John Roach, Pioneer of the Personal Computer, Is Dead at 83

John Roach, a advertising and marketing visionary who helped make the house laptop ubiquitous within the late Nineteen Seventies by introducing the totally assembled Tandy TRS-80 for $599.95 or much less by RadioShack chain shops, died on Sunday in Fort Value. He was 83.

His demise, in a hospital, was confirmed by his spouse, Jean Roach. No trigger was given.

Mr. Roach already had faculty expertise twiddling with refrigerator-size mainframes by 1967, when he joined the Tandy Company, a Texas conglomerate that was based as a leather-based items firm and included RadioShack and its hundreds of franchised sellers in electronics farrago.

He was instrumental in prodding Tandy to enterprise into the pc market. On the time, most small computer systems have been bought as kits to be assembled by hobbyists, however Mr. Roach believed that buyers would welcome a mannequin that they simply wanted to plug in.

His staff introduced the unique TRS-80 prototype — cobbled collectively from a black-and-white RCA monitor, a keyboard and a videocassette recorder — to Tandy’s chief government, Charles Tandy, and to Lewis Kornfeld, the president of RadioShack, in January 1977.

The Apple 1 had been launched the yr earlier than, and Commodore and different firms have been advertising and marketing their very own house computer systems, however the TRS-80 (the initials stood for Tandy RadioShack) rapidly turned, for a time, the most well-liked laptop available on the market.

“Charles blew just a little smoke and mentioned, ‘Construct a thousand and if we are able to’t promote them, we’ll use them within the retailer for one thing,’” Mr. Roach recalled in remarks to the Fort Value Government Spherical Desk final month.

“We have been lastly in a position to ship some machines in September and shipped 5,000 that yr, all we might assemble,” Mr. Roach mentioned. “Our rivals shipped none.”

At slightly below $600 (about $2,700 in at the moment’s {dollars}), the pc was comparatively low cost (it was $399 if linked to a individually owned viewing display). It was obtainable in all 8,000 of the corporate’s shops.

Tandy recruited Invoice Gates and Paul Allen, the long run founders of Microsoft, to write down unique software program for private, house and small-business functions, and for video games. In 1982, to advertise laptop and modem gross sales, Mr. Roach persuaded The Star-Telegram of Fort Value to turn into one of many first newspapers within the nation to go surfing.

The TRS-80 was thought of so novel {that a} mannequin was later acquired for the gathering of the Smithsonian Nationwide Museum of American Historical past.

John Vinson Roach II was born on Nov. 22, 1938, in Stamford, a rural farming group of a number of thousand folks in West Texas. His mom, Agnes Margaret (Hanson) Roach, was a nurse. His father owned a meat market that went out of enterprise due to rationing throughout World Struggle II, and the household moved to Fort Value, the place he opened a grocery retailer.

Younger John, a math whiz, calculated the change in his father’s grocery retailer with out utilizing the money register. He labored his method by highschool unloading field automobiles for Montgomery Ward retailers.

He graduated with a bachelor’s diploma in enterprise administration from Texas Christian College in 1961 after which labored for 2 years on the Navy’s Pacific Missile Vary Facility in Hawaii earlier than returning to the college, the place he earned a grasp’s in enterprise administration in 1965.

When Mr. Roach joined the Tandy Company as a knowledge processing supervisor, he mentioned in an interview with the college in 2007, “neither the idea nor the considered a private laptop had even been conceived.”

The TRS-80 gross sales growth got here simply in time to revive Tandy, which had been experiencing a hunch after the recognition of two-way residents band radios light. After Mr. Tandy died in 1978, Mr. Roach turned RadioShack’s government vp. He was named chief working officer in 1980.

Tandy’s early dominance would wither as rivals developed fashions that have been equally cheap or provided quicker speeds and larger performance. By 1991, the corporate’s share of the home house laptop market had contracted to three.5 p.c; it had been as a lot as 40 p.c, in 1981.

Throughout the Nineteen Nineties, when the conglomerate employed 37,500 staff and reported annual gross sales of $4.3 billion, Mr. Roach sought to reposition RadioShack extra generically as “The Know-how Retailer.”

In 1999 he retired as chief government and chairman of Tandy, positions he had held since 1983.

Tandy modified its title to RadioShack in 2000 and overcame cutthroat competitors to proceed as an e-commerce web site and franchise operation with the slogan “Shack is again.”

Within the Nineteen Nineties, Mr. Roach was chairman of Texas Christian College’s board of trustees, serving to to double its endowment to greater than $1 billion, construct a expertise heart and play a supporting position in Fort Value’s civic and cultural life. In 2007 the John V. Roach Honors Faculty was endowed in his honor at T.C.U. by his mates Paul and Judy Andrews of Fort Value.

“He was in a position to mix his intelligence with judgment,” J. Luther King Jr., his good friend and successor as board chairman, mentioned in an interview. Mr. Roach, he added, succeeded in remodeling the college from “a regional college to a nationwide college.”

Along with his spouse, Mr. Roach is survived by their two daughters, Amy Roach Bailey and Lori Roach Davis; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.

Mr. Roach felt personally and professionally snug with computer systems ever since his faculty days. Shortly earlier than he died, his household mentioned, he FaceTimed along with his grandchildren and watched T.C.U. beat Seton Corridor within the N.C.A.A. basketball match on-line.