Adds Computers and the Tandy 10

On 3/17/2006 at 7:49 PM nospam212-cctalk at yahoo.com wrote: That terminal certainly looks like an ADDS. I suspect that Tandy merely served as the market outlet; that they actually had nothing to do with production. Sadly, that's the story for a lot of microcomputer stuff from about this time. I call this the "We're already using an MPU in our (fill in the blank); if we just stuck a couple of disk drives and a printer on it, we'd have a comptuer system to sell" stage. For example, does anyone remember the Diablo Systems Merchant? Or the countless word processing systems like Artec that came out at around that time? The next stage was the marketing of systems by firms (Apple, Osborne, Kaypro, etc.) whose primary business was computers, not peripherals. And still, marketing was a tough nut: if you didn't already have a market presence--so you sacrificed a piece of the action to someone who had the necessary presence. Sometimes the marketing ideas were a little strange--as in the TI retail stores, or expecting that Sears could sell AT&T 6300's. The firm I was with around 1978 paid a good hunk of change to have their computer in one of those display cases at the San Francisco Airport. Much of the history of that first stage seems to have largely sunk into the primordial ooze. Cheers, Chuck