Tandy Model 4P - Power and portability at a truly unbeatable price!

It wasn't until 1986 that Tandy/Radio Shack officially dropped both the Radio Shack part of the company name, as well as the TRS designation that had been part of its naming scheme since its first - the TRS-80 - in 1977.

However, this advert shows that process is well under way, with no mention anywhere of the fact that this machine is essentially the desktop TRS-80 Model 4 repackaged in a portable unit, with the same Z80 processor along with 64K RAM. Oh, and at 26 pounds, or nearly 12 kilogrammes, it's definitely still in the luggable rather than truly portable category.

Even references to its earlier machines had dropped the TRS moniker (an abbreviation of Tandy Radio Shack), although a hint remains in the mention of the machine's TRSDOS 6 operating system.

The Model 4P was available for £999, or about [[999|1985]] in [[now]], which happened to be the same price as the double-disk desktop version. Interestingly, the release of the 4P came two years after the launch of Tandy's first real portable - the <a href="ads_022">Kyocera-based TRS-80 Model 100</a> - otherwise known as the Micro Executive Workstation.