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My first experience on a computer was an IMSAI 8080, at school, but soon after it was a TRS-80. Soon after, though, I had my own KIM-1, but I also had a programmable calculator -- a rebadged TI (I'm guess a TI-55) from, you guessed it, Radio Shack.
My father bought the TRS-80 for doing engineering work. Model 1, expansion interface, I have no idea how much RAM it had, "all of it", I imagine, knowing my father. He also had a disk drive or two, and printer that printer on aluminum coated paper with electric sparks. I can't speak much to the printouts save that they photocopied really well. I recall him calling me in to his office to point out that on the Model 1 that the BUSRQ, Bus Request, pin was tied to the tristate logic on the address bus, which implied that when you requested the bus, the address bus would "go away" before the CPU acknowledge the request (via BUSAK). He just smiled and shook his head. He was trying to DMA a device in to the machine.
He passed, late last year, and I actually found that TRS-80 in his house, in boxes, unused. I tried to hook it up really quick, but couldn't get it to start. In the end, I had to send it off to auction, I couldn't bring it home with me.
But that was a treasure to find. Not just a computer of the same model as what I first learned upon, but THE computer, over 30 years old.
Radio Shack was the first company to really make computers a consumer item. They had the hardware, software, accessories, and the store fronts necessary to push the micro computer in to the public eye, and out of the nichey boutiques where Apples and what not were available.
Having loitered and trespassed in to my share of these small stores, they were pretty uninviting to casual browsers compared to the neat, boxes, packed in plastic and racked on the walls displays at Radio Shack and the RS Computer Centers.
My father had two of the disk drives. These drives came self contained in their metal housing: drive and power supply. No wall warts here, just a 120V cable plugged straight in to a monster transformer stuck on the back. But install was simply plug it in to the wall and connect the edge connector to the Expansion Interface. No hood cracking, inserting boards, etc. Consumer friendly.
The Model 100, I still have mine, is a GREAT piece of hardware. In another thread someone mentioned someone who still used the Model 100 to write articles. The keyboard on the M100 is excellent, one of the best I've ever used. The editor is fast and simple, with word wrap and searching. The screen was 40 char wide, but you could use the terminal program to upload the text files, and when you did that, you could change the margins. So it was easy to upload the file as 80 characters wide (where it would insert CRs for you). Really practical and useful for short-medium articles.
And it lasted forever on AA batteries.
It was also quite light, since it didn't have huge batteries. It was more a sign of the size of micro electronics at the time than anything else. Turns out #2 pencils with the erasers still on, just a couple wraps of tape, and cut to length made perfect little feet for the M100 to give you a little better typing angle.
They also marketed pocket computers, rebadged SHARPS with 1K of RAM and BASIC.
That was the power of Radio Shack. They were ubiquitous, they were everywhere. Before the big box stores, they had everything. They always had the most amazing things at xmas time. I had one of their Yellow Flavor Radios.
While RS sold parts, they were a consumer store, selling consumer electronics. Pushing the TRS-80 in to the mainstream was a pretty risky move, since it really was a hobbyist dominated market at that time.
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