John Roach has died

As a kid, pouring through the latest Heathkit catalogue was a joy, as was rummaging through an old-school Radio Shack store for new stuff to put on the bread board. In later years such expeditions included Fry's in Sunnyvale EDIT: Palo Alto, actually. When Radio Shack put TRS-80s in every store it wasn't long before kids of all ages with a bit of BASIC knowledge snuck loops of obscenities onto those screens before sales staff would finally notice and interrupt. In later years it seemed that every Radio Shack store everywhere had an endless loop of Top Gun or Star Wars videos on endless loop. I cannot help but remember most people calling the TRS-80 the "Trash 80" even though nobody I knew disliked the machines, per se.

RIP John Roach, marketing visionary.

I used to half-joke that Radio Shack always tended to be either a few years too late or a few years too early with their products. For example, the TRS-80 Model 16 was a 68000-based multiuser Xenix (Microsoft's version of Unix) workstation in 1982. The 6809-based TRS-80 Color Computer also had a multiuser, multitasking operating system, OS-9, available for it. Meanwhile, over in the original Z80-based line of the TRS-80 Model I/III/4, they had a "luggable" computer, the Model 4P, that would have blown the Osborne 1 away...if it had come out two years earlier. And, their first MS-DOS machine, the Tandy 2000, zigged when the market zagged: it was MS-DOS compatible but not PC compatible. It was also possibly the only computer from a major company that used the 80186 CPU.

There are still some oddities about the Model 4 I remember fondly. The operating system for it was inspired by OS/360, I think, rather than whatever inspired CP/M and MS-DOS, so it had a different flavor -- "/" as the extension separator, JCL files instead of BAT files, and a very different way of handling devices. But it also had device redirection, which was kind of incredible for a machine of its time and capability. Going back and looking at what the last operating system shipped for it, LS-DOS 6.3, could do circa 1983 is pretty interesting -- and also speculating on what might have happened if Radio Shack had stuck with that path. (I can't find the specifics anymore, but there were a couple "SVC calls" -- the API that programs used to talk to the OS -- that were clearly meant to support a multitasking version of the OS that never came to be.)

Anyway, other than Mr. Roach, I don't think they were a very forward-looking company in most respects. It's fun to speculate what might have happened -- one of mine was, what if Radio Shack had bought the Amiga and built a new OS for it around the 68K version of OS-9? They were better managed than Commodore, surely, right? Well, yeah, probably, but that's a pretty low bar to clear. They could probably have kept a Tandy Computers division going as a PC clone maker if they'd played their cards right, but they sold all that off by the mid-1990s, IIRC, and kept missing every boat from that point on.

Ironic footnote: Tandy Leather, the craft company that birthed the once-giant Tandy Corporation, is actually still around.

As an aside, some of them have gone to the "Store within a store" concept where, instead of ill-informed blue-shirted kids wandering around aimlessly, you can find yourself in the LG TV section staffed by an LG-trained salesperson who can at least answer general questions about the units.

There is now no longer a single store in that same town that sells discrete components; the only way to source them is online.

A guy I worked for as a kid one time said/joked he got his company's start by finishing people's botched attempts at assembling their TRS-80s. (Though his company also dealt in S-100 bus CP/M systems around then, and he might've been speaking more/also about those.)

I still do.