> On Sep 29, 2022, at 8:05 AM, Chris Trainor <[email protected]> wrote: > > But still mostly a brand… the basis for the 80 was the Z80
This is how I understand it from reading "Priming the Pump: How TRS-80 Enthusiasts Helped Spark the PC Revolution" a while back. The "80" reflected the processor in the branding but shorty thereafter the reference to the coming decade made "TRS-80" an appealing brand to unify the entire computing product line under. To my memory quite a few brands of products and media used the number 80 as a kind of allusion to modernity and the future. Under the TRS-80 branding, lots of computers were offered, few of which were compatible or partially compatible with the original Model I/III. The Pocket Computer was a rebadged Sharp PC-1121 and the Pocket Computer II was a PC-1500. The PC-3 dropped the TRS-80 name for Tandy mid-way through its lifecycle and subsequent Pocket Computers -- based on Casio calculators -- were Tandy branded. The TRS-80 MC-10 was quite similar to a Color Computer superficially but incompatible with it. The Model II, released shortly after the Model I bore a bit of similarity to it yet had no compatibility whatsoever and even used a completely different disk size and format. It spawned a series of other TRS-80s (the 12/16/16B and eventually the Tandy 6000) that had some limited degree of compatibility among themselves while being architecturally independent of the I/III/4 series that dominated sales during the era. The TRS-80 Color Computer was completely unlike the computers that inaugurated the TRS-80 badging although they found a popularity of their own. The CoCo 2 and 3 were offered only under a "Tandy" name as far as I know. Then, of course, you have the TRS-80 Model 100 and Tandy 200 computers. The Model 100 is almost entirely a rebadge of the Kyocera Kyotronic 85. The 200, never sold under the "TRS-80" banner, is incompatible. The Tandy 102 is a cost-reduced version of the 100 taking advantage of surface mount technologies which reduced the weight of the computer; a handful of other changes were made to the system. Long story short: "TRS-80" started as a name for the first pre-assembled microcomputer for retail, became a trademark banner under which Tandy/RS designed or rebadged more computers, and eventually went away when it became less descriptive and the trademark itself lost its cachet. Importantly, it doesn't describe anything technical about a computer.
