“The Model I was invented by Don French (A buyer for Tandy) & Steve Leininger (The head of the Homebrew Computer Association) and first announced on Wednesday, August 3, 1977, in Radio Shack Press Release 7741-A, at a press conference at the Warwick Hotel in New York City.” [TRS-80 website]
35 years ago … The run was for 4 years because the Model I had problems with the FCC emissions requirements. Anyone who tried to use a TRS-80 model I for RTTY knows all about that problem! Still, more than 250,000 sold? The base unit with 4K RAM sold for about $2200 in today’s money. A floppy drive almost doubled the cost. By the time you added up the expansion interface, upgraded memory to 64K, added a modem (300 baud) and a second floppy, the total came up to nearly $10,000 in today’s money.
The website linked for the quote above has more on the story of the computer and the people who built it. Things have changed a bit since then.
Another good story – please don’t call it Trash80 — and then, 10 years later, OS/2 arrived. See 25 Years of IBM’s OS/2: The Strange Days and Surprising Afterlife of a Legendary Operating System
I remember them days! (but, my, do these anniversaries make me feel old).
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