nothing more than a drone. Much of this is because of the new office control mechanisms. Businesses are spending far too much time spying on employees. The computer is defined not as a tool, but as office equipment owned by the employer. Thus it can be monitored 24/7 for all activity. The knowledge worker has zero control over it and the worker must only use the approved software for approved purposes. Thus, we have a policy of spying on the employee with the rationale that the employee is using the employer’s equipment and has no rights at all.

Computers have a long history of being regarded not as liberating but as controlling. They were, in the words of a columnist in the 1969 Royal Oak Daily Tribune “insidious machines.” Remarkably, Annabelle McIlnay wrote in her column about a new use for computers, one which she disdained and which would later be put forth as a primary use of the new microcomputers. Ms McIlnay wrote about the H316 “kitchen computer.” This machine (and we’re not sure it ever actually existed) was, according to McIlnay “designed to plan dinner menus” and was programmed with 85 dinner entrees. While the idea sounded like it had merit, Ms McIlnay found herself feeling hostile as she considered the implications of a machine planning her dinners. She wondered how a machine would deal with nights she didn’t feel like cooking a gourmet meal, or how it would know to use up leftovers, if it would allow her to make her own self-concocted recipes, or if it would understand that some ingredients were too expensive out of season. But beyond those perfectly valid questions was her prevailing attitude of pure hostility toward trusting a machine.

[“Computer in Kitchen Proves One Thing” by Annabelle McIlnay, The Daily Tribune, Tuesday Nov 4, 1969]

Those who fear that technologists were “constantly trying to give over control of our lives to these insidious machines” (as McIlnay put it) have seen some of their worst fears come true. Computers have been used to track everything workers do, count their keystrokes, add up their sales, average out how long they talk on the phone, snoop on their email, and generate lists of web sites they’ve been to. Ted Nelson’s dream of computer lib has seriously eroded.

View From the Top

Tandy got out of the computer business, but for those who worked on the birth of the TRS-80, it was an important highlight of their lives. When we asked Steve Leininger what he thought was the contribution of the TRS-80 to computing, he replied without hesitation, ”We primed the pump.” In Leininger’s mind, the TRS-80 paved the way for the systems that came after it. It was a necessary link in the chain of events that led to our computerized world.

Don French echoed that thought when he told us the TRS-80 opened up the market for the big players like IBM. “Apple alone could not have done it,” he said, because they were “a garage company.” Tandy Corporation had the resources to bring small computers to the masses and that’s what they did.

Even Bill Gates acknowledges the role of Radio Shack in creating a market for small computers. He told an interviewer, in discussing the early days:

A great example of [a challenging deadline] was the work that we did on the TRS-80. The Altair BASIC comes out in 1975. In the next big wave is a set of three machines that came out in 1977. The TRS-80, the Apple II …and a machine called the Commodore PET. And those were low-cost and yet, they weren’t kits or anything. They came out prepackaged. And they looked like they would really ignite the volume in the market. And all three of them went out and did very well. Several of them, when they first shipped, had BASICs that the company themselves did. [The TRS-80] had a Level I BASIC, that actually Steve Leininger enhanced off Wang’s Tiny BASIC. But they knew that it was pretty inadequate. And so they licensed the BASIC from us that was built into all these machines thereafter …Radio Shack, with its distribution and its name, set the market on fire.

[from an interview he gave when he received the Price Waterhouse award]

Tandy was different from the many start-ups that sprang out of the Homebrew Computer Club in being an already-established company. That was both a strength and a weakness. It was a strength in giving them the financial muscle to build their own factories and make computers, and in having a distribution channel in its nationwide chain of stores. But it was a weakness in Tandy’s obsession with making a profit. While other computer companies worried about things like market share, the guys on the top floors of Tandy Center just looked at their profit margin on each computer. As long as they were satisfied with that, they would stay in the business. John Roach remarked to InfoWorld in 1984, “We still sell vacuum tubes. No one in this digital world will admit vacuum tubes still exist but we just want to make money on them.”

For Roach, it was never about the excitement of being part of the revolution. It was about making money.

In the end, Radio Shack went back to selling phones and radios and other items that earned them a good profit. They also shifted from selling their own brands to selling name brands, a practice marketing guru Lew Kornfeld was always against. Instead of Tandy computers, they began selling Compaq.

Out of their years in the computer business, there is no inspirational story of two guys in a garage building something revolutionary, nor are there legendary figures like those who inhabited the well-financed halls of Xerox PARC, where a small computer called the Alto could have wiped out the TRS-80 and all its competitors if only Xerox had brought it to market in 1977, as they considered doing (Chuck Tesler’s brother, Larry, was one of the strongest advocates of marketing the Alto). The Alto had a graphics screen, used a mouse, and was the inspiration for the Apple Lisa and Macintosh. But Xerox, with its huge investment in research, could never have sold the Alto for anything like the low cost of the TRS-80. The humble $600 black and silver machine let a lot of ordinary people learn to control their very own computer.

One gets the feeling that Steve Leininger has had mixed feelings about Radio Shack all these years, since he’s quit a number of times (always going back as either an employee or contractor) and seems to retain an emotional distance from the company. The extraordinary work he did in creating the Model I has not earned him the respect and the fame that guys like Wozniak, Jobs, and Gates have gotten. Don French, whose idea it was for Tandy to make and sell a computer, is not well known either, even though he played an important role in computer history. There was no profit for Radio Shack in making a hero out of Leininger or French.

Making Sense of History

The TRS-80 is sometimes treated as little more than a footnote in the history of small computers, despite its obvious importance. The testimony of so many people who say they got started with computers because they had a TRS-80 is remarkable. Many learned programming and went on to computer careers. For others, their foray into TRS-80 programming was a phase of their lives and they went back to what they were doing before. The corporate world did not value people who had the nerve to think they could write an entire program by themselves, working all night as the spirit moved them, fueled by endless cups of coffee or soft drinks and relying on their own instincts. Such people were generally not inclined to work to someone else’s specifications or to quickly fit in as one member doing a small part of the work of a large team.

For these reasons, many early programmers did not find a haven in Corporate America. Their mind-set was all wrong and their talent languished in a world that had changed. Some, like Jake Commander, went back to making music, an industry that didn’t care if you were a high school drop-out.

With only a few exceptions, those intense years of living and breathing TRS-80 did not add up to wealth or success. In retrospect, enthusiasm for the TRS-80 must be judged for what it contributed to the lives of those it touched, apart from conventional measures of success. To spend your time totally immersed in something, to learn new things every day and have the satisfaction of creating something others found useful… it was an experience not everyone has or understands, and it couldn’t last forever.

Bill Schroeder told us his years with Logical Systems were the best years he ever had, and Mark Lautenschlager told us that programming whiz Steve Pagliarulo contacted him years after Micro Systems Software was defunct and said he wanted to get the old gang back together and try another company. Those years working on DOSPlus were his best years. But it was too late. Lautenschlager had moved on and there was no putting it back together.

By conventional measures, our experience in business was a failure. We ended up in debt, worried about just getting by day to day. Getting over the disappointment that our product had no more market and the financial worries that brought was not easy. We’ve had moments we wished it had never happened. Everyone understands making a pile of money, but it’s harder to grasp the concept that lots of people who didn’t make money and who are largely unknown contributed a great deal to computer history.

Nothing we’ve done since has been like being in business selling TRS-80 software. Our operation was so different from any company we could work for now that it’s like having once lived a different life. Few people understand that the early software products generally had only one author and they were sold out of small offices where disks were duplicated by hand and manuals were run off at the local Kwickie print shop. Most had no business plan and their products happened almost by chance. Consider the contrast with the way Vern Hester created Multidos as a one-man shop working part-time with occasional part-time help and the way IBM went about working on its OS/2 operating system in the late 1980s. According to the 1993 book Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM by Paul Carroll, “…the new OS/2 operating system ended up involving more than 1700 programmers working under two separate management structures at four sites on two continents.” All that, and OS/2 was a flop.

Clearly, society honors those whose products survive and who made lots of money. The quintessential computer hero is Bill Gates; software made him the world’s richest man. What was Bill Gates’ contribution to computer history? He had the vision to see what microcomputers could be, he believed in Moore’s Law and ran his business as if it were true. Was he a technical genius? Maybe, but what made him a success was the business orientation he had from the beginning, and his incredible competitiveness. Gates once wrote a letter to a computer magazine trying to argue users out of stealing software. He thought software companies should be paid for their work and, unlike those geeks who shared their code and passed around disks full of software, Gates wanted exclusive ownership of his work. He was always smart about licensing his software rather than outright selling it to hardware companies.

How surprised we were when we visited the wax museum at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco in the fall of 2000 and there was Gates’ grinning image in the company of Galileo, Freud, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. As we stood there in the darkened corridor looking at these men in wax, something didn’t add up. Not only did they place Gates in with these illustrious men of history, but they had him holding a box with the blue Windows logo. Are we to believe that Windows is somehow the same kind of technical accomplishment as writing The Origin of Species, declaring publicly that the earth goes round the sun, or the discovery of relativity?

Gates as technical genius is a misreading of the facts. Instead, Gates should be regarded as the last of the great tycoons, in the company of J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. Like his fellow tycoons, he wanted to hang onto what he built and crush the competition. He started out like the rest of us, but he had something extra. He saw that software could be a big business, and he set out to make it happen. He built an empire that would have been hard to imagine back in 1979 when we were working on that first version of Lazy Writer. Like the other tycoons, Gates has moved on from running his business empire to spending his time and money on philanthropic pursuits. Whatever you think of his business tactics, Gates has devoted himself to giving something back and, in giving away the wealth he earned from software, he is once again having a huge influence on the world we live in. As did the other tycoons.

An article in Forbes magazine called Gary Kildall, whose contributions to computing are huge, “the guy who could have been Bill Gates.” But Kildall was no match for Gates, as future events would clearly show. No other early pioneer had the impact of Gates, who got most of it right (not all of it — there was Xenix and Microsoft Bob, after all), but enough to build Microsoft into the most powerful company on the continent (maybe on the planet). The drama in the stories of Microsoft’s beginnings are echoed in the stories of many other early pioneers. The difference is that Gates got more of it right and he had the vision of software as a big and profitable business.

Valuable Historic Artifacts

Old computers, like other obsolete equipment, usually end up in the trash, hauled off to land fills, compacted down to a dense square, or broken up so the metal inside can be resold. But the early microcomputers, as we have seen, had more sentimental value to their owners than, say, a lawn mower. Many of those owners kept their first computer and others wish they had. An older, slower machine can be used to teach how computers really work, much like a Model T can be used to show how a car is put together, with its major parts visible.

A solid market is developing in old computers, for both nostalgia reasons and collector’s items for their own sake as well as for their ultimate financial value. Some of the early computers have all but disappeared. Very early microcomputers that were not built in large numbers are taking on real value for collectors. Mint condition Altairs, IMSAIs or SOLs are getting rare and those who have them mainly understand they are not junk. These artifacts of our prosperous civilization are taking their place in museums and collections, every bit as important as early telephones, phonographs, or automobiles.

The older computers that were built in large numbers like the TRS-80s, the Apple II, and the Commodore 64 will take longer to become rare enough to be collectibles. There are still enough TRS-80s around so that collectors can sometimes acquire a Model I, Model 4, Model 100 or Color Computer at a modest price or even for free. Most of those still in existence are sitting in storage somewhere, rarely used anymore. Their owners still can’t bring themselves to just throw them away.

At the 2000 Vintage Computer Festival, organizer Sellam Ismail wowed an audience of old computer buffs when he held up an original mint condition Apple I, the legendary creation of Steve Wozniak, and offered it at auction. It is one of only 200 known to have been made by the small Apple Computer company housed in Steve Jobs’ garage. A bidder offered $20,666.66 (its original price was $666.66). It finally sold for $25,000. The seller was Ray Borrill, who had ordered it for his Data Domain store directly from Steve Jobs in 1976 and had kept it ever since. So Borrill, who admits that he, like New York Computer Mart owner Stan Veit, never made any real money out of selling computers in the old days, made the biggest profit of his career on that historic piece of equipment.

Ismail describes himself as an accumulator who became a collector. He began by keeping his old equipment, then went on to buy more until he had a warehouse bulging with over 1500 computers, plus thousands of books and magazines. In 1997, he organized the Vintage Computer Festival for collectors and historians and has been holding events for retro computing buffs ever since.

Sellam Ismail holds up Roy Borrill’s Apple I; it sold for $25,000.

Looking Back

The old computers may be remembered with fondess, but technology continued to bring more power to personal computing until users began regarding their PC as a mere tool, replacing it as soon as something faster appeared in the stores.

When David Ahl was putting together his issues of Creative Computing, he looked for content that showcased the creative aspects of using a computer. Original programs and novel uses for those early machines filled the pages of his magazine. Programmers were stars and their extraordinary programs were the stuff of legends. But all that changed. The corporate world took over and profits, not creativity, triumphed. Small players were bought out or forced out.

Lew Kornfeld, Radio Shack president during the TRS-80 years, stated in 1977 about their then-new microcomputer, “This device is inevitable in the future of everyone in the civilized world — in some way — now and for as far ahead as one can think.” He got that right, but Radio Shack was not destined to be part of that future.

And neither were the many small companies that produced the really great software that was the beginning of a hugely profitable industry. Their story has been absent from accounts that purport to tell the history of the computer. Before computers became appliances, they were amazing machines that dazzled beginners and beckoned to entrepreneurs and more than lived up to their promise. We remember those years, and with the perspective of time and the wisdom of hindsight, we see how important they really were.

Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date, Robert X. Cringely, Addison-Wesley, 1992 (the PBS TV series, Triumph of the Nerds, was based on this book)

Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM, Paul Carroll, Crown Publishers, 1993

Dealers of Lightning, Michael Hiltzik, Harper Business, 1999

Digital Deli, Steve Ditlea, Workman Publishing, 1984

Fire in the Valley, Michael Swaine and Paul Frieberger, McGraw-Hill, 1999 (source for the TV movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley)

Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer, Stan Veit, WorldComm, 1993

Inside Out: Microsoft In Our Own Words, Warner Business Books, 2000

Portraits in Silicon, Robert Slater, MIT Press, 1987

Programmers at Work, Susan Lammers, Microsoft Press, 1986

Running Wild: The Next Industrial Revolution, Adam Osborne, Osborne-McGraw-Hill, 1979

The Road Ahead, Bill Gates, Viking, 1995

Tandy’s Money Machine: How Charles Tandy Built Radio Shack Into the World’s Largest Electronics Chain, Irvin Farman, The Mobium Press, 1992

To Catch a Mouse Make a Noise Like a Cheese, Lewis Kornfeld, The Summit Group, 1992

The Authors

David and Theresa Welsh live in suburban Detroit. Since closing out their TRS-80 software business in the mid-1980s, they continued working in IT as well as writing/editing/photography activities. They are both retired and busy with personal projects.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

1 The First Complete Microcomputer: TRS-80

It Began With the Altair in 1975

The Revolution Begins

Software

Hardware Standards

Electronic Games Pave the Way

Magazines Spread the Gospel of Microcomputing

The Early Days of the TRS-80

Problems With Software on Cassette

The “Trash-80”

Customer Reaction to the TRS-80

The World in 1977

Keeping up with the Competition: The Late 70s

2 The DOS Wars

Moving Up to Disk Drives

The Quest for a DOS

Creating TRSDOS

Alternatives to TRSDOS

Slugging it Out in the Magazines

Hard Drives

DOS Wars and the Model 4

The Triumph of Logical Systems Inc

A Shrinking Customer Base

The IBM PC: CP/M or MS-DOS?

Tandy Abandons the TRS-80

3 David’s Story

My Post-War Childhood and How I came to Write TRS-80 Software

Discovering Radio

Discovering Photography

Life in Small Town USA

Bad User Interfaces Predate Microcomputers

Technology Starts to Get Interesting

Coming of Age in Grand Rapids

“Word Processing” in the Late Fifties

Twenty-four Channels of Personal Communication

College Years in Detroit

My Break in Photojournalism

Meeting Theresa

Enter the Altair

We Take Up Flying

3 David’s Story

Finally, My Own Computer

Level II BASIC

Disk Systems

Learning to Program in Assembler

Going into the Software Business

Programming the Word Processor

Controlling Printers

Testing and Marketing a New Word Processor

Launching Lazy Writer

Competition and Change in the Market

Theresa Quits as Office Manager

Becoming a Dad

The Trip to LA

Coping With the Ultimate Decline

Sumup

We Attempt to Trim Printing and Mailing Costs

Finding The Right Office Help

We Try To Stay Afloat

About Programming and Porting Software

Moving to the Suburbs

4 Theresa’s Story: What it was Like on the Bleeding Edge

Buying a Computer Led to a Business

Being in the Software Business

Supporting Our Products

It was Mostly a Guy Thing

Programmers Were Cool

Partnering Never Worked Out

David’s Broken Leg

The 1983 West Coast Computer Faire

We do a Seminar

Ten Days in the Hospital

Feeling Overwhelmed

The Best Surprise!

Difficult Times & New Challenges

Parenthood

Dealing with Decline

Life After the Software Business

5 Computer Commerce: Games, Business, Robots, and Scams

Games

Business Programs

Word Processing — The Most Wanted Application

Word Processing for Everyone

Printing and Word Processing: A world of Trouble

The Quest for “Letter Quality” Printing

Lazy Writer: A Capable Word Processor

Business Computing in the 1980s

Spell Checkers

Spreadsheets & Accounting Software

Data Base Software

Mail Lists

The Million Dollar Accounting Software

Bulletin Boards: the Beginning of Online Services

Robots

ROBOTS: The New Industrial Revolution?

Scams

6 Selling it in the Magazines

Why Magazines Were Important

80 Micro

Computer User

80-US Journal

Creative Computing

Computer News 80

Other Magazines

Personal Computing

Popular Computing

Other Publishing Efforts

The “Mysteries” Series of Books

List

Software Guides

Newsletters Sponsored by Companies

Magazines for Specific Industries

The Road to the Future

7 TRS-80 and the IBM PC

A Developing Standard: The IBM PC

Problems at Tandy

Model I/III/4 Software Vendors — What Options?

What it Meant to the Users

Are Computers Liberating or Controlling?

View From the Top

Making Sense of History

Valuable Historic Artifacts

Looking Back