Customer Reviews

Priming the Pump: How TRS-80 Enthusiasts Helped Spark the PC Revolution

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Oh, the memories. This is a book that you can judge by its cover; doesn't it remind you of something you'd see in the hobby book section of a Radio Shack circa 1980, sandwiched in between the SAMS photofacts books and ham radio antenna guides? "Priming The Pump" is a very personal recollection of early microcomputer history, more along the lines of Stan Veit's "History Of The Personal Computer" than Brian Bagnall's journalistic "On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise And Fall Of Commodore" (both great reading.)

Put briefly, David & Theresa Welsh's book is exactly how I remember the glory days of 8-bit microcomputers. For those who weren't there, these "Wonder Years" of personal computing were a hobbyist renaissance of Edisonian proportions, full of wonder and small-community values, laced with inventiveness and packed with more than a bit of 60's idealism. So empowering was the concept of having a privately-owned personal computer, that only a few years after the Big Three (Apple, Commodore & Radio Shack) first hit the shelves, universities in the U.S. experienced an explosion of new computer science majors that has not been equaled since.

"Priming The Pump" picks up where John Markoff's "What The Dormouse Said" leaves off - and if you enjoy this type of history, these two books are ones you should read before moving on to what has since become the Revealed Truth of the Silicon Valley, Robert X. Cringely's "Accidental Empires" (and from there, pretty much every biopic involving Steve Jobs and/or Bill Gates.) This is not that book.

What David and Theresa have done is write the Rest Of The Story viewed through Tandy glasses, and a very personal pair at that - a story of entrepreneurship, early technology and background on most of the major individual contributors from the TRS-80 days whose history has been nothing short of opaque despite being quite possibly the world's most popular home computer up until the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981. Here, for the first time in print, Steve Leininger (The TRS-80's Steve Wozniak) and Randy Cook (its Gary Kildall) get their due. What, you haven't heard of these guys? Chuck Peddle (inventor of the Commodore 64) gets his due in Brian Bagnall's book - and, like Leininger and Cook, the reason these guys aren't household names is because their parent companies were rather faceless as opposed to being cults of personality emerging from a garage. Today, only Apple is left among the original members of this garage cult, and as the sole company remaining we should appreciate that there were once many voices, equally fresh and innovative in their day.

While writing the book was an 8-year labor of love for the authors, reading the book is similar - it's so "you are there" personal that it's akin to reading Bill Bryson's "Thunderbolt Kid" if Bill had become a TRS-80 programmer. But if you weren't there, you're going to be at odds with the lack of journalistic distance with which the book is written. The Welshes are not writing from a Voice Of God 3rd-person perspective here - this is more like Beat journalism, where you are down in the trenches at the West Coast Computer Faire once again, dealing with crappy distribution, Empyrean magazine publishers (Wayne Green!) and larger-than-life mini companies (Adventure International, Micro Systems Software, etc.) along with the nightmare of being new parents trying to make ends meet.

With this in mind, the only information I would have added - LNW Research, where art thou? LNW, the Cadillac of TRS-80 clone makers and kit-builders, is mentioned only in passing despite sharing the stage with Logical Systems (of LDOS and Lobo MAX-80 fame), the only significant 3rd-party hardware companies to orbit Tandy's solar system.

A fantastic, if sentimental, read!

As one of the co-creators, I know the history of the TRS-80. This is the most accurate history of this "Industry Creating Machine" out there. Even knowing the history, it was enjoyable to fill in the holes related to some of the other players.

Many people give Apple the credit for creating the personal computer industry, but it really took Radio Shack with their stores and presence in the market to bring the awareness of personal computers to the masses. Then IBM made the market take off.

A fun read for those that lived the revolution and those who want to know why we have personal computers today.

Another good book for additional history on the personal computer revolution is Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer. This gives an account of the other player in the infancy of the industry.

I enjoyed this book thoroughly, read it cover-to-cover. It would be a shame to focus on whether this book has enough "polish". If you are interested in this topic, I encourage you to check it out. The writing is clean and easy, and I tore through the book with no problem. There are wonderful photographs and reproductions of old TRS-80 ads. The story is really about not only the TRS-80, but the early microcomputer movement, and how it was overtaken by the PC revolution. It's also a personal story of a self-taught programmer and husband-wife entrepreneur team. I am so glad this book was written, because this is an important and entertaining story. I can only hope that someone will do something similar for the TRS-80 Color Computer, which was the machine I grew up on and put myself through college with.

Having lived through the times described in the book, just reading it again makes it enjoyable all over again. I started working for Radio Shack just to get one of the computers. I remember it was 4K and a tape player for $999 less my employee discount. I had a TRS-80 Model I, several Model III's and and a couple Model 4's. I was the only person that I know of that 2 hard drives at the time. One 5 meg and the other 10 meg and I used them in my business. Each costing over $6000 each. I think about it now, I can get 2 TB for $100. I sold TRS games in a retail store in Garden City Michigan and through mail order for 4 years. I got to see Dave and Theresa in my store at least once a month as I sold their software Lazy Writer. That was a long time ago but it seems just like yesterday.

I remember while still working for Radio Shack having a problem getting computers for the people that wanted them. I had at least 50 a week wanting one. I could only get 2 or 3 a month in the beginning and being on commission that was a bust. I figured out that if I started putting in orders with a $10 deposit, I could start getting in computers faster. I would refund myself and sell the computer to people on my list. At one point I had over 400 computers on order at one time. When one sold I would reinvest in other things like Floppy drives. Radio Shack started to notice the volume of computers being sold and started opening dedicated computer stores. After that I started my own business out of my house and 2 months later I was in business to stay.

There were may talented people at the time. Larry Ashmun, Vernon Hester, Scott Adams, and Kim Watt besides David and Theresa Welsh. I admired these people for there skills and creativity.

The book gives the best and accurate accounts of the time and was enjoyable to read. Good job Theresa and Dave.

Victor Andrews (former owner of Level IV & Soft Sector Marketing)

I was an early owner of a TRS-80 Model I, later a Model III, and finally a model 4, before purchasing my first IBM PC. As an assembler language programmer (actually a Systems Programmer) for IBM mainframes at the time, I wrote terminal emulation software on the Model I that allowed me to connect from home to the corporate mainframe computers using a modem. I was a very early tele-commuter.

Fond memories, and some not so fond, returned after reading about the original cassette interface, the early floppy drives, the expansion unit, NewDos and LDOS, among other things. I often wondered what became of Randy Cook, the original TRS-DOS author, and the historical accounts in the first part of the book solved that mystery.

I found the author's struggles and successes in the software industry very interesting. Having only worked at large commercial software companies, the story about the operation of a small "mom and pop" software company was most insightful to me.

A nostalgic and enjoyable read.

Having worked for Radio Shack Repair from the late 70s through the 80s and buying my 1st computer (a model III), the book brought back a lot of good memories. Sharing programs/info., learning Basic, writing a few useful programs, learning a little assembly language from my brother-in-law who was a programmer at Data Point.

I enjoyed learning more about what was going on behind the scenes.

Radio Shack and the very cool TRS-80 line and later PCs that followed from Tandy are never given credit for the true impact that they had on the PC revolution and simply getting people to use PCs.... A TRS-80 Model one was my first PC and it rocked! At the time, it was amazing - I still have it! This is a very interesting book for those who want to know the real story of Tandy and their very cool computers!

This book offers a first hand account of a family that was involved in Software development for Tandy's TRS-80. The love these users have for the "Trash 80" comes through in these pages. This book painstakingly chronicles the rise and fall of the micro computing industry in the heady days before the PC rose to prominence.

The story is interesting, but I felt this book could have stood a little editing. There were several places where I would skim through a few pages to get past the description of interpersonal turmoil to get back to the "interesting" bits. This book was obviously a labor of love, so I feel bad criticizing it, but I was hoping for more of a straight up "history of the TRS-80" and analysis of the business of micro computing and what I got was more of a story about entrepreneurship.

Still if you are curious about what it was like to develop software for the TRS-80 this book contains a lot of gems.

There must be as many as a million people with fiond memories of their first experiences with a TRS-80 computer, for there were more than a score of magazines devoted to the TRS-80, and book stores had a shelf of books on the Model I-IV, the 100, the PC-1 and the PC-2. "P" stood for ("pocket",not "personal"). We didn't call TRS-80 the "operating system" but we loaded it slowly with an audio cassette, or in a few seconds from a floppy, and it had "hooks" to allow attachment of our own code. This work concerns a single individual, not a team of specialists, who coded and sold a word processor. The official histories of computing make no mention of the TRS-80. but the device that intrigued so many for so long deserves books, and more books.

This is a first-person narrative of the experiences of an early "cottage industry" software business focused on the TRS-80. I tend to enjoy this kind of material, and the TRS-80 was indeed a landmark in personal computing, but this book just isn't enjoyable. It consists of three completely separate parts: (1) anecdotes from the early days of the TRS-80's design and the people behind it, (2) David's personal story, and (3) his wife Theresa's personal story. There is no attempt to connect the three, so there's a fair amount of redundancy and often apparently conflicting points of view--the book doesn't speak with one voice. Part 1 has some interesting material on the TRS-80 and its designers and user community in part 1, which I enjoyed; but parts 2 and 3 are full of irrelevant "my life story" details that have nothing to do with this topic, and that frankly depict the authors as less-than-likeable people who were unable to get along well with each other or their business partners and were permanently embittered by landing in bankruptcy as a result. Just publishing part 1 as a self-contained narrative of the history and early user community of this important invention, with the interesting information about the people behind it, would have been more effective. Severo Ornstein's "Computing in the Middle Ages" is much more engaging, as is Steve Wozniak's iWoz (though it's self-indulgent) and Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution".