Good Ol' Tandy Days

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, May 09, 2012, Richard Kreiss wrote:

>I gave an 8 inch floppy to a friend who taught computer science at Brooklyn
>College. He showed it to one of his classes and told them that it held
>450kb of data. This was in the days of 1mb 3 1/2" disks. They were shocked.

I thought the 8in floppies on the Model II were 640k, and a
whopping 1.2m on the double sided ones on the Model 16/6000s.

The max RAM one could get in the Model 16/6000s was 512K.  Bob
Snapp made some jury-rigged RAM cards for this which piggy backed
chips to get them to 1024k.  I first met Jim Asman when Bob told
him to come to me in Seattle to buy the boards as Bob wouldn't
ship them into Canada.

The original hard drive for the Model II was an 8in drive with 8
meg storage and came with chirping bird sounds.  If one powered
it up before removing the shipping strap on the bottom, it would
toast the $4,500 drive.

The last mainframe I ran was a Burroughs B-4500 which had all of
200k *BYTES* of IC RAM, and ran an average of 20 programs in the
mix at any time.  It would run circles around the comparably
prices IBM 360s of the time.

>Now one can put 64gb in your pocket and it could get lost.

>We have gone from writers asking who needs or would ever use 35 mb hard
>drive to buying a 1 plus tb drive for less then 100.00 for an internal
>drive.

When I managed the Radio Shack X-department at 19th and K in D.C.,
a woman came in asking for a machine with 128k RAM so I knew she
came from the local Apple dealer.  I asked her what she wanted to
use the computer for, and she said she wrote mystery novels.  I
sat her down with a Model II running Scripsit, showing her how
easy it was to deal with multi-page documents, how nice the
keyboard was, etc. never mentioning the 64k RAM.  She bought the
Model II, Scripsit, Daisy Wheel II that afternoon (about 6 grand), 
and I took it to her Georgetown apartment later that day.  She
had not bought the external HD enclosure even though I told her
that she would undoubtably clobber her floppy without one.  A
week later she came in saying I was right, bought the externl
drive, and I managed to get her work off the non-bootable floppy.
She then referred several other local authors to me who bought
similar systems including a pair for Kitty Kelly and her husband.

As I've said before, Tandy was in a position to dominate the
small computer business in the early '80s having good products,
a distribution system second to none, and some very knowledgeable
sales people.  Unfortunately they hadn't a clue how to deal with
professional computer sales and marketing people.  It might be
interesting to get people like me, John Esak, JP, and Tom Podnar,
together to write a case study of how to kill a business.

Bill
-- 
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Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that
will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues
a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.
  -- Frederic Bastiat