In the 1980s, there was a truly staggering amount of choice for a consumer looking to purchase a home computer. On the high end, something like an Apple Lisa, a business-class IBM PC, or a workstation from Sun Microsystems could easily range from $6,000 to $20,000 (not adjusted for inflation). For the time, these mind-blowing prices might have been worth the cost, but for those not willing to mortgage their homes for their computing needs, there were also some entry-level options. One of these was the Sinclair ZX-80, which was priced at an astounding $100, which caused RadioShack to have a bit of a panic and release this version of the TRS-80 computer to compete with it.
As [David] explains in his deep dive into this somewhat obscure machine, the TRS-80 MC-10 was a commercial failure, although not for want of features. It had a color display, a chicklet keyboard, and 4K of RAM, which were all things that the ZX-80 lacked.
Unfortunately, it also had a number of drawbacks compared to some of its other contemporaries that made consumers turn away. Other offerings by Commodore, Atari, Texas Instruments, and even RadioShack themselves were only marginally more expensive and had many more features, including larger memory and better storage and peripheral options, so most people chose these options instead.
The TRS-80 MC-10 is largely a relic of the saturated 80s home computer market. It’s drop in price to below $50, and the price competition between other PC manufacturers at the time was part of the reason for the video game crash of the 1980s, and even led to Steve Jobs getting fired from Apple. There’s not a huge retro scene for these machines either, although there is at least one game developer you can see in the video below from [Spriteworx]. If you want to experiment with some of the standard TRS-80 software, there are emulators that have everything you need.
Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip!
The MC10 is an interesting machine, it has a decent CPU , the MC6803 but the design was weird. The MC6803 has a serial port but the designers of the MC10 decided not to use it. Instead they bit banged the serial like the CoCo series. That was not the only trade off. Shame, it actually isn’t a terrible machine but it wasn’t up to the standards of the time.
But in the 1980’s this was a terrible computer! I remember looking at it for my first computer. It was too expensive, had too little software, no disk drive, a terrible keyboard and not enough memory. I ended up with the Atari 800xl, which I still have. Like the article said, for a few dollars more
Having said all that, I picked up an MC10 a few years ago with the 16K expansion. It’s was much less expensive than when Radio Shack dropped the price, I won the bid on EBay <$50 US, shipped. I now have a second and a MCX-128. Must say I like the 6803 processor. Interesting Microcontroller.
MC10 had a french version which was matra alice, it was red in a big red box with manuals and a wonderful drawing from moebius. I enjoyed this in my teenagehood, i sent mine long time ago to a museum.
Yes, seems the Alice was well loved. :-)
This is a membrane keyboard, not a chicklet keyboard. Very different and much worse. My fingertips ache whenever I even think about my old Atari 400.
“manufacturers at the time was part of the reason for the video game crash of the 1980s, and even led to Steve Jobs getting fired from Apple”
(Citation needed)
Thank you. Came to say the same. That’s a completely nonsensical statement. No part of it is even close to true. Come on HaD writers, what are you doing? Stop making up history. Some of us were there.
The important bits of the sentence go “the price competition between other PC manufacturers at the time …even led to Steve Jobs getting fired from Apple.”
I think that’s broadly accurate? Jobs and Sculley got into a fight about which direction to take the company, with Sculley wanting to fight it out on the open-architecture PC front, and Jobs wanting to go his own way with the more expensive, monolithic Lisa and Mac.
When the Lisa and Macs didn’t make sales figures (“price competition from other PC manufacturers”), Sculley essentially forced him out.
But rather than resort to the “making up history” line, feel free to let us know how you see it!
So old we’re part of the scenery.
So, It’s not only LLMs who “hallucinate”
…
Video game crash – Steve Jobs getting fired from Apple.
I don’t see the connection here. That’s like saying the CEO of Chevrolet got fired because sales of Peterbilt trucks and plummeted.
Sounds like an AI hallucination to me
The MC10 really had three problems IMHO
1. It was much too late. Had it arrived a bit after the ZX81, which is clearly the inspiration, then it would have been competitive with similar machines but it was late and compared to a C64 or Spectrum it’s a joke. That was an incredibly fast 3 years of home computer innovation so being late made you irrelevant.
2. It wasn’t a COCO. As MDS has said many times they should have released a 4K cost reduced COCO instead because software compatibility is everything, so you either had to have an enormous slush fund to launch a new machine at that time (hello Amstrad) or a large pool of existing software. It didn’t really matter how good the machine was, incompatible meant dead. Hence stuff like the C16, Plus4 (and the 6509 based post PET stuff) all crashed and burned even for big people like Commdore but the C128 did not.
3. It was a technology step behind. It’s a really tight implementation of the Motorola 6803/6847 chip combo but it’s a bunch of TTL glue and stuff at the time Commodore was doing custom chips and Sinclair had long shipped a 4 chip ZX81 with all the glue on a ULA.
“. It didn’t really matter how good the machine was, incompatible meant dead.”
Nah, I wouldn’t say that. VIC-20 vs C64, ZX80 vs ZX81, Apple I vs Apple II..
Depending on how we look at it, users are willing to port their software or make a switch at some point.
Please check the history. The MC10 came out in 1983. Zx80 was already out of production, zx81 was replaced with the zx spectrum. So do not compare the MC10 with the zx80 and zx81 things where moving on already to better systems.
The MC10 came out in 1983. The ZX80 was released in 1980 and production was stopped in 1981 and replaced with the ZX81 in also 1981. So the MC 10 was not the answer to the zx80 or the the zx81 because in1982 the zxspectrum came out. So this articles makes statements that rewrites history. The mc10 was never the answer to the ’80 or zx81 maybe the zxspectrum.
I had to read it a few times, but I think that is what it says.
It was years later, and not appropriately better.
My parents forked over $20 to buy mine for me from a neighbor. Haven’t stopped programming since. I built this emu as a nostalgia trip: https://mc-10.com/
$20 very well spent.
Aw man lol I remember these. In my early days I had a client that wanted his whole office set up with these which he had purchased at an auction. Since this was the early days of the computer world in some veins, they did the job just fine. It was just financial spread sheets etc. I remember trying to wrap my head around what I was dealing with lol. Ah a fun jaunt down memory lane.
Software, and especially games. That makes or breaks a system. The best option in the early to mid 80s was by far the Commodore 64 if you were in the US, and the ZX Spectrum if you were in the UK.
Sadly, yes. And KC85 or older AC1 in ex-GDR.
The ZX80/81 and ZX Spectrum had been cloned en masse in the eastern bloc.
Using ULA replacements done via discreet circuits.
To professionals, though, there had been real business PCs by late 70s-early 80s.
Commodore PETs with hi-res graphics boards, higher end versions of the TRS-80 CoCo (used for CompuServe acccess/hi-res graphics), MS-DOS compatibles (!= IBM PC) etc.
Apple II and clones with Z80 cards were common until mid-80s, too.
By 1984, AutoCAD-86 on Sirius-1/Victor 9000 and IBM PC on DOS was available.
AutoCAD-80 for CP/M systems had existed, but is now rare.
But anyway, home users probably lived in C64/ZX land, indeed.
The clichè is horribly accurate, I think. How depressingly backwards they had lived in retrospect.
Imagining that there had been ZX81 users and first Mac users at same time..
I just find it hard to believe an office set up with this particular machine even in that day and age. You would at the very minumum want something that had a typewriter style keyboard which the Commodores, the TI 99(4a), and the Ataris provided.
Chicklet keyboards were widely despised and that’s why computer companies stopped using them. IBM realized they made a grave error by releasing the PC Jr with a chicklet keyboard.
+1
Even the ZX81 users had been offered replacement keyboards to.
With a mechanical keyboard, even a poor microcomputer could been turned into a little serial terminal for accessing local BBSes or uni from home.
For an accoustic coupler, a simple serial interface was good enough most of time.
No dire need for handshaking or RS-232 levels..
I think i found why they didn’t use the built in serial. The supported baud rates the 6803 could support were tied to the chips clock speed.
It appears that motorola was expecting 1.22mh to be the base clock and at that cpu speed it supports the common bauds of 300,1200 and 9600 but if rs was using the 1mh speed option the available bauds were odd numbers like, 244.1, 976.6 and 7812.5
It may have been too much of a headache to find printers or modems that would work with it at those speeds. Even if they didn’t plan on releasing many add on’s their own I internal development tools would probably break on these rates.
Makes sense. These odd baud rates were too poor for an early smart-modem, even.
However, an dumb acoustic coupler would probably have had worked.
The AF filters/modes for 300 baud and 1200 were tolerant enough, I mean.
So dialing into an X.25 PAD might have worked (not sure).
Because PADs had auto-baud detection – in my country, at least.
At the beginning of a connection, you’d enter a star (*) and the PAD would try to figure out baudrate, stop bit, parity etc.
Again, in principle. Not sure how intelligent the PADs were at the time.
My parents bought me one of these off a neighbor for $20 and have been programming ever since. Here’s an emulator I built as an homage: https://mc-10.com/
Oooh, upgraded. Nice. :-)
As a teenager in the early 80s I got one for Christmas. I don’t have it anymore. It was plugged into the family TV with one of those screw based switch boxes with the lever, TV or computer. I also tried typing in basic code a bit. You could do a trippy full screen color flash with one of the tutorials in basic. It had some interesting built in one key sprites. I got frustrated after a while though.
The worst part was the way Radio Shack/Tandy deliberately sabotaged the machine to make it difficult to upgrade in terms of video modes and internal RAM. The memory map wasn’t even properly decoded to shadow RAM appeared all over the place and the BASIC variables were in display RAM on the higher graphics modes. All of these can be worked around and I have done it to give the machine 8k RAM internally (6K VRAM) which adds video modes up to 256×192 full screen but they really went out of their way to make that difficult. Radio Shack/Tandy could have implemented it with about $2 worth of glue logic and better design but they chose not to do that but instead hobble it to make it more difficult. Anyway as crap as the machine was then when it was released in 1983 I do still love it.
I have converted over 800 BASIC programs from a diverse range systems from the 70s and 80s to this computer, as well as writing many new programs. I find it a delightful system to use, especially its ability to embed semigraphic characters in strings using the keyboard. https://jggames.github.io/Type-in-Mania-Programs.html