Stuart was the real deal. When he hosted this show, he was an avid computer enthusiast, and wasn't just some hack reporter, like you tend to see today.
As a kid who grew up in the 90s, I freckin loved multi media pcs! Encarta ‘95 was one of the first cd-roms I remember using… I thought all the video clips and animations were super cool!
I thought being able to research for papers in Encarta instead of the physical encyclopedias my dad bought in the early 80s was badass. Definitely a sign of the times.
But WHO in 1991 didn't know what a tube was? Hell, I was only 21 and I knew what a tube was. Lots of tube stuff was still around well into my childhood. Hell, they were still making tube TVs into the 1970s.
@@tarstarkusz the fuck time are you from ? non-crt screens didn't dominate until around 2007! The last NEW CRT model was introduced in 2010, so you're way early.
I remember when Radio Shack began as a electronics hobbyists go-to shop that was acquired by Tandy Leather, but after around 10 to 12 years Radio Shack sales began to out due Tandy Leather sales ... so Radio Shack bought their parent company Tandy Corporation and renamed it Radio Shack Corporation. However when sales began to slump in the early 2000s Radio Shack closed up all of its brick and mortar stores in order to do its sells online instead. I miss walking into an actual Radio Shack store in order to buy my latest electronics and hobbyists items.
This is actually quite sad....you are witnessing the end of Tandy right here. This machine the Tandy Sensation was an incredible computer for its time but Tandy made too many mistakes along the way. They failed to innovate and the Sensation was their end. What a shame....they were the first to allow a customer to fully customize their kit before buying it.
Actually the first half of the 90s was a hard time for all computer manufacturers. Acorn went under but ARM could save itself, Atari went bankrupt, so did Commodore, Apple almost went bankrupt and many workstation manufacturers as well. One of the main problems was that the PC was finally becoming really good and the other one that Motorola could not compete with Intel anymore on tne 68k line and wanted everyone to move over to PPC! The PC became so good that manufacturers which formerly had superior sound and graphics stopped being able to compete over those things anymore (aka Tandy) on and given the mass manufacturing and research other companies with custom GPUs for their own machine also had a hard time. SGI could compete for quite a while but later on was also blown out of business more or less by off the shelve 3d solutions from the PC side.
They were once good but that all changed later when you couldn't enter a store without getting a sales pitch on why you must purchase a cell phone from them today. Or when they refused to check you out on a battery purchase because they wanted detailed personal information from you to put into their database and you didn't want to give them anything.
My first computer was a Tandy. A neighbor had upgraded to windows95 so we got their old setup for free. The Tandy had a 3.5 & 5.25 floppy drive. And just a few mb hard drive. We had the huge printer 🖨 that came with it. It worked like an electric typewriter. So loud! I used the music writing game alot that it came with.
Loved, the coco 2 and 3. I also had the TRS-80 model 3 with 16k ram and the cassette recorder for input. Later had a 1000SX with one 5 1/4. 360 disk drive. I later got a 20mb hard card for $500 + .
@@hulksmash8159 It's actually in stereo, with mono audio routed only to the left channel. In real mono videos, both left and right channel play the same audio.
I remember playing with a CRT monitor based touchscreen about 20 years ago at a government kiosk. They were damn responsive, almost as good as a modern tablet or smartphone. I think it would have been an infrared touchscreen (your finger blocked a grid of light beams as you touched the screen), which was a bit of a disadvantage because the precision was low and the UI was generally restricted to very large buttons only.
I started working for Radio Shack in summer of 1995. One of my first trainings was held in a conference room at a "Computer City." Shortly after, Computer City failed and the store turned into a Fry's Electronics. That was a little hint of what the future held for Radio Shack at the time. Sad.
I had a 1000 RLX 286, 20 meg hard disk drive(faulty), one 3 1/2" floppy drive(great), the related monitor, printer, keyboard, mouse and three-year warranty: that took care of the hard drive problem(it jumped from DOS to Desk Mate) at will. It was replaced and worked great! Print Shop, Wheel of Fortune and other software(IBM-Compatible software "Expert Brand"
The ZX81 was initially very popular in the USA due to its low price, but there was a delay in getting the 16K RAM expansion modules here, and rather than wait for the RAM expansion to become available, most users gave up on the ZX81 (since you can't do much with only 2K RAM!) and bought a different, more powerful computer instead.
I used to work for Tandy in Australia back in 1983 to 1985 (part time while at school) was great back then as they paid 10% on sales to casual staff and the computer were expensive
Same here. I worked at a Computer Center in San Diego from 80-81. I'll never forget the time one of the local colleges placed an order for 50 Mod 1 with interface and floppies. On top of that, R.S. had a generous stock option. I'll never forget the shock when I found out what the stock was worth when I was getting ready to buy my first house. It's a good thing that I cashed out when I did.
I would have loved to bring people like Alan Turing in a time machine so they could see what computer science has achieved. J Presper Eckert, the co builder of UNIVAC back in the 50's saw some of the modern computing industry as he lived until 1995 but I think he would even be amazed at the power of 21st century machines.
Sadly i was a d*ck broke teenager at that time and couldn’t afford one of those fancy 80mb HDDs. 3.5” floppies for me. Could still do quite a bit just on floppy back then
***** This program was produced and broadcast on PBS stations in the USA and Canada, with sound on both the left and right audio channels, not just the left one...
AlainHubert That would be about 24 years... and if the uploaded file has a mute right channel, it's either a badly done digitizing or faulty source media to begin with.
***** 24 years then. And you're right, it's a badly done digitizing of the audio content. But we're lucky, at least they didn't stretch the picture to fill the screen, with everything being squashed, and respected the 4:3 original aspect ratio.
Especially with headphones, the single channel audio is annoying, fortunately I found a way to fix it via my sound settings.. otherwise it would be unwatchable.. or unlistenable rather..
Man, that part about the twilight years of the coco and how every computer will go thru it sticks, as a computer collector, you can only imagine what it was like once they were left behind and software slowly but surely stopped working with or supporting it.
They always tried so hard to make computers for the home use educational , all those multimedia CD roms with encyclopedias and other crap. The real reason PC's made it into everybody's home (outside proper business use) was the same as always: Games and Sex .
That was a decent entry-level computer in 1991. $1299 for a complete system was very reasonable. It wouldn't really need to be replaced until 1995 or so when you wanted to get on the world wide web/information superhighway.
More like typical Computer Chronicles era prices, where add ons that come built in nowadays cost more than the computer and software that nowadays you'd download for free would cost you hundreds of dollars. It couldn't have been just the march of technology that changed prices so much, could it?
Mostly, yeah. Integration of components became easier over the years. Think of all the shit on your PC motherboard that old computers needed bulky ass cards for. As for software, when more people buy, you can charge less. The market for software was comparably small in the 80s to early 90s.
Something funny is I remember back in 2001 going into a Goodwill thrift store and seeing much more powerful Pentium PC's in there for $10 each you know like the systems that would cost $2,500 or more 5 or 6 years earlier back in 1996 and 1995 when they were the new hottest and latest PC's . I would buy them and resell them for $100 for easy pocket money to buy new computer parts for myself.Back in 1998 I would acquire those 386's and sometimes more rarely 486's (usually slower SX 25's or DX-33's for $10 too.They were useful for me learning how rebuild PC's or modify them.I would sell them too.
UK v USA: The TRS-80 Model I and the ZX81 (Timex 1000) are similar spec, yet, in the US, the TRS-80 sold well, while the ZX81 didn't and the two computers look very different. I think it's mostly the different looks that did it, the TRS-80 I looks like a "big boy's" computer for computer-y things whereas the ZX81 looks like a game system (and it was no good at games) In the UK, the ZX81 sold OK whereas the Model I was unheard of Having said that, we bought British then, unless it was Commodore
This was during the CDROM era that preceded the WWWinternet.. the CDROMs like the ones they're showing here were more expensive than just a book and not much better so for most people computers continued to be useless.
1991 was honestly the start of their long and slow death. Heck it might have even started before this but once they started selling the same junk as everyone else and stopped selling stuff that nerds actually wanted it made them irrelevant. I mean they basically had just one kind of customer: the nerd and once they left their base behind it was only a matter of time. Sad really. Other electric stores done the same thing and failed too. There's a formula for sure but you can't abandon your core customers like this and expect to thrive. Even Best buy is on skaky ground. Sure the internet didn't help any, RadioShack was always a tad bit more expensive than going to specialty store online, but with RadioShack at least you could have it that day. I think that's what helps keep best buy afloat. People want this and that but if they need something that's a whole other matter..
Touchscreens became available commercially in the early 1980s. HP released the HP-150 in 1983, which featured a 9-inch Sony CRT monitor surrounded by infrared emitters and detectors which could sense the user's finger touching the screen.
