John Roach, a marketing visionary who helped make the home computer ubiquitous in the late 1970s by introducing the fully assembled Tandy TRS-80 for $599.95 or less through RadioShack chain stores, died Sunday in Fort Worth. He was 83.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Jean Roach. No reason was given.
Mr. Roach already had college experience playing with refrigerator-sized mainframes in 1967, when he joined the Tandy Corporation, a Texas conglomerate founded as a leather goods company that included RadioShack and its thousands of franchised electronics farrago dealers.
He was instrumental in spurring Tandy to venture into the computer market. Back then, most small computers were sold as kits to be assembled by hobbyists, but Mr. Roach believed that consumers would welcome a model that they just had to plug in.
In January 1977, his team presented the original TRS-80 prototype — composed of a black-and-white RCA monitor, keyboard, and cassette recorder — to Tandy’s chief executive, Charles Tandy, and Lewis Kornfeld, the president of RadioShack. †
The Apple 1 had been introduced the year before and Commodore and other companies launched their own home computers, but the TRS-80 (the initials stood for Tandy RadioShack) quickly became the most popular computer on the market for a while.
“Charles blew a little smoke and said, ‘Build a thousand and if we can’t sell them, we’ll use them in the store for something,’” recalled Mr. Roach in comments to the Fort Worth Executive Round Table last month.
“In September we were finally able to ship some machines and that year we shipped 5,000, everything we could assemble,” said Mr. roach. “Our competitors have not shipped any.”
At just under $600 (about $2,700 in today’s dollars), the computer was relatively inexpensive (it was $399 when plugged into a separate proprietary display). It was available in all of the company’s 8,000 stores.
Tandy recruited Bill Gates and Paul Allen, future founders of Microsoft, to write exclusive software for personal, home, small business, and games. In 1982, to promote the sale of computers and modems, Mr. Roach The Star-Telegram from Fort Worth about to become one of the first newspapers in the country to go online.
The TRS-80 was considered so new that a model was later acquired for the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
John Vinson Roach II was born on November 22, 1938, in Stamford, a rural farming community of several thousand people in West Texas. His mother, Agnes Margaret (Hanson) Roach, was a nurse. His father ran a meat market that went bankrupt due to rationing during World War II, and the family moved to Fort Worth, where he opened a grocery store.
Young John, a math genius, calculated change in his father’s grocery store without using the cash register. He worked his way through high school unloading wagons for retailers in Montgomery Ward.
He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Texas Christian University in 1961, then spent two years at the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii before returning to college, where he earned a master’s degree in business administration in 1965.
when mr. Roach joined Tandy Corporation as a data processing manager, he said in a 2007 interview with the university, “neither the concept nor the thought of a personal computer was even conceived.”
The TRS-80 sales boom came just in time to revive Tandy, who had been going through a slump after the popularity of two-way radios for civilians waned. After mr. Tandy died in 1978, Mr. Roach is the executive vice president of RadioShack. In 1980 he was appointed Chief Operating Officer.
Tandy’s early dominance would disappear as competitors developed models that were equally cheap or offered faster speeds and more functionality. By 1991, the company’s share of the domestic home computer market had shrunk to 3.5 percent; in 1981 it was a whopping 40 percent.
In the 1990s, when the conglomerate employed 37,500 employees and reported annual sales of $4.3 billion, Mr. Roach to reposition RadioShack more generically as ‘The Technology Store’.
In 1999, he retired as general manager and chairman of Tandy, positions he had held since 1983.
Tandy changed its name to RadioShack in 2000 and overcame the cutthroat competition to continue as an e-commerce site and franchise operation with the slogan “Shack is back”.
In the 1990s, Mr. Roach was chairman of the board of trustees at Texas Christian University. He helped double the endowment to more than $1 billion, built a technology center, and played a supportive role in Fort Worth’s civic and cultural life. In 2007, the John V. Roach Honors College was donated to TCU in his honor by his friends Paul and Judy Andrews of Fort Worth.
“He was able to combine intelligence with judgment,” J. Luther King Jr., his friend and successor as board chairman, said in an interview. mr. Roach, he added, has managed to transform the university from “a regional university to a national university.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Roach is survived by their two daughters, Amy Roach Bailey and Lori Roach Davis; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Mr. Roach has felt personally and professionally comfortable with computers since his college days. Shortly before he died, his family said, he facetimed with his grandchildren and watched TCU beat Seton Hall in the NCAA basketball tournament online.
