Dialing up the future: CompuServe, Tandy’s TRS-80 at RadioShack, and the San Jose Mercury News

The “digital divide” is a term usually used to characterize the gulf between those who have ready access to computers and the internet, and those who do not.

I like to think of it in a more archival sense with the digital divide being a demarcation line between online full-text access to today’s, yesterday’s, along with the year and decades before that’s newspapers, and a world, where even if we all are blessed with a plethora of computers and internet service providers, accessing those newspapers of yesteryear for free is in most cases next to impossible online, unless you are fortunate enough to have access to digitized older newspapers such as can be found at the Thompson Public Library: https://thompsonlibrary.insigniails.com/Library/Digital. Otherwise, archival newspaper research for 1978 still  means scouring bound volumes in a musty newspaper morgue or library, or spending hours in a dark cubicle with one’s head’s buried and eyes straining, spinning reel-after-reel of microfilm or sheet-after-sheet of microfiche.

Does it matter? I think it does. While I can call up verbatim copies of stories I’ve written for most newspapers since 2001, I cannot as easily access stories at a distance in space and time I wrote for the Peterborough Examiner back in 1985 on Paul Croft Jr., who had been a brilliant computer scientist in the late 1960s for Control Data in Minneapolis, but later, while suffering from paranoid delusions stemming from late onset schizophrenia, in 1972 shot and killed in a company parking lot in Canada a co-worker, after hearing voices telling him to do so.

Later, after being released from detention in a mental health institution, but having a relapse into more  mental illness again, largely triggered by not taking his anti-psychotic medications because of their unpleasant side effects, Croft wound up wounding two OPP Tactical Rescue Unit (TRU) officers in 1984, who had arrived at his home in a remote part of Haliburton County, Ontario to execute a warrant under the Ontario Mental Health Act, alleging he had breached the conditions of the lieutenant-governor’s warrant he was subject to, namely by not taking his prescribed meds. By the time I encountered Croft in October 1985, he was on trial in Lindsay, Ontario in what was then the Supreme Court of Ontario, being tried on two counts of attempted murder.

Croft shot the two officers with a high-powered rifle. Both, while injured, recovered and survived.

Again found not guilty by reason of insanity, Croft became among the rarest of the rare among what were then often referred to as the criminally insane: a man detained on not one, but two lieutenant governor’s warrants.

Ditto the 1987-88 series of stories I wrote for the paper on the so-called Peterborough Armouries Conspiracy, which had several dimensions, including a number of police investigations, involving civilian and military police, several court cases, two very tragic suicides, and finally a coroner’s inquest presided over by Ontario’s deputy chief coroner at the time.  Names like Andrew Webster, Ian Shearer, Jeffrey Atkinson,  Lloyd Jackson and Michael Noury have largely been lost in the pre-internet mists of time, recalled only if one happens to have a scrapbook of newspapers clippings, or access to bound volumes of the Peterborough Examiner or its microfilm for 1987-1988.

Without that kind of research access, 30 to 35 years after the events, one’s memories of such stories have a sort of sepia tone or looking through the glass dark quality to them. Although oddly enough you can find a good summary of the Peterborough Armouries Conspiracy story through a June 17, 1987 story headlined “Cyanide deaths a Peterborough nightmare” by Southam News reporter John Kessel, which appeared in among other places, the now Glacier Media-owned Prince George Citizen, which has digitized its older newspapers with the PDF available online at: http://pgnewspapers.pgpl.ca/fedora/repository/pgc%3A1987-06-17-24/PDF/Page%20PDF

I can almost tell you to the day in retrospect when I think the internet “arrived.”

When I arrived at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario as a history graduate student in September 1993, the main library was still Douglas Library on University Avenue, but across the street kitty-corner to it was a massive construction project where they were building the brand-new Stauffer Library on Union Street. This was the end of the brief five-year NDP Bob Rae era in Ontario and while the economy wasn’t strictly speaking in recession, it was far from booming, so projects of such scale in places like Kingston were rare.

I remember using an internet station in the just opened Stauffer Library the next year on one of my first visits in October 1994. The Netscape Navigator browser had just been released that same month, but Queen’s was using the NCSA Mosaic browser, released in 1993, almost the first graphical web browser ever invented. The computer services and library folks at Queen’s got it from day one to their credit. They knew this was going to be so popular with students instantly, the work stations (and there weren’t many) were designed for standing only. How many places in a university library is there no seating? Not many. But they wanted to keep people moving because there would be lineups to use the stations.

I also remember reading the San Jose Mercury News online because it was in Silicon Valley and one of the very first papers in North America online. Today its online archive goes back to June 1985. The funny thing is, the San Jose Mercury News recognized its brief moment in history and for a few years anyway punched well above its weight, doing fine investigative work, both in print and online; a small regional paper no one had ever heard of before the early 1990s unless they lived in Southern California. In its brief shining moment, the San Jose Mercury News had 400 people in its newsroom, revenues of $300 million and profit margins of more than 30 per cent, a bureau in Hanoi, and netted a Pulitzer Prize for foreign news.

In 1994, we all knew intuitively the world had changed with the internet and graphical web browsers. I had sent my first e-mail from Trent University in Peterborough more than three years earlier in the spring of 1991 from the Thomas J. Bata Library on their “Ivory”  server (someone in computer services seemingly had a sense of humour), and was also sitting down as I recall. That was neat, but this was on a whole other scale entirely.

I realized in July 1995, as I was finishing up writing America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’ Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan for my master’s thesis in 20th century American history on the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989, that my class would likely be the last Queen’s University history class where students, including me, had few online citations in their footnotes or included in their bibliographies, and the style of such citations was still very much in development.

While the San Jose Mercury News is often thought of as pioneering in its online venture, the first newspaper to go online was The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio way back on July 1, 1980.  It was part of a unique CompuServe and Associated Press experiment about the potential of online papers. Eventually other AP member newspapers were part of the project, including the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, The Virginian-Pilot, The Middlesex News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But it was The Columbus Dispatch that published the first “online” newspaper when it began beaming news stories through the CompuServe dial-up service. The paper was the first daily in the United States to test a technology that enabled the day’s news to flow into home computers at 300 words per minute. Users paid $5 per hour for the service. “To become a subscriber,” the paper reported at the time, “a resident will have to have a home computer.  Such equipment is now available in electronics shops.” If you had Tandy’s TRS-80 from RadioShack, founded in 1921 as a mail-order retailer for amateur ham-radio operators and maritime communications officers on Brattle Street in Boston by two London-born brothers, Theodore and Milton Deutschmann, who named the company after the compartment that housed the wireless equipment for ham radios, and a modem with access to the online CompuServe dial-up service, you were ready to go, or at least until the pioneering online experiment ended in 1982.

Launched in November 1977, the $600 TRS-80 was one of the first mass-market personal computers with about 16K of memory and a 12-inch-square monitor with one shade of gray characters and no graphics, using software designed by a still obscure start-up named Microsoft, founded 2½ years earlier in April 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

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End of an era for gadget and gizmo DIYers as RadioShack to file for bankruptcy

I still remember trying to build my first crystal radio set as a kid. Or should I say more truthfully watching my dad build it for the most part. A crystal radio set is a simple radio receiver, popular in the early days of radio. It needs no other power source but that received solely from the power of radio waves received by a wire antenna.  All you need are a few a few inexpensive parts, such as a coil of copper wire for adjustment, a capacitor, a crystal detector, and earphones. Crystal radio sets are are distinct from ordinary radios as they are passive receivers, while other radios use a separate source of electric power such as Alternating Current (AC) wall power electricity or Direct Current (DC) battery power to name a couple.

Crystal radios can be designed to receive almost any radio frequency band, but most receive the amplitude modulation (AM) broadcast band, although some receive the 49-meter international shortwave band.

It wasn’t so much that as a kid I was what would today be known as a member of the “maker community” or DIYer (Do it yourselfer) or tinkerer (a word we did have back in the 1960s and 1970s). No, it was more my Uncle Ab (Abner Barker), my dad’s older brother, who was an electrician and lived in St. Catharines, Ontario when I was growing up in Oshawa. Uncle Ab didn’t visit often but when he did arrive for a few days now and then, he’d do things like bring me a radio or my first-copy of Popular Electronics magazine, a publication for electronics hobbyists and experimenters published from October 1954 until December 1999. Uncle Ab was such an enthusiast himself he seemed willing to overlook that even when interested his nephew had … err … a very limited aptitude for mathematics, physics or any other applied science that might have proved useful for an electronics hobbyist to possess.

Some may also recall Heathkit, the brand name of electronic test equipment, high fidelity home audio equipment, television receivers, amateur radio equipment, robots, electronic ignition conversion modules for early model cars with point style ignitions and other kits and electronic products produced and marketed for assembly by the purchaser by the Heath Company of Chicago from 1947 until 1992.

Edward Bayard Heath, an early monoplane pilot and aircraft engineer, had founded the company in 1926, after purchasing the Chicago based Bates Aeroplane in 1912, and then going on to found the E.B. Heath Aerial Vehicle Co., which later becoming the Heath Airplane Company.

I hadn’t thought about building crystal radio sets for years. Or Heathkit. Just like I hadn’t thought about RadioShack for years. Not until I stumbled upon a  Feb. 2 news story yesterday from Bloomberg Business that  RadioShack, founded in 1921  as a mail-order retailer for amateur ham-radio operators and maritime communications officers on Brattle Street in Boston by two London-born brothers, Theodore and Milton Deutschmann, who named the company after the compartment that housed the wireless equipment for ham radios, is about to declare bankruptcy. Circuit City bought the stores formerly known as RadioShack in Canada in 2004, re-branding them as The Source by Circuit City. In 2009, Circuit City’s U.S. parent company filed for bankruptcy protection and BCE Inc. bought the stores, re branding them once again as The Source. There is a store here in Thompson, Manitoba in City Centre Mall.

Bloomberg Business reported that RadioShack has lost $936 million since the fourth quarter of 2011, the last time it was in the black, and its shares have lost 99.6 percent of their value since peaking 15 years ago. On Feb. 2, the New York Stock Exchange said it had suspended trading on the stock and started the process of delisting it.

RadioShack has been based in Fort Worth, Texas since 1963 when Charles Tandy, who ran a successful nice market chain of leather stores, acquired the struggling-then chain of what was nine RadioShack retail stores in Boston and area, for about $300,000 as a favour to its major creditor, First National Bank of Boston.

From the early 1960s until the early 1990s, RadioShack, with its own private brand manufactured accessories, batteries, transistors and capacitors, had plenty of success going after customers “looking to save money by buying cheaper goods and improving them through modifications and accessorizing,” writes Joshua Brustein, referencing Irvin Farman’s 1993 book, Tandy’s Money Machine: How Charles Tandy Built RadioShack Into the World’s Largest Electronics Chain, in his Feb. 2 Bloomberg Business story, “Inside RadioShack’s Slow-Motion Collapse.” The target audience was people who needed one small piece of equipment every week.”

And then in November 1977, in its boldest move, Tandy had RadioShack launch the TRS-80, one of the first mass-market personal computers with about 16K of memory and a 12-inch-square monitor with one shade of gray characters and no graphics, using software designed by a still obscure start-up named Microsoft, founded 2½ years earlier in April 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

Why bold? There was no known market for personal computers in 1977. With a $600 price tag it was going to be the most expensive product RadioShack had ever sold. Tandy mused about the initial order of 1,000 TRS-80 units that his RadioShack stores could always use them for inventory management if customers weren’t interested in buying them. However, in its early years, the TRS-80 was more popular than Apple’s computers.

Early last year, Steve Cichon, a writer for the website Trending Buffalo, sifted through the back page of the front section of the Saturday, Feb. 16, 1991 Buffalo News with a RadioShack ad for items such as  voice recorders, GPS devices, answering machines and camcorders that RadioShack was selling 24 years ago. Cichon found that his iPhone had cancelled out any need for 13 of the 15 products then being sold by RadioShack, which had a combined listed advertised price of $3,054.82 in 1991. That amount is roughly equivalent to about $5,100 in 2012 dollars,” Cichon wrote in his Jan. 14, 2014 post, adding, “The only two items on the page that my phone really can’t replace: Tiny Dual-Superhet Radar Detector, $79.95. But when is the last time you heard the term ‘fuzzbuster’ anyway?” and the “3-Way speaker with massive 15″ Woofer, $149.95.”

Near the end, RadioShack was showing signs it was becoming self-aware of its stuck-in-the-past image problem, witness this 1:12 YouTube video from an ad they did for the 2014 Super Bowl, which is pretty  priceless, if too little too late. Clerk number one answers the phone and says to clerk number two: “The 80’s called. They want their store back,” featuring the spot-on perfect music of Canadian rockers Loverboy’s 1981 anthem Working for the Weekend blaring in the background. If you can honestly say you danced on the roof of one of your Loyalist College print journalism classmate’s orange Toyota Corolla at Lake on the Mountain, just outside Picton, Ontario, to the tune in 1981 and she still remembered the incident with some fondness, if continuing disbelief, almost 30 years later, it probably helps. You can catch the RadioShack 2014 Super Bowl ad on YouTube here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpkixVDFpcI

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