Item — HN Reader

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 run well today, 40 years later.

* Third-party products. Apple published everything needed to create software and hardware for the II. Its slots invited engineers to design cards. The TRS-80 came with a superb BASIC tutorial, but Tandy otherwise kept all technical information secret, hoping to monopolize third-party development.[2] 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). 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.

* 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). 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, Epyx, MicroProse, and SSI, there are much cruder-looking ads from tiny companies offering bad clones of popular arcade games.

[1] Two virtues Commodore's later drives did not retain

[2] 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.

2 comments

> 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, Epyx, MicroProse, and SSI, there are much cruder-looking ads from tiny companies offering bad clones of popular arcade games.

Well, there are a bunch of game (and other) ads that look pretty cool to me in 2020 (Epyx is on page 355 of 80 Micro.) One issue with games for that system is that graphics are in black and white, but then again so were Space Invaders, Pong, and Asteroids! Not to mention the first version of Tetris. Apple's original Macintosh still had monochrome (but much more detailed) graphics, and many interesting games were made for it.

Most computer game companies were probably tiny in the early 1980s.

It is interesting to think about what the computer industry would look like today if Commodore, Radio Shack and other companies/platforms had managed to keep up with Apple (and DOS/Windows) over the long term.

> Tandy otherwise kept all technical information secret, hoping to monopolize third-party development

Didn't many vintage computers (and other electronics) come with schematics so you could troubleshoot/repair the machines and/or design your own expansions?

>Most computer game companies were probably tiny in the early 1980s. I also wonder what would have happened if Commodore, Radio Shack and other companies had managed to keep up with Apple.

You are under the impression that Commodore did not keep up with Apple. As others have said in this thread, the Commodore 64 dominated computer games in the 1980s in the US; Apple was a strong second, until Nintendo on the low end, and PCs on the high end, took over from both after 1988.

Compare the Commodore magazine Compute!'s Gazette for December 1983 (https://archive.org/details/1983-12-computegazette/mode/1up) to the 80 Micro and Rainbow issues I previously cited. It has ads from

* Spinnaker

* Atari

* Epyx

* Orion

* First Star

* Infocom

* Datasoft

* Avalon Hill

* HesWare

* Sierra

* subLogic

* Access

* Adventure International

By 1984 several of the above would disappear because of the video game crash, but at this time all were still well-known publishers on multiple platforms. Of the list, the Tandy magazines probably has ads from Infocom (which published its games on every computer known to man) and maybe subLogic and Adventure International. Tandy desperately tried to revive the Color Computer by finally promoting third-party software, which is why the Color Computer 3 (released in 1986) has some releases like King's Quest III (but not any others in the series).

>Didn't many vintage computers (and other electronics) come with schematics so you could troubleshoot/repair the machines and/or design your own expansions?

Some. Of the three 1977 computers, Apple was by far the best, with complete schematics and Wozniak-authored articles in BYTE with technical details. TRS-80 had, as I mentioned, nothing other than the BASIC tutorial accompanying the computer. Commodore was not as good as Apple but much better than Tandy, and would put out even more detailed documentation for later computers; its Commodore 64 technical manual is considered a classic.

Other companies also varied. Atari had by far the most sophisticated hardware when its 8-bit computers appeared in 1979. It, like Tandy tried to keep technical information to itself, which no doubt handicapped developers attempting to use that hardware, but in 1981 completely changed course by releasing lots of documentation. TI always kept everything to itself until after discontinuing the 99-4A computer after losing against Commodore in a price war. But no company came anywhere close to what IBM did by releasing everything, even source code to its BIOS. The resulting immediate massive development of hardware and accessories by others was hugely important to the PC architecture becoming the industry standard.

> You are under the impression that Commodore did not keep up with Apple

Thanks for the interesting summary; what was the last year that you think Commodore was a viable competitor to Apple?

I do wish Apple paid as much attention to gaming on macOS as they do on iOS.

It is cool though that C64 is still a viable game platform in 2020, with products (C64 Mini) that you can buy. ;-)

> TRS-80 had, as I mentioned, nothing other than the BASIC tutorial accompanying the computer

Apparently you could buy this for $9.95: http://www.trs-80.org/trs-80-micro-computer-technical-refere...

>Apparently you could buy this for $9.95

Sorry, I should have clarified that I was referring to software development. Radio Shack, as a store chain prominently selling kits and Forrest Mims's books on electronics, would have embarrassed itself by not offering schematics for its computer.

What Tandy did not do was offer software documentation. 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.

> complete lack of Tandy documentation that motivated the author to write the article in the first place

It looks like Radio Shack published this in 1979: http://www.trs-80.org/trs-80-assembly-language-programming/

It also appears that they supplied a machine language monitor/debugger, T-BUG. So armed with a Z-80 manual and a memory map of the system you could probably do basically anything.

Since the system used block character graphics (like ANSI block graphics), and a memory-mapped display, accessing them from assembly language (or any language) seems like it would be trivial unless they somehow kept the video RAM address and character set a secret.

However, it doesn't look like Radio Shack provided official source listings for their firmware the way IBM (and perhaps other companies) did. I expect that greatly helped with the development of software and tools for the IBM PC, as well as the development of compatible machines.

As much as I like modern computers and smartphones (and systems like the Raspberry Pi) which have absurdly higher speed and greater storage than vintage machines, it's always amazing to consider the explosion of creativity and fun that people managed to have with these pioneering "personal computers."

>Thanks for the interesting summary; what was the last year that you think Commodore was a viable competitor to Apple?

1985-1986, the period of about 18 months after the Amiga came out. You read BYTE magazine from then and it's clear that the magazine (and, more importantly, its readers) viewed the Amiga and the Atari ST as viable, realistic challengers to the Macintosh as leader of mouse-based graphical computing (i.e., anything not IBM/MS-DOS). Neither Commodore nor Atari succeeded in supplanting Apple for reasons I won't get into here.

But you're not asking the right question. Apple itself was having a very difficult time in convincing corporate customers that Macintosh was the answer to anything. Everyone acknowledged that Macintosh's user interface and software were excellent. But DOS was good enough, had a gigantic software library, and by the end of 1986 it was possible to pay $1000 for a PC clone that could run dad's spreadsheets he brought home, and also run Flight Simulator for him and educational games for the kids. The one exception was creative types; desktop publishing and graphic design, with the Laserwriter's PostScript capability, let Apple keep Macintosh alive, while the Apple II line kept bringing in cash even though the PC was eating it and everything else non-DOS alive.

By 1988, although the Commodore 64 still had the largest home computer installed base, the PC was growing so quickly that everyone knew that it would soon take over. Meanwhile, Nintendo was so popular that in one year it sold as the entire C64 installed base since 1982. So every game publisher began shifting to PC and/or consoles. Apple's also huge II installed base also kept it afloat as mentioned above, and the significant educational market let Apple keep producing II models until the early 1990s, almost exactly the same time as when Commodore went bankrupt and discontinued the C64. But realistically, neither the C64 nor the II had been viable markets for software or hardware companies since about 1990.

Apple survived because by the early 1990s Macintosh sales were finally trending upward, with the continuing creative market joined for the first time by substantial home and educational demand thanks to the low-cost Classic and LC models. But the relentless growth and dominance of the PC market, combined with mistakes by Apple in the mid-1990s, caused the company to come within moments of bankruptcy and/or sale in the late 1990s until Steve Jobs came back and pulled off a miracle.

FWIW are you aware that the TRS-80 appeared in the Allied Industrial Catalog of the time perhaps two months before its retail debut? Which (if they were targeting any industrial uses) makes the closed approach you describe seemingly more puzzling.

I was not aware of that. But that's not contradictory with what I described. Tandy released a lot of business software; basically, its counterparts to the prepackaged turnkey systems for accounting/word processing/inventory that system integrators/VARs were by 1977 starting to assemble around CP/M S-100 systems. Tandy didn't mind third-party development as long as it was the publisher, and its stores only sold products with the Tandy Radio Shack logo somewhere.

As I mentioned, independent computer stores—the Byte Shops, the Computerlands—didn't bother to carry TRS-80 products, despite the huge customer base, because they understandably didn't think they could compete against Radio Shacks everywhere. Same with toy and department stores that after 1980 became the primary home-computer sales channel for Commodore and Atari. Since company-owned Radio Shacks couldn't carry anything without the Tandy logo, 80 Micro and other magazines became the only way for third-party developers who didn't or couldn't get approval for resale by Radio Shack to reach customers. And 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.

Compare this to Apple. 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.

> 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.

Funny you should mention that - the original Oregon Trail program (including it source code in BASIC) is on page 132 of the Creative Computing issue!

Thank you for pointing that out; I had read the Creative Computing article with the (I think CDC) BASIC source code for Oregon Trail, but didn't realize that this is the issue.

This is exactly the same time as David Ahl (founder of Creative Computing)'s monumental BASIC Computer Games book. While that book was the single most important source of source code for the earliest personal computer BASIC game programmers, another important resource was articles like this one. BYTE printed source code for important early type-in programs like Star Trek and Hunt the Wumpus into the early 1980s, too.

s/puzzling/ironic/ . I appreciate your posts and did not intend to sound contradictory.