Don French, a buyer for the consumer electronic chain Tandy Radio Shack, was convinced that the company ought to offer a personal computer. Initially Radio Shack, which had experienced phenomenal growth selling audio equipment and citizen's band radios in its chain of stores across the country, was skeptical: computers were difficult to set up and use, and Radio Shack's customers were typically interested in low prices and easy of use, not in the underlying technology.
Although Radio Shack stores did sell wires, switches, and circuit parts for the hobbyist, its main customers neither knew nor cared much about what went on inside the "black boxes" they bought. Eventually the company relented and in the summer of 1977 introduced the TRS-80, at a base price of only $400. It was indeed a complete machine, although the base model had only 4K bytes of memory and could not handle lowercase letters. One could expand its storage and input/output by purchasing an Expansion Interface at additional cost. But it did work as advertised, and the TRS-80 easily met Tandy's sales projections. The company soon introduced advanced models with more internal memory and disk drives instead of cassettes for entering programs.
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