Tandy Assembly 2026 Enters Its Final Day With Real TRS-80 Hardware Still Doing What It Does Best

Tandy Assembly 2026 reaches its final day in Cincinnati, gathering Radio Shack TRS-80 and Color Computer enthusiasts for live hardware demos, repairs, and community preservation.

Tandy Assembly 2026 reaches its final day today in Cincinnati, Ohio, after bringing together enthusiasts of Radio Shack and Tandy computing from October 2 through October 4. Held at the DoubleTree by Hilton Cincinnati Airport, the gathering focuses on the machines that once made Radio Shack an unexpectedly important force in personal computing: [TRS-80 Model I](/platforms/trs-80-model-i) systems, Color Computers and related Tandy hardware, software and peripherals.

The event combines exhibitions, technical discussions, demonstrations and the sort of hardware conversations where a perfectly normal sentence may contain three different expansion-bus standards. Demand was strong enough for the event hotel allocation to sell out.

This year's gathering also carries a sad note: planned keynote speaker Jerry Heep died unexpectedly before the event, with organisers offering condolences to his family and friends.

Events such as Tandy Assembly are an important part of preservation because keeping software images online is only half the job. Vintage computers also depend on practical knowledge about repairs, interfaces, storage devices and undocumented behavioural quirks, much of which still lives in communities rather than manuals. A forty-year-old TRS-80 cannot explain why it has stopped working. Fortunately, putting a room full of Tandy enthusiasts around it usually produces several opinions before lunch.