The Tandy Corporation
14 comments
·June 20, 2025LarsDu88
irrational
I did leather working as a kid in the 80s and only knew Tandy as the leather company. I’ve been a programmer for decades now and had heard of the Tandy computers but never connected the name to the leather company. I’d especially never heard that they also owned Radio Shack. This article was a real eye opener.
EvanAnderson
Eerie coincidence: Coleco, manufacturers of the ill-fated ADAM home computer, which competed with Tandy/Radio Shack, was originally the Connecticut Leather Company.
LarsDu88
Apparently the Ycombinator equivalents of early microcomputer startups were leather hobbyist stores!
agumonkey
It was one of the first brand I remember as a kid, I never sought to dig their history.. kinda jawdropping.
toast0
> The project was formally approved on the 2nd of February in 1977 and the production run was increased to 3500. You’d think that moving from 1000 to 3500 computers was evidence of growing support for the project, but no. This 3500 number was so that when the computer failed to sell, Tandy Corporation could use them in their Radio Shack stores for inventory control — stores which numbered 3400 at the time.
This part is kind of amazing. They recognized the potential of computing, and wanted to have it for their use, but didn't think anybody else would want to do inventory management?
PaulHoule
One thing I always found weird about Radio Shack was that, even though ham radio was a lynchpin of hobby electronics, Radio Shack never sold ham radio gear. I mean, they'd sell you a 10-pack of resistors for $1 but they would never sell a transceiver or antenna -- which I think would have been much higher margin than those resistors.
rmason
I think that it would be hard to find knowledgeable employees to sell everything. The sales process would be way more technical. When they started selling computers nobody knew much about them.
It would be a dream job for a young ham but a disaster for a corporate guy putting together training for non-ham employees that would be making minimum wage.
empressplay
A quick search of eBay reveals Radio Shack did indeed sell ham radios:
protocolture
I had no idea Tandy Electronics and Radio Shack were related.
DidYaWipe
"Radio Shack began selling private label products under the name Realist, but the name was changed to Realistic after some litigation."
Cool story. I wish a few comments like the above had a bit more background. I wonder if the problem with "Realist" was the existence of the Stereo Realist, a popular 3-D camera made from 1947-71.
Edit: Yep! Google's so-called "AI" says:
"Tandy, through their RadioShack brand, could not use the name "Realist" for their private-label products because of a legal dispute with the company that produced the well-known Stereo Realist camera, according to 2080 Ventures. The Stereo Realist camera was a popular 35mm stereo camera produced by the David White Company.
This legal dispute led Tandy/RadioShack to change their brand name from "Realist" to "Realistic". The change occurred in 1954, after Radio Shack had already begun selling products under the "Realist" brand."
TMWNN
This article covers the TRS-80's introduction and quick rise; presumably part 2 will cover its fall. I do not know whether part 2 will also cover the Tandy 1000; if it does not, I hope the author considers a part 3 as that story is as interesting as the TRS-80's.
Quoting myself below on how Tandy, with the TRS-80 and 1000, blew its lead in the computer market twice in a decade. Prior discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41685915>)
It's well known that the Apple II was one of the first three prepackaged, preassembled personal computers on the market. It, the TRS-80 Model I, and the Commodore PET all appeared in late 1977.
It's not well known that the Apple was not the obvious winner of the three; the TRS-80 was. Every small town in America had Tandy's Radio Shack stores, and even if Radio Shack had a reputation for selling toys and gizmos as opposed to computers, it had a reputation. As a startup, Apple didn't. Commodore wasn't as well known as Tandy but was an established calculator and office-equipment company, with its own semiconductor fab that produced the 6502 CPU that Apple and other rivals used.
And, in fact, until about 1980, the TRS-80 dominated the market. What happened?
* The disk drive. All three computers only used tape storage in 1977, but their makers soon provided disk drives. Tandy's drive is a horrible, unreliable kludge. Commodore's PET disk drives are gigantic monstrosities that are fast and reliable[1] but far too expensive. Steve Wozniak's Disk II is a combination of a brilliantly simple and reliable disk controller, and inexpensive-to-make (and thus highly profitable) drive mechanism, that still runs well today, five decades later.
* Third-party products. The TRS-80 came with a superb BASIC tutorial, but Tandy otherwise kept all software technical information secret,[2] hoping to monopolize third-party development.[3] Radio Shack stores were not allowed to sell non-Tandy products, and couldn't carry third-party publications like 80 Micro that by default became the major way companies sold TRS-80 products (since other retailers didn't want to compete with Radio Shack stores). Since corporate policy prevented Radio Shack clerks from admitting that third-party magazines or products existed (even while a Tandy executive wrote a regular column for 80 Micro, and the company regularly advertised in its pages), the only way a TRS-80 or Color Computer customer knew of this gigantic ecosystem's existence is if a friend told him, or he happened to walk by a newsstand with 80 Micro or Rainbow magazine.
Commodore's Jack Tramiel never ever understood the importance of software development, and the PET fell far behind Tandy and Apple in the US; until the VIC-20 in 1980 most of Commodore's computer sales were in Europe and Canada, where Apple and Tandy didn't compete.
Compare this to Apple, which published everything needed to create software and hardware for the II. Its slots invite engineers to design cards. A very important factor in the II's early popularity was school districts buying it to run educational software from MECC like Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand. But this was not inevitable. A teacher or administrator in a rural school district in 1979 looking to purchase computers would naturally look to the Radio Shack in town, but would only have found incredibly crude Tandy-published software. Even with such handicaps Radio Shack had a substantial portion of the educational market, which after 1980 quickly eroded until 1985, when Tandy had an unexpected second computer boom driven by the PC-compatible Tandy 1000.
* VisiCalc. Because of the above, VisiCalc was written for the Apple when market share should have caused it to be written for TRS-80 (Dan Fylstra of Personal Software, VisiCalc's publisher, was one of the first owners of the TRS-80. <https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1978-04/1978_04_BYT...>). Being only available for Apple massively drove sales of the II; for the first time, people bought a computer to run a specific killer app, as opposed to the other way around. In turn, others chose the II to develop for.
Even after 1980, when Apple had clearly gained sales momentum, Tandy still had the bulk of the installed base. 80 Micro's December 1982 issue <https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1982-...> has 484 pages. I'm pretty sure no Apple magazine ever came close to that thickness; the only other computer magazines in history to be that thick are 1) PC Magazine before it went bimonthly in 1984 after the December 1983 issue hit 800 pages, and 2) BYTE. Wayne Green, the publisher of 80 Micro, had by that time written editorials in almost every single issue pleading with Tandy to encourage third-party developers. Tandy didn't relent until the Model 16, introduced that year, had zero third-party software after six months. But by then it was too late.
As fat as they are, reading Tandy magazines like 80 Micro and Rainbow <https://archive.org/details/rainbowmagazine-1983-12/> from the early 1980s is like visiting a sad and barren alternate world; instead of Origin, Sierra, MicroProse, and SSI, there are much cruder-looking ads from tiny companies offering bad clones of popular arcade games.
... And yet, despite its many, many mistakes, Tandy got a second chance with the Tandy 1000! It was the best-selling low-cost PC compatible from 1985 onward. It was so popular that software boxes routinely stated that they were compatible with "IBM/Tandy". So popular that game developers routinely made sure that their products were "Tandy compatible"; that is, support Tandy's special graphics and sound features.[4] In the second half of the 1980s Tandy was arguably #2 in PC compatibles after Compaq, and clearly #1 among everyone, including IBM and Apple, in the home market. There was no reason whatsoever for Tandy and its gigantic distribution and retail network to lose out to Gateway and fellow Texan Dell ... But, of course, it did. So, yes, Tandy blew not one but two separate leads in the computer industry within a decade. That takes talent.
[1] Two virtues Commodore's later drives did not retain
[2] Read this BYTE article from two years after the TRS-80's release <https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1979-08/1979_08_BYT...>, which a) discusses how to implement machine language graphics and b) complains about the complete lack of Tandy documentation that motivated the author to write the article in the first place.
[3] It's clear in retrospect that TRS-80 was intentionally designed to not be compatible with the existing 8080/Z80 standards. ROM's location in the memory map broke CP/M compatibility, and the expansion bus is not S-100 compatible.
[4] Actually PCjr-compatible, which the original Tandy 1000 was designed to clone
empressplay
>Commodore's Jack Tramiel never ever understood the importance of software development, and the PET fell far behind Tandy and Apple in the US; until the VIC-20 in 1980 most of Commodore's computer sales were in Europe and Canada, where Apple and Tandy didn't compete.
I assure you, Canada has both Tandy and Apple computers in the late 1970s / early 1980s. But they were much more expensive than a VIC-20.
Also, the Model 1 was a Z80 and the CoCos were 6809s, which I suspect had much more to do with the differences in third-party software offerings than Tandy's 'attempts' at obfuscation, given the competition all had 6502/6510 processors that were much easier to port between.
TMWNN
>I assure you, Canada has both Tandy and Apple computers in the late 1970s / early 1980s.
I could have worded that better; I had Europe more in mind for Tandy and Apple's absence. I am aware that Tandy and Commodore had significant presence in Canada; Radio Shack stores were almost as much a presence in small towns there as in the US, and the PET began a long tradition of Commodore computers being more popular outside the US than at home. (Commodore even began as a Canadian company, back in its office-furniture days.)
(I know the article we're discussing here mentions a Tandy store in Europe, and TRS-80 was actually among the very earliest microcomputers of any kind available in Britain, but it disappeared almost immediately from the market for whatever reason. As for Apple, again, despite the Apple II Europlus, the Cork Apple factory, and Douglas Adams and Stephen Fry being the first two Mac owners in the UK, Apple was almost completely absent from the market compared to other US companies until the 1990s.)
>Also, the Model 1 was a Z80 and the CoCos were 6809s, which I suspect had much more to do with the differences in third-party software offerings than Tandy's 'attempts' at obfuscation, given the competition all had 6502/6510 processors that were much easier to port between.
6809 definitely contributed, but that still does not change Tandy going out of its way to discourage third-party products sold outside its stores. As for Z80, not at all. Tandy could have 100% dominated the CP/M market from the get-go had the TRS-80 been out-of-the-box compatible, but instead it foisted TRSDOS onto its users, so incompetently written that Tandy eventually gave up and licensed one of the many third-party replacement OSes it spawned as the official TRSDOS 6.
One of my favorite bits of tech trivia is the story of Tandy's pivot from being a leathergoods store to selling some of the first home "microcomputers" simply because microcomputing overlapped as a hobbyist activity in it's early days.
Quite unexpectedly, Tandy/Radioshack's computer business has gone kaput, but Tandy leathergoods still exists and has operating stores more than 100 years later.