1977: Radio Shack announces the TRS-80

On 3 August 1977, Tandy Corporation’s Radio Shack division publicly announced the TRS-80 Micro Computer System. Priced at $599.95 fully assembled—including a monochrome monitor and keyboard—it was one of the first complete personal computers offered to the general public through a national retail chain. Within weeks thousands of units had been ordered, far exceeding the company’s modest initial forecast of a few thousand machines a year.

The TRS-80 was powered by a Zilog Z80 microprocessor running at 1.77 MHz and shipped with 4 KB of RAM (expandable to 48 KB) and Level I BASIC in ROM. Its architecture was simple enough for hobbyists to understand yet powerful enough to run serious programs. Early users wrote games, small business ledgers, educational drills and the first wave of home-brew artificial-intelligence experiments—pattern matchers, simple expert systems and rudimentary natural-language parsers—directly in BASIC or Z80 assembly.

What made the machine historically decisive was not raw speed but accessibility. Before 1977, most people who wanted to experiment with computing or early AI techniques needed access to a university or corporate mainframe. The TRS-80, together with the nearly simultaneous Apple II and Commodore PET, moved the computer from the glass house into the living room and the high-school classroom. Magazines such as Byte and Creative Computing filled with TRS-80 code listings; user groups formed in every major city; and a generation of future AI researchers got their first hands-on experience with stored-program machines.

That cultural shift still shapes today’s landscape. The same impulse that once led teenagers to type ELIZA-style chatbots into a TRS-80 now drives students to fine-tune open-source language models on laptops. Mass-market hardware, open documentation and an enthusiastic hobbyist community remain the quiet infrastructure beneath modern AI. The beige box unveiled on 3 August 1977 was an early, decisive step in making that infrastructure commonplace.