They actively encouraged early adopters to provide it, making it known that they would sell the best efforts in their stores, a plan that worked rather brilliantly and doubtless contributed to the TRS-80’s having a much larger software library than its competitors from Apple and Commodore by 1979. Still, Radio Shack showed considerable foresight in realizing that their machine needed supporting software. No wonder they shipped with two games as their standard software starter package. Hard as Radio Shack and owners might have tried to justify the TRS-80 as a “serious” tool, it’s probably safe to say that virtually all who purchased them wanted first and foremost just to play with them. Solutions like this, far more convoluted and time consuming than the traditional methods they wanted to replace, were everywhere in the early software market. They seemed quite high on the idea of a TRS-80 in the kitchen, often including pictures of exactly that in their promotional literature, yet one has to wonder just what advantage a balky computer with cassette-based storage offers over a calculator and a good old pencil and pad. This last demonstrates how confused even Radio Shack was about what their computer would actually get used for. There was also a payroll program, presumably the same one that French and Leininger had demonstrated to Charles Tandy, head of the company, to sell him on the potential of the TRS-80 the program crashed when Tandy entered an annual salary (his own) too large for it to handle.Īnd there was a “kitchen” utility bundle, which could convert measurements and store messages for other family members. There were, for starters, some educational software to help the kids out in math and a personal finance system (Quicken in 4 K!). Radio Shack also had four “productivity applications” already available at launch. The TRS-80 shipped with two programs on an accompanying cassette, computerized versions of backgammon and blackjack. Even the staple justification of a few years later for buying a computer - “We can use it for word processing, and the kids can do their school reports on it” - wouldn’t quite fly with 1977-era machines. (Radio Shack, in what should be becoming a familiar theme by now, refused to splurge for the $2.00 or so they would have cost to include.) It was not even possible to connect a printer to the TRS-80 prior to the arrival of Radio Shack’s expensive “expansion interface” in mid-1978. As computers began to enter homes in reasonable numbers in 19, bemused (or not so bemused) spouses, parents, children, siblings, and roommates all asked the same question: but what can you actually do with it? Proud new owners didn’t find that a very easy question to answer, for these machines were absurdly limited the TRS-80 had no color capabilities, only the barest of graphical capabilities, no sound, no lower case letters, for God’s sake.
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