80 Micro: The magazine for TRS-80 owners

Last Updated on January 13, 2025 by Dave Farquhar

It’s September, and that means Septandy. That makes today as good of a day as any to talk about 80 Microcomputing (later shortened to 80 Micro), one of the most successful of the early computer magazines. It also featured an innovation that changed the direction of the industry for good.

The computing world before 80 Micro

The TRS-80 was the most popular computer of its generation, in spite of the Trash-80 perjorative. It’s not that any of the other computers released in 1977 sold badly. But neither Commodore nor Apple had a chain of 4,000 retail stores to sell their computers in. Any of the three could sell you a computer, but Radio Shack was in the best position to make buying a computer convenient.

While Radio Shack was trying to figure out how to build enough computers to keep up with demand, magazine publisher Wayne Green was looking for an idea. A magazine he founded, Byte, had become the second most highly circulated magazine in the country, behind only Vogue, the legendary fashion magazine. But he lost control of it.

Green cloned Byte, starting a new magazine called Kilobaud, but competing with Byte was difficult. Byte had the head start, and it was hard to argue if you read one of those magazines that you really needed the other.

His new idea was to create a magazine dedicated to a single computer. And it made sense to launch a magazine covering the TRS-80 first, since it was the best selling machine. 80 Microcomputing launched in January 1980.

An immediate success

It worked really well. 80 Micro gave TRS 80 owners a source of information about their computers that was completely independent of the company who made it and sold it. It worked really well from an advertising standpoint as well.

The TRS-80 naturally developed a strong ecosystem around it. Radio Shack stores sold everything you needed to make your own accessories for it and to develop your own software for it. But the store didn’t sell any third party products. So you were on your own when it came to selling your creations. You could advertise in a magazine like Byte, but only a fraction of the readers would be interested. You could be pretty certain that anyone who was reading 80 Micro at least owned the computer your product worked with.

Wayne Green had no trouble whatsoever getting advertisers. And with plentiful advertisers, he could make and keep a promise. In the first issue, he promised the magazine wasn’t going to be a shill for Tandy, Radio Shack, or anyone else.

“I don’t ask that you like me-that’s your problem, not mine. I like you and I will be working for your best interests … and so will the magazine,” he wrote in the first issue.

Green had some personal failings, but this is exactly the correct way to run a magazine in an upstanding, ethical fashion. One of the things 80 Micro did was publish a short column called 80 Alert, which listed advertisers who were having trouble delivering products readers had paid for, or had gone out of business.

The mix of content in 80 Micro

Besides that, 80 Micro contained a good mix of editorial content, ranging from articles about using available commercial programs for TRS-80 systems to type-in programs and highly technical content teaching you how to program the systems. It even covered the Langley-St. Clair replacement CRT displays, something I can’t imagine a modern magazine accepting the liability for. Whether you were trying to run your business on a TRS-80, wanting to program it, or modify the hardware to improve it, 80 Micro had something for you in each issue.

There weren’t a lot of professional tech journalists in 1980, and Green didn’t want a magazine written by full-time professional writers anyway. He invited reader submissions and paid $50 per printed page, which was good pay for 1980. That’s $191 in 2024 dollars. That’s about double what I got when I was writing freelance in the early 90s.

80 Micro’s influence on the industry

The formula worked, and 80 Micro quickly reached a circulation of 152,000. Having proved the concept, so Green quickly followed it up with a magazine for Apple computers. He couldn’t replace Byte, but he could recreate it in the aggregate, in the form of successful machine specific titles.

80 Micro was the direct inspiration for both PC Magazine and PC World. In a case of history repeating itself, David Bunnell put together PC Magazine, only to quickly lose control of it. So he recycled his idea, creating PC World magazine under the same corporate umbrella as Green. This explains why Wayne Green never created a magazine for IBM computers. At least not directly.

80 Micro paved the way, showing how things would be done for the next 20 years, until computer magazines had to move online thanks to the rise of the Internet.

Spinoffs of 80 Micro

80 Micro resulted in one spin-off as well. Tandy followed up the original TRS-80 with subsequent models that were also based on the Z-80 CPU. But in 1980, they launched something completely different: the Color Computer. The CoCo plugged into a television rather than having a built-in display, and used a completely different architecture. Other than being sold in the same stores, it didn’t really have anything in common with the computers that 80 Micro covered.

So in 1983, Wayne Green launched a new magazine, Hot CoCo, to cover the color computer. As the CoCo’s popularity waned, Hot CoCo merged again with 80 Micro in 1985.

End of the line: 1988

80 Micro met its demise after after Tandy shifted its focus to its PC compatibles like the Tandy 1000 line. 80 Micro attempted to cover Tandy PCs along with the other product lines through May 1987, even giving the Tandy 2000 the cover on its January 1984 issue. By June 1987, it was covering Tandy PCs exclusively. Its audience wasn’t happy with either arrangement, and readership and the page count dwindled.

Arguably it would have been better to leave 80 Micro alone, have it cover the TRS-80 series and the Color Computer series, and launch a new magazine strictly for the Tandy 1000. Yes, the Tandy 1000 was a PC compatible, so PC World and PC Magazine would overlap. But Tandy’s PCs had a number of quirks unique to them. And since they sold well, especially the Tandy 1000, arguably they had a large enough audience to support a dedicated magazine, at least for a few years.

But ideally they would have made that launch sometime around 1985, not 1987. In 1987, the Tandy 1000 was  selling very well. I would argue it wasn’t clear in 1988 that its days were numbered, but but by 1990 it was clear the Tandy 1000 and Tandy computers in general were in trouble.

Meanwhile, the older TRS-80 line was essentially an orphan, but retained enough of a following that it could have supported its own magazine beyond mid-1987, although in diminished form.

Reading 80 Micro today

Those late issues of 80 Micro may not have been popular at the time, but they remain a useful snapshot in time of what it was like to own a Tandy 1000 in the late 1980s. If earlier TRS-80s are what you’re into, you’ll like the earlier issues better. If you’re restoring an old TRS-80 or Tandy computer and find a mod you can’t figure out, it’s entirely possible the mod originated from an article in 80 Micro.

80 Micro ceased publication with the June 1988 issue, approximately 5 years after Wayne Green sold it to Computerworld.

The magazines are technically still under copyright, but high-quality scans exist online, both at archive.org and elsewhere.

Criticism of Green and his magazines

The 1988 biography of Wayne Green, titled Run, Wayne, Run, paints 80 Micro and the rest of Green’s computer magazines in a negative light, calling all of them failures. But the author had an axe to grind with Green, being married to Green’s ex-wife, and arguably had a conflict of interest. The book talked up Green’s failures and downplayed any success Green ever had, including 80micro and RUN.

Putting your feelings about Wayne Green the person aside, 80 Micro was a good magazine and its formula worked well. Green and Computerworld replicated the idea over and over again throughout the decade, as new computer models launched. As long as the computer they were covering fared well in the marketplace, the magazines did very well too.

I do think Green’s magazines worked best when he created them and then largely stepped out of the way. He was better at creating magazines than he was at running them. But the seven-and-a-half-year run of 80 Micro was a much-needed resource for TRS-80 computer owners at the time, and remains an invaluable historical record for these storied machines.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.