Radio Shack's TRS-80 microcomputer ruled the roost before the IBM PC came out. They sold by the millions to computer hobbyists and businessmen, thanks to the ubiquity of "the Shack," but were wiped out by the IBM PC onslaught. But Tandy was actively hostile to the TRS-80's supporters, so a huge Counterculture grew in opposition to the RS Establishment, selling better hardware and software, and hacking the innards of the machine. It was all held together by specialist magazines, user groups, and a thousand one-programmer shoestring companies. This was my universe when I was in high school.
"Priming the Pump" is the story of the creation of the Model I, the forces that led to the TRS-80 "ecosystem," the names and games and utilities and DOSes that everyone in the know had heard of. It's also the story of David & Theresa Welsh's word processing system Lazy Writer, which is representative of the many small tech businesses that thrived in the TRS-80 world (due to the general lack of decent software & hardware from Radio Shack). The straight-up history and interviews are very interesting to anyone who was "there," and probably marginally so to anyone who cares about the history of microcomputing.
Like a lot of the handmade artifacts from the micro hobbyist days, this is a labor of love, and you have to take the bad with the good. It's got 50 pages(!) of David Welsh's childhood autobiography from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. The section on TRS-80 magazines gets derailed into a lot of show more unrelated ones in which Lazy Writer was advertised, but leaves out two of the most important (The Alternate Source and Softside).
But this is nonetheless likely to be the definitive history of that beloved subculture. The Welshes have dug up the true stories behind people whose names were famous (or infamous): Vern Hester, Randy Cook, Dennis Bathory Kitsz, Scott Adams, Wayne Green, Harv Pennington, Big Five Software, Misosys, World Power Systems, and more. Reading it induced pure rushes of emotion in parts of my mind I hadn't touched in a long long time (think of it as "Twilight" for microcomputer geeks). Like the pro-democracy aristocrats before the French Revolution, the heroes of the TRS-80 were shabbily treated by the new world they had set in motion, and "Priming the Pump" goes a long way towards setting them in their rightful context. show less
"Priming the Pump" is the story of the creation of the Model I, the forces that led to the TRS-80 "ecosystem," the names and games and utilities and DOSes that everyone in the know had heard of. It's also the story of David & Theresa Welsh's word processing system Lazy Writer, which is representative of the many small tech businesses that thrived in the TRS-80 world (due to the general lack of decent software & hardware from Radio Shack). The straight-up history and interviews are very interesting to anyone who was "there," and probably marginally so to anyone who cares about the history of microcomputing.
Like a lot of the handmade artifacts from the micro hobbyist days, this is a labor of love, and you have to take the bad with the good. It's got 50 pages(!) of David Welsh's childhood autobiography from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. The section on TRS-80 magazines gets derailed into a lot of show more unrelated ones in which Lazy Writer was advertised, but leaves out two of the most important (The Alternate Source and Softside).
But this is nonetheless likely to be the definitive history of that beloved subculture. The Welshes have dug up the true stories behind people whose names were famous (or infamous): Vern Hester, Randy Cook, Dennis Bathory Kitsz, Scott Adams, Wayne Green, Harv Pennington, Big Five Software, Misosys, World Power Systems, and more. Reading it induced pure rushes of emotion in parts of my mind I hadn't touched in a long long time (think of it as "Twilight" for microcomputer geeks). Like the pro-democracy aristocrats before the French Revolution, the heroes of the TRS-80 were shabbily treated by the new world they had set in motion, and "Priming the Pump" goes a long way towards setting them in their rightful context. show less