Where was my Model 1 made?

[k0d3g3ar]

I happened to find myself in Dallas a couple of weeks back, and ended up driving to Ft Worth to visit my favorite BBQ joint (Angelos) coz I love that brisket!

Well my Google Maps was sending me all over the place and by accident I ended up downtown Ft. Worth and drove right past the Radio Shack world HQ complex.

It made me think... I wonder the actual physical address of where my Model 1 was made (in 1977/78)? Does anyone know that? I'm assuming it wasn't where Radio Shack HQ is now, right? I mean I suspect they were not such a big company in the late 1970s, or am I wrong on that?

Myles

 

[Chuck(G)]

Radio Shack was very big in the 1970s after the acquisition by Tandy in the 1960s. They bought Allied (anyone remember Knight Kit?), had branched out into international operations (Dick Smith in Austrialia used to be Radio Shack). Their big moneymaker was CB radio.

But to answer your question, Fort Worth and, IIRC, Austin.

 

[Al Hartman]

My copy isn't handy, but I'd bet the answer is in here:

http://www.amazon.com/Priming-Pump-...ie=UTF8&qid=1410494555&sr=1-3&keywords=trs-80

 

[k0d3g3ar]

Radio Shack was very big in the 1970s after the acquisition by Tandy in the 1960s. They bought Allied (anyone remember Knight Kit?), had branched out into international operations (Dick Smith in Austrialia used to be Radio Shack). Their big moneymaker was CB radio.

But to answer your question, Fort Worth and, IIRC, Austin.

Yes, but I actually wanted a complete physical Address. I was hoping to visit the site.

Also FYI, I'm an expat Australian and I actually worked for Dick Smith Electronics in Adelaide, Australia in 1978. I was one of his very early and first employees there. DSE was NEVER owned by Radio Shack. Dick Smith was an independent entrepreneur who followed in the footsteps of other entrepreneurs from Australia at the time (e.g. Bob Ansett, etc.) and he built his business from a single car radio repair shop in New South Wales into an international network of stores nationwide which eventually was sold to overseas interests. He was never part of the Radio Shack company. In fact, Radio Shack in Australia were represented by their own stores, typically under the "Tandy" name. DSE (as it does today) directly competed with Radio Shack throughout Australia.

Myles

 

[gonk23]

Also FYI, I'm an expat Australian and I actually worked for Dick Smith Electronics in Adelaide, Australia in 1978. I was one of his very early and first employees there. DSE was NEVER owned by Radio Shack. Dick Smith was an independent entrepreneur who followed in the footsteps of other entrepreneurs from Australia at the time (e.g. Bob Ansett, etc.) and he built his business from a single car radio repair shop in New South Wales into an international network of stores nationwide which eventually was sold to overseas interests. He was never part of the Radio Shack company. In fact, Radio Shack in Australia were represented by their own stores, typically under the "Tandy" name. DSE (as it does today) directly competed with Radio Shack throughout Australia.

Yep, although in 2001 Woolworths Ltd (who also owned DSE) purchased Tandy, and eventually converted the Tandy stores to DSE stores from 2009 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_(Australia)).

 

[Chuck(G)]

Yes, but I actually wanted a complete physical Address. I was hoping to visit the site.

Also FYI, I'm an expat Australian and I actually worked for Dick Smith Electronics in Adelaide, Australia in 1978. I was one of his very early and first employees there. DSE was NEVER owned by Radio Shack.

I didn't say that it was. Quite the reverse--DSE purchased the existing Tandy operation in Australia. Perhaps I should have been a little more concise in my language.

 

[JDallas]

...I ended up downtown Ft. Worth and drove right past the Radio Shack world HQ complex...

I thought Radio Shack was headquartered in Las Colinas but the internet says they're in Fort Worth near the river.

I'm in Dallas and see images of downtown Fort Worth from one of the local TV News channels. I see what once were called the Tandy Towers (I worked in Tower II) and the rest of Tandy Center.

I checked the local city info and got this:

(1) "The Tandy Center has been renovated and converted into City Place, a mixed- use office and retail development with a new parking garage."

(2) "Formerly known as Tandy Center and previous headquarters of RadioShack..."

(3) "Popularity of the mall (Tandy Center) began to wane in the 1990s, leading Dillard’s to move out. Virtually vacant, the mall was reborn in 1996 as an outlet mall, Fort Worth Outlet Square, but was still not successful. The mall and ice rink were both eventually closed and converted into office space. Today, the building is known as City Place."

Tandy Center in the 70s/80s was used for a lot of the scenes in the movie "The Lathe of Heaven" filmed in Dallas.

...I mean I suspect they were not such a big company in the late 1970s, or am I wrong on that?

Tandy bought Radio Shack in the 60s and by the 70s they were a big company predating their computer line. The two big companies in Fort Worth were Tandy/Radio Shack and General Dynamics (building F-16s).

...I wonder the actual physical address of where my Model 1 was made (in 1977/78 )? Does anyone know that?

Can't help with that specifically, someone else will.

Radio Shack was already big and while Tandy Center was where all the office work was, Tandy owned a lot of buildings around town... plain factory space where all sorts of toys were manufactured. But what I saw once of one of those facilities, I suspect they had a more sophisticated production line somewhere else to do the computer line.

I designed electronic products in the non-computer division and our stuff was manufactured in Seoul Korea, and after labor riots there, production was moved to China... 15 or 20 years before the rest of the world did that.

 

[KC9UDX]

Some of that Korean-manufactured stuff was (and still is) superb!

I certainly don't know the answer, but a lot of "Made in USA" computer stuff back then wasn't really, and today, they'd get in big trouble for saying that. It was "assembled in USA" but the parts were made all over the place.

 

[k0d3g3ar]

I didn't say that it was. Quite the reverse--DSE purchased the existing Tandy operation in Australia. Perhaps I should have been a little more concise in my language.

In the 1970s & 1980s, DSE was an entirely self-standing and separate business that competed with Tandy in the 1970s & 80s - that was when I worked there. The fact that Woolworths purchased DSE from Dick Smith in the 1980s and then purchased Tandy/Radio Shack in Australia 20 years later is a M&A activity that happened well after DSE stopped selling the System 80 and certainly 20 years after I resigned from working there and it isn't relevant to the context of what life was like on the ground back then. In the 1970s & 1980s, you could purchase either a System 80 from DSE or a TRS-80 from Tandy. Every customer, at least in my home town, had that option. When I worked for DSE, we were almost "at war" with Tandy over sales for this and the clear strategy was to undercut on price and over deliver on service. That was the mantra then.

The end result, however, didn't go according to plan. The System 80 was plagued with poor manufacturing quality - in particular the inbuilt cassette tape. The manufacturer made the decision to make a cassette recorder a part of the consolidated case, which was the downfall of that machine. Not only did it make the size of the computer difficult but the cassette quality was so poor that we probably got back 50% of the machines sold as returns when customers couldn't save their programs and retrieve them reliably later. Tandy at least had a separate cassette recorder that was not only of higher quality but you could replace it without having to replace the computer. When floppy disk drives became all the rage, this only made the System 80 look even more cumbersome. Around that time, DSE started to sell the VIC20 computer and I think management realized that the quality control issues that plagued the System 80 defeated the profit potential of continuing to sell it, and it was eventually phased out.

When Dick Smith sold his company in the 1980s, he cashed out and started a travel magazine business, along with pursuing a ton of his own "bucket list" projects like attempting to fly a helicopter solo around the globe. Woolworths, although known for being a supermarket chain in Australia back then, were owned by overseas interests and probably changed corporate hands a dozen times between the 1980s and 2000s when you are referring to their M&A activity over the Tandy name.

My whole reason for starting this thread was not to correct Wikipedia with the truth of life on the ground in Australia, but to complete the circle of where my TRS-80 Model 1 that I bought in Adelaide, Australia, had been made and to possibly visit that site location at some point. I have regular business in Dallas, so its not a stretch if the machine was made there, to hunt down the location and visit it. Maybe that's part of my bucket list. Certainly not as extreme as Dick Smith, but then I do feel that his influence on my life was pretty major and I tend (even to this day) to share his philosophical belief system.

Myles

 

[k0d3g3ar]

I checked the local city info and got this:

(1) "The Tandy Center has been renovated and converted into City Place, a mixed- use office and retail development with a new parking garage."

(2) "Formerly known as Tandy Center and previous headquarters of RadioShack..."

(3) "Popularity of the mall (Tandy Center) began to wane in the 1990s, leading Dillard’s to move out. Virtually vacant, the mall was reborn in 1996 as an outlet mall, Fort Worth Outlet Square, but was still not successful. The mall and ice rink were both eventually closed and converted into office space. Today, the building is known as City Place."

That's interesting, and that sounds like it might be the place. I'm going to check the labeling on my various TRS-80 systems and see if they state where they were made. I thought I had seen "Made in USA" on them, which led me to believe that the manufacturer location was in Ft. Worth. If it was in the area now known as City Place, I'm sure it bears little resemblance on what it looked like back then. I did notice that Radio Shack did offer tours of their HQ if you book it ahead of time. I might just do that in the future.

Thanks for the info.

Myles

 

[curtis]

I was working for RS in the 70's after graduating from college and couldn't find anything else!

Managed a store in Odessa, TX and went to the annual manager's meeting and got to tour the brand new Tandy Center. There was definitely no manufacturing facility there.

However, there was a wire manufacturing factory in Fort Worth out near the Alliance Airfield, If I remember correctly. That might have been partially converted to manufacture some of the TRS computers in the early days.

Also remember the first TRS-80 my store received. Honestly, I thought it was nothing but a toy until a kid who was working in one of the Midland, TX stores started programming on it and showing off some of the capabilities.

Been hooked ever since on computers.

 

[JDallas]

...Some of that Korean-manufactured stuff was (and still is) superb!

Agreed. I never had any problem with Seoul's manufacturing.

However I had big problems with our technical liaison that was supposed to take our finished product designs and integrate them into production. Liaison techs had a propensity to do dumb things - for example, one liaison wasted about 4 months trying to add a 555 timer daughter card to the line of cordless phones I designed for Radio Shack (circa 1988-89 ) to change one bit of the radio digital packet, instead of editing one bit of the firmware.

I certainly don't know the answer, but a lot of "Made in USA" computer stuff back then wasn't really, and today, they'd get in big trouble for saying that. It was "assembled in USA" but the parts were made all over the place.

They should change that to "BOXED IN USA"

...If it was in the area now known as City Place, I'm sure it bears little resemblance on what it looked like back then...

Fort Worth doesn't really change that much. Just the people and the signs on the buildings.

It definitely wasn't manufactured in Tandy Center/City Place.

That facility was for corporate offices. The twin towers (Tandy I and Tandy II) sat at opposite ends of the indoor shopping mall. There was a third building of the complex was perpendicular to the two tower line... never visited it. The buildings of Tandy Center were and still are chalk-white and thus the set of buildings are easy to identify from the skyline.

The Fort Worth equivalent to the Dallas "Side-Walk Sale" was in the parking lot of one of the Radio Shack manufacturing sites in sight of downtown but in the cheap section. I went there a few times and got a tour of the manufacturing building site there once on the job. What I saw were talking doll assembly lines and an electronic chess board; I think that is one facility that can be ruled out as potentially being capable of assembling computers.

If no one posts the answer you're looking for, regarding the actual manufacturing site for your computer, if you can find a contact email for " Jerry Heep ", he'll definitely have the answer. He was a technician during the TRS-80 design and was titled as "Engineer" when I was there in the late 80s.

Jerry retired a year or two ago so don't use a Radio Shack email. He's about the only person I know that saw the long history of Radio Shack from the inside.

And Jerry was a great fan of TRS-80 computers. When I worked there, his office was two doors down from mine and as I recall he had at least four Model IIIs or IVs stored in there. I've speculated that Jerry would likely have one of the greatest TRS-80 collections in Texas.

 

[lowen]

I happened to find myself in Dallas a couple of weeks back, and ended up driving to Ft Worth to visit my favorite BBQ joint (Angelos) coz I love that brisket!

What, you didn't go to Frisco and eat at Three Stacks? (Or grab serious fajitas at La Hacienda Ranch?) I was in Frisco last year for a cyber security conference and ate at both places..... the shotgun door handles at La Hacienda Ranch stick in my memory!

It made me think... I wonder the actual physical address of where my Model 1 was made (in 1977/78)?

As I recall, in "Priming the Pump" the statement is made that Steve L. did his engineering work in an old saddle factory. I'll have to go back over my copy to see if more detail is given, but it's pretty likely that the actual address would depend upon the serial number if more than one physical building was the 'factory' at different times (I don't know, but early units as I recall were made in smaller shop and later ones in a larger building, but, again, I'd want to re-read the section of the book). The likelihood of that data still being around anywhere and still being readable is pretty slim; I won't say impossible, because it's always possible that Frank Durda has that information somewhere in his stash.

 

[lowen]

...As I recall, in "Priming the Pump" the statement is made that Steve L. did his engineering work in an old saddle factory.

Well, looking through "Priming the Pump" didn't give any addresses, nothing more specific than what I said above. However, there are some quotes interspersed in the text pointing back to Radio Shack's book 'Tandy's Money Machine' that might have more detail (not really very likely, but it's worth a look). The text of that book can be found online, but I don't have a link handy.

 

[Al Hartman]

It's on Archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/Tandys_Money_Machine_1992_Mobium_Press