Radio Shack's Dancing Demon
A Pixel Miracle from the Underworld
As a kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I got to witness the home computer revolution first hand. In just a few years computers went from mammoth-sized machines full of tubes and wires that filled entire rooms to machines with keyboards and monitors that regular people could purchase and take home.
Our first computer was a TRS-80 Model III, purchased from Radio Shack in 1980. For just over $1,000 the machine came equipped with 16k of RAM (for reference the picture that appears below is 256k), a cassette player for loading and saving programs, and a black and white monitor.
Back then, watching a computer do pretty much anything was amazing. People spent lots of time writing programs to perform simple math equations and generate word puzzles. Most of the games we had didn’t even have graphics — or, if they did, they were made up of ASCII characters. The programs we had were prehistoric compared to today’s technology, but back then every single thing a computer did felt like a miracle.
Like graphics, very few programs played music. If they made any sound at all it was usually just a simple beep here or there. And then, one day we discovered the Dancing Demon.
Dancing Demon was a program sold by Radio Shack, which is where we got all of our software back then. (The TRS in TRS-80 stood for “Tandy/Radio Shack”.) Loading Dancing Demon from cassette probably took somewhere between 5-10 minutes. Adding floppy disk drives to the TRS-80 was another $1,000.
After loading the program, the show would begin. The digital curtain would raise and the Dancing Demon would take the stage, tap dancing to a series of beeps that played recognizable tunes. The program included several pre-programmed dance routines, and each one could be played back at a custom speed.
The fun did not stop there, as Dancing Demon also came with a built-in editor that allowed you to create your own dance routines! Each of the Demon’s dance moves were assigned a letter of the alphabet, which could be linked together to create your own routine. This may not sound very exciting, but in a world where people got excited by watching a computer count to 100… making a demon dance was pretty amazing.