[Coco] Another Radio Shack Article

[Bill Loguidice]

This is mostly true, but it's not really true that the PC took off in the
home until several years after its 1981 release. Frankly, it took the
release of increasingly more powerful and cheaper clones for that to start
to happen. I talk about it extensively in two specific chapters in my next
book out, Vintage Game Consoles (late February/early March), but
essentially you're looking at the TRS-80 peaking in 1980 with 40% market
share (and becoming statistically irrelevant by 1984) and the C-64 doing
the same in both 1983 and 1984 (becoming statistically irrelevant by 1992).
The PC and compatibles wouldn't exceed those numbers until 1985, with
nearly 50% market share. From that point on, the PC and clones got ever
higher until by the mid-90s they were at greater than 90% market share, and
most of the competition had vanished.

===================================================
Bill Loguidice, Managing Director; Armchair Arcade,
Inc.<http://www.armchairarcade.com>
===================================================
Authored Books<http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Loguidice/e/B001U7W3YS/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_1>and
Film <http://www.armchairarcade.com/film>; About me and other ways to get
in touch <http://about.me/billloguidice>
===================================================


On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 2:24 PM, Al Hartman <alhartman6 at optonline.net> wrote:

> You guys are all looking at the PC from a 2013 perspective.
>
> When the PC came out, the best selling computer was the TRS-80 Model I and
> III, closely followed by the Apple ][ Plus. I wanted a PC, because to me it
> seemed like a faster TRS-80. While not software compatible, PC-DOS looked
> like TRS-DOS, the character based screen was familiar (and even had 80
> columns for more text on the screen.) It could use the same Epson MX-80
> printers, it had similar software like WordStar, dBase II, Visicalc, and
> even could run a lot of the BASIC games I ran on my TRS-80 with minor mods
> to account for the different screen size and slightly different BASIC.
>
> A 64k Cassette PC with a CGA card was about $999.00, which was similar to
> the price of a TRS-80 at the time.
>
> I eventually bought a Taiwanese clone a few years later, but the PC wasn't
> all that different from what was available from other companies.
>
> One could even mod the PC to add a power light, reset button, extra RAM (I
> recently modded my 256k 5150 logic board to take 640k on board), etc.
>
> It wasn't that big a leap as an Atari 800 or later, a Commodore 64 was
> which were systems with a different philosophy of disk drive management,
> etc.
>
> -[ Al ]-
>
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