John Roach died - creator of TRS-80

[Cmaier]

Texas ‘Country Boy’ Helped Launch Personal-Computer Era — The Wall Street Journal

John V. Roach, who has died at age 83, oversaw introduction of a small $600 PC at RadioShack in 1977

apple.news

First computer I ever used was a TRS-80 model I. My elementary school obtained one, and my parents got me into a special program where 8 third graders could come to school an hour early a few times a week to learn to use it.

My teacher didn’t really know how to use it, but she has some sort of education guide for it and I learned a little BASIC.

The following year the school district got some model 3’s and things got more structured (I never took another computer class, though)

The school district moved onto Apple IIs, but none of my friends could afford those for their homes. Years later me and my friend won the International Computer Problem Solving Contest (whatever that was) by writing a program to calculate and display Pascal’s triangle on his TRS-80 Color Computer.

I also fondly recall going into radio shacks and making the employees think I broke the machines by printing random symbols all over the screen. Good times.

 

[DT]

I used to ride my bike down to the Radio Shack in the mall, I was always buying some little project related thing so knew the folks that worked there pretty well. When it was quiet, they'd let me bring in my handwritten BASIC programs to enter and run

 

[Cmaier]

And who could forget this thing?

The Interface Experience: Bard Graduate Center

interface-experience.org

So great.

TRS-80 changed my life. My parents were convinced that I had an aptitude and that computers were going to be incredibly important, so they bought me a TI-99/4A. I spent all my time reading Byte, Compute, etc. etc. Became a self-taught programmer, got kicked out of my one other computer class in middle school (I tested out of the mandatory class and was stuck in an independent study) by a teacher who threw a chair at me, took the computer science written exam to get into my PhD program (i signed up for data structures and for algorithms classes a month before and dropped them when I passed - having no formal computer education, the textbooks were invaluable in putting names to concepts i had figured out for myself along the way…)

I ended up getting my phd in electrical engineering, and designing and manufacturing a really weird CPU as my dissertation research, and all of that started because of my fascination with playing Scott Adams text adventures on the original TRS-80 when I was 7 or 8.

 

[Cmaier]

April 1978 Byte Magazine, from my digital collection…