Farman has written the admiring, official story of the short, frenetic life of hard-driving, hard-drinking, wheeler-dealer salesman Charles Tandy. He was involved with computers only in the two years before his death, a period covered in two chapters. They tell how in 1976, Tandy’s Radio Shack chain, at first without his direction or blessing and with no in-house skill in engineering or computing, first tried to put together a marketable computer kit and then, in the following year, put the TRS-80 on the market in its thousands of stores for $599.95, instantly becoming “the biggest name in little computers.” After reporting that the microcomputer was based on the Zilog Z-80 and had a 12-inch display, a keyboard, a cassette tape recorder, 4K of random-access storage, and BASIC in its 4K ROM, the book says little more about the computer or computing. Much is said, however, about the financial manipulations that took place in the brief time between its introduction and Tandy’s death in 1978 at the age of 60.

The book is another work in the current flood of authorized biographies of the financial manipulators of the world, some of whom seem to be an important part of the history of computing, whether we like it or not. In these two years, Tandy’s firm accelerated the personal computing revolution that has changed the face of the computing world forever. Unfortunately, this book, which I cannot recommend, does not tell this story well or in sufficient depth or detail.