John Roach, a promoting visionary who served make the household computer system ubiquitous in the late 1970s by introducing the thoroughly assembled Tandy TRS-80 for $599.95 or significantly less by means of RadioShack chain merchants, died on Sunday in Fort Really worth. He was 83.

His demise, in a medical center, was verified by his wife, Jean Roach. No cause was given.

Mr. Roach already had college or university knowledge fiddling with refrigerator-dimensions mainframes by 1967, when he joined the Tandy Company, a Texas conglomerate that was established as a leather-based products company and bundled RadioShack and its hundreds of franchised sellers in electronics farrago.

He was instrumental in prodding Tandy to enterprise into the laptop or computer market place. At the time, most smaller pcs had been offered as kits to be assembled by hobbyists, but Mr. Roach considered that consumers would welcome a design that they just essential to plug in.

His staff introduced the first TRS-80 prototype — cobbled collectively from a black-and-white RCA check, a keyboard and a videocassette recorder — to Tandy’s chief executive, Charles Tandy, and to Lewis Kornfeld, the president of RadioShack, in January 1977.

The Apple 1 had been released the 12 months right before, and Commodore and other businesses ended up marketing and advertising their individual property desktops, but the TRS-80 (the initials stood for Tandy RadioShack) speedily grew to become, for a time, the most preferred laptop on the sector.

“Charles blew a minimal smoke and stated, ‘Build a thousand and if we just cannot provide them, we will use them in the retailer for a thing,’” Mr. Roach recalled in remarks to the Fort Worth Government Round Desk past month.

“We have been ultimately capable to ship some machines in September and shipped 5,000 that year, all we could assemble,” Mr. Roach said. “Our opponents transported none.”

At just below $600 (about $2,700 in today’s pounds), the pc was relatively inexpensive (it was $399 if linked to a independently owned viewing screen). It was accessible in all 8,000 of the company’s shops.

Tandy recruited Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the future founders of Microsoft, to publish exclusive software for personal, house and small-business enterprise applications, and for video games. In 1982, to promote pc and modem income, Mr. Roach persuaded The Star-Telegram of Fort Value to become one particular of the very first newspapers in the place to go on line.

The TRS-80 was viewed as so novel that a design was later obtained for the assortment of the Smithsonian Countrywide Museum of American Historical past.

John Vinson Roach II was born on Nov. 22, 1938, in Stamford, a rural farming community of several thousand men and women in West Texas. His mother, Agnes Margaret (Hanson) Roach, was a nurse. His father owned a meat market that went out of business simply because of rationing for the duration of Earth War II, and the family members moved to Fort Value, in which he opened a grocery retailer.

Younger John, a math whiz, calculated the change in his father’s grocery retailer without having utilizing the hard cash register. He worked his way as a result of large school unloading box vehicles for Montgomery Ward retailers.

He graduated with a bachelor’s diploma in business administration from Texas Christian University in 1961 and then labored for two yrs at the Navy’s Pacific Missile Array Facility in Hawaii before returning to the college, the place he attained a master’s in company administration in 1965.

When Mr. Roach joined the Tandy Company as a details processing supervisor, he stated in an interview with the university in 2007, “neither the concept nor the imagined of a particular personal computer experienced even been conceived.”

The TRS-80 sales growth arrived just in time to revive Tandy, which experienced been encountering a slump just after the recognition of two-way citizens band radios pale. Following Mr. Tandy died in 1978, Mr. Roach became RadioShack’s government vice president. He was named main running officer in 1980.

Tandy’s early dominance would wither as competition produced types that were equally affordable or available faster speeds and better performance. By 1991, the company’s share of the domestic household computer system current market experienced contracted to 3.5 p.c it had been as considerably as 40 p.c, in 1981.

Through the 1990s, when the conglomerate used 37,500 personnel and noted annual revenue of $4.3 billion, Mr. Roach sought to reposition RadioShack more generically as “The Know-how Shop.”

In 1999 he retired as chief govt and chairman of Tandy, positions he had held considering the fact that 1983.

Tandy adjusted its title to RadioShack in 2000 and overcame cutthroat competition to continue as an e-commerce web site and franchise operation with the slogan “Shack is again.”

In the 1990s, Mr. Roach was chairman of Texas Christian University’s board of trustees, supporting to double its endowment to additional than $1 billion, build a technologies centre and engage in a supporting position in Fort Worth’s civic and cultural existence. In 2007 the John V. Roach Honors Higher education was endowed in his honor at T.C.U. by his friends Paul and Judy Andrews of Fort Truly worth.

“He was ready to mix his intelligence with judgment,” J. Luther King Jr., his good friend and successor as board chairman, said in an interview. Mr. Roach, he included, succeeded in transforming the college from “a regional college to a national college.”

In addition to his wife, Mr. Roach is survived by their two daughters, Amy Roach Bailey and Lori Roach Davis six grandchildren and a good-granddaughter.

Mr. Roach felt individually and professionally relaxed with computer systems ever considering that his school days. Soon before he died, his family claimed, he FaceTimed with his grandchildren and watched T.C.U. conquer Seton Corridor in the N.C.A.A. basketball match online.