Tandy Released the TRS-80 Home Computer
On this day · 3 August 1977
When Radio Shack put a real computer on store shelves for $600, the personal computing era went mainstream overnight.
On August 3, 1977, Tandy Corporation and its Radio Shack chain unveiled the TRS-80, one of the first computers an ordinary family could buy off a shop floor. Until then, computing meant corporate mainframes or solder-it-yourself hobbyist kits. The TRS-80 arrived assembled and ready to switch on.
For about $600 you got a keyboard built around a Zilog Z80 processor, 4 kilobytes of memory, a twelve-inch monitor, and a cassette recorder for loading programs. A built-in BASIC interpreter let buyers write their own software, and a cassette of games shipped in the box.
Tandy’s executives had braced for modest demand, guessing they might move 1,000 units in the opening month.
Sales beat the most cautious estimates tenfold within the first month.
With thousands of Radio Shack outlets already nationwide, the company could put computers in front of shoppers everywhere at once. Alongside the Apple II and Commodore PET that same year, the TRS-80 helped turn the personal computer from a curiosity into a household product.
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