The TRS-80 Model II. What were the market conditions like for it?

[Keatah]

Back in the day (as a kid) I always wanted a Model II to set up some sort of real or make-believe Nasa ground control station. Kids! I tell ya! Naturally there was no way that was going to happen.

 

So as a result I never had one, and my only experience with one was reading about it in the catalogs. With prose that used words I didn't fully understand. My wife had one and we recently sold it due to it taking space, being noisy, consuming a lot of power, and generally not being used for anything.

 

But back in the day, what where the main competitors to this machine? And were there any areas that it excelled in better than any other micro? What was its niche, if any?

 

As a kid, I always took note of what computers were being used where. And I don't ever recall seeing a Model II in day-to-day use anywhere. If I did, it escapes me at the moment.

[George Phillips]

Model II's were used primarily in the back office running business applications like accounting, inventory, billing -- that sort of thing. Hence why you were unlikely to run into them. Initially I'd say their main competitors were CP/M machines and possibly some minicomputers. Later on they added a 68000 processor to the line so it moved more into the minicomputer arena. It ran Xenix - Microsoft's version of Unix and supported terminals. And by then PC's themselves world have become another competitor in that space.

 

I don't know if the applications were considered to be anything special. I have heard the machines were well built and lasted forever with many of them plugging away in the back office long after they were obsolete.

[JamesD]

The Model II could run CP/M as well as Radio Shack's DOS and BASIC, and the 8" drives gave it more storage capacity than most CP/M systems.
So it was pretty much a CP/M machine with additional capabilities.

[pski]

The Model II was a machine with multiple personalities. Initially released with TRSDOS for the Model II, Tandy attempted to exert its monopolistic tendencies as usual and control the software ecosystem. However, and this have been intentional by the designers but certainly not by management, the machine's architecture was ideal for running CP/M. The CP/M vendors of the day realized this and soon began offering various flavors of CP/M. The machine quickly became known as a solid CP/M platform.

Later iterations of the line that included the MC68000 subsystem, like the Model 16, were able to run XENIX and became capable Unix workstations, The Model 16B was the most popular Unix based workstation on the market for a few years.

However, as with many vendors of the time, a large subset of the business rational for the machine was competing with the IBM PC. And we all know who won that war. This is actually a topic I'm researching for a future episode of TRS-80 Trash Talk.

[doctorclu]

Can add that when I was in 8th / 9th grade we had a teacher at my school that used a TRS-80 Model 2 for recording grades, word processing, banners for announcements, and crossword puzzles.

[BassGuitari]

Contrary to popular belief, there were actually some games for the Model II, as well, although certainly that was not its demographic. (Special thanks to Pski for setting me up with a few disks a couple months back! )

The original nine Adventure games by Scott Adams were released on a single floppy and as far I can tell, they appear to be unique to the Model II rather than straight "ports" of the Model I or CP/M versions. Most notably, the room description bar at the top of the screen is in inverse video, the 80-column screen is properly utilized (at least mostly), and there are occasional errant capital letters mixed in with the Lower CAse text.

There are also a handful of exclusive original "arcade" games from a Maryland Model II user group (or an actual company? Need more info!) written in BASIC with M/L subroutines. Graphics scrolling does not appear to be within the Model II's considerable arsenal of capabilities; these games play like glorified LED, LCD, or VFD handheld games. (Although that could just be because they were written in BASIC.)

(Any Model I/III BASIC game that doesn't contain any PEEKs or POKEs should run on a Model II as well, at least theoretically. Although the PRINT and PRINTTAB commands could probably be slightly modified to utilize the Model II's higher screen real estate; unmodified Model I BASIC games look sort of scrunched to the left on the Model II's 80-column display.)

[tschak909]

The Model II line was an interesting evolution at Tandy.

 

Tandy knew that they needed to tackle the business market, customers were actually using Model 1's with disk systems in various jobs, from inventory management, to accounting, and even in process control. Commodore PETs were also being used in this fashion (I would argue even moreso, due to the massive amount of expansion rom space possible in the PETs, coupled with both the expansion bus and the user port, not counting the IEEE-488 interface.). And you had a whole slew of business computers from different companies which all had the same standard specs:

 

* 80 column monitor

* keyboard with a 10-key

* 8 inch drive for high capacity

* 32K to 64K of RAM

* Z80 or 8080 CPU

* Running some form of CP/M

* All in one case

 

And these systems were literally being pitched as complete solutions for small to medium sized businesses that only needed a single computer in the back-office or at the secretary's desk.

 

If more was needed, typically businesses would shell out for an S-100 system from a VAR like Godbout (CompuPro), or one of a zillion other companies selling s-100 cabinets with multiple serial ports, to attach terminals.

 

Minicomputers were also in this mix, particularly if a database was needed, or if you were buying software from a VAR that had long since standardized on a minicomputer of some sort (I saw many odd minicomputer designs used in vertically integrated solutions right up until PCs got enough memory to run multi-user operating systems like UNIX effectively. One pharmacy system that I was called in to help restore to working order was built atop a GA-16/220 minicomputer from 1973, with two CDC 9427 combo 5MB disk pack/fixed disk drives. ORIGINALLY DESIGNED FOR INDUSTRIAL PROCESS CONTROL!)

 

So Tandy's design was an attractive proposition, because:

 

* You got a 64K system for about $3000 (street price) Most business systems fully equipped would cost a bit more, at that time.

* everything expected from a business system

* It ran somewhat familiar software (Scripsit, etc.) if you came from the Model 1

* It ran CP/M (Pickles & Trout wasn't bad)

* The machine was reliable and well built

* You could add serial cards and drop DT-1 terminals off it, if you ran appropriate software, so you could maximize your investment.

* A fairly complete set of business software

* A decent BASIC to write your own business software (there were countless numbers of BASIC programs that drove business back offices for a decade)

 

Later, as Tandy adopted a 68000 as an additional processor, you suddenly got, for the same price in 1982, the cheapest UNIX multiuser system available on planet Earth. (this would soon change very quickly with the arrival of VENIX on the PC, but I digress!), drop a handful of terminals off a Model 16, and you could service up to 5 terminals easily. again, maximizing investment.

 

-Thom

[Omega-TI]

Back in the day I only sold two of them. They were terribly expensive and so was the paltry software library.

The model 16 sold better, but mainly to commercial accounts. I never sold either version to an average consumer.