Priming the Pump:
How TRS-80 Enthusiasts
Helped Spark the PC Revolution
About the Authors
Since closing out their TRS-80 software business in the mid-1980s, David and Theresa Welsh have been busy raising their daughter and active in IT work, community involvement, and writing/editing/photography endeavors.
Before he immersed himself in Z80 programming, David had been a professional photographer. He returned to doing occasional photo assignments, and, more recently, has digitized and cataloged his considerable accumulation of images, mostly in black and white film. David played an active role in his daughter's education, establishing a computer lab at her elementary school, using old, donated computers. Theresa served as a "Picture Lady," introducing kids to computer art.
After the demise of the TRS-80 business, Theresa worked at EDS as a technical writer, then moved to Ford Motor Company in various contract positions through the 1990s, serving as newsletter and web editor at the Scientific Research Lab until the auto industry cutbacks in 2005. She went on to take technical writing gigs in banking and healthcare. David also did contract assignments as a technical writer and consultant during this period through their consulting company, Explainamation (www.explainamation.com). He has served as chairman of a local organization working for community development in the interests of residents along the border between Detroit and its northern suburbs.
Theresa co-authored an award-winning business book (The Brave New Service Strategy, with Dr. Barbara A. Gutek) and wrote a novel for young adults, Tara, Initiate of Heliopolis. She also does editing for other authors and has done work for the Alan Kardec Educational Society (AKES), editing older works translated from Portuguese and French. She is an avid book reviewer for her website, www.theseekerbooks.com, and at amazon.com , where she has over 100 reviews.
Daughter Amy spent her senior year in high school as an exchange student in the Czech Republic and traveled thoughout Europe. Today she lives in New York City and aspires to a career in media.
2019 TANDY ASSEMBLYIn September 2019, we attended the Tandy Assembly event in Springfield Ohio, in which people who once bought and used Tandy Radio Shack computers gather to display and demonstrate new ways to use these early microcomputers. It is amazing to see that there is still interest in these machines which contributed so much to computer history and modern culture. Many attendees remember with fondness the pleasure they got from having a TRS-80 as a kid, learning to program it and finding ways to use it. Some are still writing code for it, often using an emulator on a modern computer. Ian Mavric traveled all the way from Australia to demonstrate his interface device that lets you take your old TRS-80 files from their floppy disks and save them onto a modern SD card, which can then be used as a hard drive. There are several other products that also do this. We brought copies of our book, which we discovered nearly everyone already had. Nevertheless, we signed and sold a good many more copies. If you would like to know more about this group, try their website: tandyassembly.com. |
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2007 VINTAGE COMPUTER FESTIVALWe were at the 2007 Vintage Computer Festival (VCF) in Mountain View California at the excellent computer museum in that city. We were the first presenters, and had an enthusiastic audience for our slide show, which used a lot of the old ads and photographs. Several media organizations interviewed us and gave us a chance to discuss what happened in the late 1970s that led to the explosion of personal computer use. | |
 Some of the vintage items in the Computer Museum at Mountain View CA |
 A Difference Engine, built out of erector set parts |
January 1, 2008 / 30th Anniversary of TRS-80
The 30th anniversary year for TRS-80 (1977 - 2007), was a great year for our book, with nothing but favorable comments from our readers. I got a wonderful email from a former Radio Shack employee who wrote:
"Thank you for writing the book! I was delighted to find it on Amazon and read it over Christmas. It was nice to read so much background on the events I experienced working for Tandy from 1980 to 1993... Reading your book brought back so much. Time spent at the store as a salesperson, learning most of what I knew about the TRS-80 from our teenage customers! The blitzes. Disk doubling punches. An absolute prohibition on outside software and magazines in the store. Every model you mentioned and some you were too kind to mention such as DT-1 and DT-100 terminals, a slew of roman-numeraled printers, the phrase "near letter quality", and millions of dollars in ill-conceived marketing. I wish I still had a "Diskette of the Month" club card, I'm sure that closed a lot of business customers!"
Two other important books were published in 2008 about those early
years: iWoz by Steve Wozniak, and On the Edge: The
Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore by Brian Bagnall. I have read
(and reviewed for amazon.com) both books and can recommend them as adding
to our store of knowledge.