Old-school Nerdy Comics

savetz writes "20 years before User Friendly, Doctor Fun, and Dilbert, about the only place a geek could go for a fix of nerdy comic goodness was ... Radio Shack. Tandy Computer Whiz Kids was a comic book series that was distributed for free at Radio Shack stores. It featured overeager kids stopping bad guys with their TRS-80s and acoustic modems, sweetly naive information about computers, and constant shilling of Radio Shack products. They're now on the Web." Update: 04/19 03:44 GMT by J : We're having a bit of DB trouble tonight... bear with us.

Equal gender hackers??

[CyberWolf]

I just started to read the frist episode, and I found 2 points to be interesting.

1) The include girls. The co-heroes are a boy and a girl.

2) The girl seems to know more about computers than the boy. I guess this comes from secretaries being mostly women at the time.

The pages are a bit slow to load, but it is an interesting read, a flash back to an almost forgotten past.

Cheers.

An earlier comic source of geeky goodness.

[cliffy2000]

What about the old issues of The Incredible Hulk when Rick Jones used his Ham radio to gather "The Teen Brigade" assist the Hulk in times of need? You might want to check out Incredible Hulk #6 for quite possibly the first truly geek comic reference. (Google yielded this [geocities.com] as a place to read about it -- check out the bottom of the page.)
- Senor Cliffy

Temporary mirror

[3.1415926535]

here [homeip.net]. Go easy on me, please!

Re:Radioshack pc's blew

[GigsVT]

The Sensation II was the last Tandy branded computer to sell in the US. My parents got one when I asked for a computer all those years ago. If it had a cdrom tray rather than caddie, then it was a Sensation II. The first Sensation came with a caddie CDROM.

The WD hard disk had a strange habit of hanging under heavy swapping load, it would freeze for like a full minute, then start working again right where it left off.

Oh, yeah, the hard disk they shipped with was 212 megs, and it was already nearly full with all the crap they put on it. Tons of demo programs, and the stupid desktop replacement that Tandy wrote was default instead of Program Manager, forgot the name. It was huge and bloated for the time and considering the machine shipped with 4 megs ram.

The soundcard and modem were on the same card, and the modem was only 2400 when 9600 was pretty much standard by late 1993 when the system came out. Of course you had three ISA slots to upgrade it with, but the lower slot could only take short cards because the processor interfered with the clearance.

Now that I think about it, I really know way more than I ever wanted to about this subject. That computer was really what got me into computers in the modern sense, the only one I had before that was a C64.

Mirror

[TheAlchemist]

Here's a complete mirror of the comics:

Tandy Computer Whiz Kid Comics [austinsystems.com]

Enjoy!

Re:Where's my 150-in-one?

[LMariachi]

How about 200-in-1 [auspexscientific.com]? Or even slightly more [einsteins-emporium.com]?

These things are still out there waiting to be given to budding young nerds (although budding chemistry nerds may be out of luck,) you just have to look a little harder now that Radio Shack makes all their money selling Compaqs and Sprint cell phones.