Remembering the old “Trash 80”
The Dinosaur Age of Digital Newspaper Technology
It wasn’t much of a computer, but I have to admit, it changed my life. Do you remember the Radio Shack TRS-80, affectionately known as the “Trash-80?” And its successor, the Tandy 200? In the mid-1980s they each became, for a while, as much an emblem of foreign correspondents as the Olivetti portable typewriter.
They were also shockingly primitive, fickle, and prone to erasing entire stories for no discernible reason.
In 1985, after three years as The Washington Post’s correspondent in New Delhi, India (at a time when the incipient age of digital technology was nothing more than a gleam in the eyes of India’s progressive prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi) I was completely clueless about this new computer phenomenon that out of my sight was beginning to take journalism by storm.
When I left India for my next
foreign posting I was issued my first “computer,” a little Radio Shack Tandy
TRS-80 model that operated on four AA batteries, didn’t even have a hard drive,
had only 24K bytes of random access memory and a little “screen” about 1½ 
inches
high on which you could write about four lines of type at a time on a barely
readable, unlighted liquid crystal display. (TRS-80
photo at left)
It had a minuscule 2.4 MHz of speed and you had to save your files to an external 3 1/2-inch floppy drive quickly because the memory would disappear before you knew it. It could just barely be called a computer, and by today’s standards would be nothing more than a primitive word processor. But we called them computers.
Then came the Tandy 200, a relative speedster with its 8 MHz microprocessor, 128K bytes of RAM, a 10 MB hard drive (10 megabytes!!). A 640 x 400 screen display and operating, of course, on MS-DOS.
Everybody has their own nightmare stories about the TRS-8- and Tandy 200,
which came with zero technical support and which were prone to brain explosions
at any time. Mine happened while covering some long-forgotten diplomatic crisis
in Maputo, Mozambique, with a dozen other South Africa-based hacks. My
colleagues were gathered around the hotel pool during a break in the story, but
I had to finish a long and complicated analysis piece for the Sunday edition of
The Washington Post and I was in my room pecking away on my Tandy 200. I don’t
know what happened, but just as I was putting the finishing touches on this
brilliant piece of prose the screen went blank.
(Tandy 200 Photo at right)
The other hacks, several stories below at the pool, said the stillness of the afternoon was shattered by a terrifying, primal scream, followed by a string of shocking obscenities. As I leaned back in my rickety old chair its legs gave way and I collapsed onto the floor, babbling incoherently like a baby. My friends, of course, knew immediately what had happened as I started rewriting the piece from scratch. I would have liked to have thought that they sympathized with me but I think I heard the sound of laughter from below. They would have immediately known what happened, having been victimized by the Tandy 200 themselves at least once.
That said, the old Tandy was a Godsend, because it soon came equipped with a
primitive external modem, dodgy as it was, with which we sometimes were able to
file stories to Washington via packet switching through our London
office—providing you were able to get a clear enough phone line to London. In
most Third World countries I regularly visited that was a pretty big “if.” But
first you had to either fiddle with those rubber acoustic couplers that fit
over the phone handset but often failed to work, or, later, crawl around on the
floor of a hotel room with a screwdriver and alligator clips and dismantle a
hardwired phone line. My old Los 
Angeles Bureau mate, Bill
Booth, recalled how he once was under a hotel bed, pliers and screwdriver in
hand, when the maid walked in, took one look and hastily left. "She had a
look on her that said 'I don't want to know what's going on here,'" Booth
said.
But when it worked the Tandy was a whole lot easier than the decrepit old telex machines on which for years I had to re-keyboard all of my stories on perforated paper tape, or, before that, make nightly trips to the PTT (Post, Telephone and Telegraph) offices in numerous African, Asian and Middle East countries, where I had to cajole or bribe reluctant bureaucrats (who usually spoke no known language) into tape-punching and sending my dispatches to Washington via a “press collect” telegram.
While covering the 1978-79 revolution in Iran I used to tell people I had a nine-to-five job: From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. I would be out in the streets of Tehran, covering the action, and from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. (during the nightly curfew) I would be in the telex room of the Hotel Intercontinental punching a tape and trying desperately to hold a telephone connection long enough to send my story to Washington. This, of course, was long before anyone had heard of personal computers. A working Tandy 200 would have been welcomed then.
Then there were the stories when we had to rely on “pigeons,” or people flying out of a disaster area or any location without telecommunications, to carry out my typewritten dispatches and deliver them to a Reuter office for telexing?
My Los Angeles Times colleague, Rone Tempest, reminds me of the days we wrote stories of the Bhopal, India, gas disaster on portable typewriters perched on the hood of a car and then raced to the airport and desperately begged Indian Airlines flight crews to “pigeon” our stories to New Delhi.
The advent of laptops was also great for circumventing
government censors in those countries that tried to control the news media.
They could control a telex machine operator in a post office or hotel, but
dealing with billions of scrambled data bits flying over telephone lines or,
later, through satellite dishes was a bit much for the censors.
From the technically-primitive background of a Tandy 200 owner, I gradually morphed from hard core Luddite to something approaching an IT whiz on the emerging desktop PCs that were available. By 1995, while living in Los Angeles as West Coast bureau chief, I was hosting my own, cutting-edge “Talk with Bill Claiborne About California” chat page on The Washington Post’s pioneering digital edition, which then was called “Digital Ink” and whose platform—before the emergence of the World Wide Web, was AT&T’s Interchange. Digital Ink used the new Netscape Navigator software and had no more than 10,000 visitors then. But readers of my little early-generation blog proved to be as feisty then as they are today and weren’t averse to telling me off because of my stories.
Soon I was learning the ins and outs of digital technology, and from there it was only a short tick on the learning curve to eventually creating my own website, “Claibornes’ Australian Website.”
But those old Trash-80s and Tandy 200s were where it all started. They've got a lot to answer for.
