A TRS Farewell

My RSS reader passed along an item about the death of John Roach, CEO and chairman of Tandy once upon a time. In mentioning he had been the “spearhead” of the TRS-80, I remembered how different retrospectives I’ve turned up have the role of a less high-ranking Tandy executive named Don French wane and wax as if depending on who was supplying the information. That can feel a petty correction to make at a moment like this, though. My own family started off with a TRS-80 Model 1 and stuck with proprietary Radio Shack hardware for years, such that I’ve long had the impression I wasn’t really aware anyone else sold computers until PC clones started showing up in the houses of friends. With that connection I got into emulation of the TRS-80 early enough to tinker with a program for the “classic” Macintosh operating system when I didn’t know where to find other programs for it beyond those supplied with the program. It was about a decade later that I began to try out a more capable emulator with more ultra-low-resolution games ready to hand, but that emulator stopped working some operating system upgrades later. For the moment, though, yet another emulator I happened on not that long ago continues to hold up.