My family got one from my Grandma complete with one of theism old dot matrix printers. I was about 11. And had no clue how to use a computer. But my best friend was a computer nerd. So he taught me. Slowly things upgraded, and this was forgotten over the years. I was cleaning out my moms house when she passed away about 8 years ago. And guess what I found? Yep, the old Tandy. I still have it to this day! Haven’t booted it up yet. But it does bring back a lot of memories to see these screens and games, ect.. I still remember those recipe screens. With the ingredients list. My mom used that and would print it out!
Haha yes that startup sound is unforgettable. Computer would have been dead silent if it weren't for the crazy hard drive. The 720k floppy was always my biggest challenge. Usually id try to find 360k floppy games at Walmart and then copy them to a 720k disk using a computer and my dad's office.
Actually there were two Tandy 1000 models that came with VGA graphics, the 1000RLX and 1000RSX. But many games require the special 16-color PCjr/Tandy graphics modes in order to provide the improved Tandy sound capability, so on these models you'll often only get standard PC speaker sound. The Tandy 1000's joysticks are compatible with the TRS-80 Color Computer series, and when Tandy was designing the chip responsible for Printer, Sound, Serial, and Joystick (PSSJ) in the later 1000RL/SL/TL models, they discovered that its joystick port could also easily serve to provide digital audio, known as DAC, which could be used in combination with the PCjr-style 3-voice sound. Thus you can't use DAC sound and the joysticks at the same time, but you can use joysticks and 3-voice sound simultaneously. And the 1000RL has a standard PS/2 mouse port so you should have no problem finding a mouse that works with it.
I saw the "Actually no 1000s had VGA" line in the video and came here to post this, but being that this video is 6 months old you easily beat me to it. I had a 1000 RLX but as you pointed out, it wasn't nearly as useful as an RL HD for playing old games since many games tied the sound compatibility to the graphics compatibility.
I also had a RLX, I was able to trick some games to use the sound with VGA by renaming the support files. Actually the hard drives were not MFM, but a non-standard 8-bit version of IDE, Tandy called it Smartdrive.
A few other lines can be upgraded, like the TL, and a few need special cards, and dip switches changed. Only the original 1000, 1000A, and 1000HD can't have vga installed
I had an RLX, 3-year warranty, because the hard drive kept switching from DOS to DeskMate of its own accord. New drive, no old probblem, I liked DeskMate. Was worth the money to extend warranty in this case. I miss the system!
Jimi Blues same here! Parents bought me a $1000hx, 1.44MB floppy, no HD.. ($1000), then a friend was selling his 286 40MB HD about a year later for 200$ to pay for a sound card...for his 386... 8/
Another excellent, well documented, and enjoyable video. I remember those PCs. I had a Tandy 1000 HX in the late 80's which I used for homework and more importantly for connecting to BBSs. Remember those? It might be interesting to see a video some day about the fate of those Internet precursors and to perhaps watch you connect one of your PC projects to an existing BBS using a modem (before analog phones are gone too). Again, great video.
I did R:BASE programming on a Tandy 1000 with an external hard drive that was as big as the Tandy was. These were inexpensive, but their compatibility was hit or miss. Eventually the small college I was working for started to build their computers from parts and never looked back at the Tandy line. Tandy was also the only manufacture to release a Micro-channel clone. It bombed.
Great Video lots of good information. A Tandy 1000 RLX was my second computer after a Commodore 64. It was a cool computer for what it was did allot of collage papers on it using Word Perfect... those were the days of blue backlit screen document writers.
I had the next model up when I was in middle school into high school. The 1000 RLX non HD version. I didn't realize how different the RL was from the RLX. The RLX had a 286 AMD 10Mhz with a turbo button to slow it down. It came with 640k I believe but was upgradable to 1mb. Also had the fancy new 1.44mb floppy as apposed to the 720k one. Still the awesome Deskmate on the ROM, with DOS 5.0. I wish I still had mine. Thanks for the memories!
Wow this brings back memories. My first computer was a Tandy 1000SX with a 20MB HD (on a card) and a 5.25 drive. It was a hand-me-down from my first office job after community college. I loved playing the old Taito 5.25" floppy disk based games (Qix, Operation Wolf, Bubble Bobble, etc.) very well and the Tandy graphics really popped compared to the PC CGA modes.
Thank you so much for this video - it's so nostalgic. I never had a Tandy - it was never really a thing in Europe or Scandinavia at least ... I grew up with PCs though - first one being a clone of an XT, with no hard drive and CGA graphics. That was in 1989. Get a hold of Norton Commander, it makes it so much easier to copy files. And you can use ARJ , RAR or similar archiving tools to compress files into 720k archives that can easily be transferred :) I used to have two small batch files that would package a directory and all of it's sub folders and files into an archive-size of my choice, and then another batch file that would unpack it again into a folder given through the parameters. Unfortunately, all my DOS related stuff is packed away at the moment, otherwise I'd have shared the bat files with you. I preferred ARJ back in the DOS days, as it was better than ZIP and less prone to corruption.
9:17 You could use ARJ. its basically like pkzip. but you can break a large program down into any file size segments like 700k to fit a 20mb file to span several floppys.
Heh, came here to say this. ARJ was great for creating spanned archives. PKZIP's volume spanning could only create floppy disk-sized volumes, directly onto the floppies, and it would fail if your disk wasn't completely empty or if it had any bad sectors at all. ARJ could also create spanned archives with a fixed volume size... but it could also just use whatever space was remaining on your floppies, and if you were using fixed volume sizes, it could create them in a directory on your hard disk.
You can easily transfer game of any size using floppy drives. There are many option to create compressed archives. The best one is RAR. You can even use WINRAR to compress and automatically split archive in 720KB parts, just set correct version. DOS version isn't developed for a long time, but if you use legacy WINRAR version, it should be able to automatically create self unpacking archive with DOS executable. Or you could use DOS RAR on Windows 9x or even XP or 32-bit vista/7. It has user interface similar to Norton Commander. Tandy 1000 is the best known for it's sound capabilities. Even later games that required VGA to run like Lemmings 2 supported tandy audio. There's even support in many later games that required 386 or even 486. I don't know if there's even a Tandy compatible PC that had those CPUs. That support was probably due to standardized music support in late DOS, with midi files and various playback drivers.
I had a Tandy 1000SL. It came with two 5.25 in floppy drives. The best game I ever played on it was The Three Stooges by CinemaWare. All their games had great Tandy graphics and sound.
Most software even nowadays has the option to split archives to a certain sized parts, if one is copying stuff from a modern system, 7-zip is not a bad choice either as it still does ZIP archives as well. There doesn't seem to be a 720k option inbuilt, but one can always type the part size manually.
+Kazenov The problem using modern software is what to do after getting the parts on the Tandy. It's not like I can fire up Windows to join them back together. Apparently the original Zip will do it, though, using DOS on both sides. (I assume it'd work from the Windows command line.)
Had a Tandy 1000 but I also had a Macintosh and that was my primary computer - the 1000 was just a low cost way to have a PC compatible. Wasn't a game player so never really appreciated it's virtues at the time. But now I do and kind of wish I still had that 1000 - it was a pretty great design in how it bested the IBM PC Jr, and at much more affordable pricing. A home computer that was pretty good gaming machine and could run PC productivity software.
Hi, cool video, for old PCs you can try getting a parallel Zip drive, those are ridicously cheap, worst case scenario won't with your parallel port, but they cost nothing in the US. Second suggestion is use Norton Commander with a null-modem cable to a newer PC, I do that with an i386 SX that does not work with Zip drives
I bought an original Tandy 1000 when it came out. It had, 128k, a single 5 1/4 floppy and I had the CGA monitor. I upgraded it to 640k and added a second floppy and a LX80 printer. The awesome tandy graphics made Kings Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry (thanks Sierra!) so awesome in pre-EGA days.
Null modem cable to transfer from a modern system, the same way we copied from computer to computer in the lat 1980's and early 1990's; it still works today.
The Tandy 1000 was great. The 1000, the TX, and TL were great for the time (and so were other models). However, selling the RL with an 8086 CPU in 1991 and later.... sorry but that was just an outmoded architecture. It definitely WAS a throwback. Tandy didn't keep innovating when they were surpassed by others that had 386 processors and VGA.
My first PC was a Tandy 1000SX, which I bought primarily to the play the game Starflight. In addition to the "Tandy" graphics and sound, it also had 768k of usable memory, rather than the standard PC-compatible 640k, though not many programs used that much. It also ran at 7.16 MHz.
My first PC was a Tandy 1000 RL Harddrive model. (I still have it) My dad bought it for me for Christmas and sprung for the upgraded 1.44MB floppy drive, but not the 1000 RLX version which had a 286 and VGA graphics.
1:55 First, but not the only. PS/1 was their second attempt at a home-grade machine, and the Aptiva line was the third, and the one that was actually successful to a point. And then the first NetVistas were derived from late-model Aptiva chassis.
Sis and I had Tandy sl2/1000 with no hdd, and only had 640 kB memory and I think it had 1.44 floppy drive. I remember playing hero quest 1 for TGA (Tandy graphics) and it had better sound card then pc speaker. Lol. My high school upgrade from Apple ii2e to Apple Macintosh plus and classic. And I remember that crapy Tandy desktop hahah. Wasn’t there a RXL 286 version. Lol I wanted that system so badly but it was like over $2000 here in Alberta Canada back in the day. Wanted it so badly but could not afford it. I may even have old Tandy desktop 3.5 floppy disk somewhere. Maybe in storage lol. Can’t remember. But ya we had Tandy sometime early 90’s. And got me into computers. Lol I hated that Tandy system so much cuz compared to Mac plus and classic we had at school which had hdd screen and grey screen and were a lot faster. Everybody else was on 286 or better system, wasn’t till much later I finally was able build my own 486dx system hah. We’ve come such long way since then. Now I’m 40+ yrs old and this video brings back soo many memories. Hero quest 1 and centaurs in TGA graphics and sound on bunch 1.44 floppy’s hahahah I think we later got 2400 bbs modem and used connect to bbs? Can’t remember lol
The Tandy 1000 back in 1992 was my first MS DOS computer, I bought it used but a complete system, with monitor, printer and a bunch of floppies. my model had no hard drive, but both 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 inch floppies , I learned Lotus 123 on it, I don't see it being of much use today
I would later play "Wheel of Fortune" and used Broderbund brand Cards/Banners software program and the ilk. My former RLX 1000 was strange, its hard drive jumped indiscriminately from DOS to DeskMate 3. I had a warranty. Three hard drives later, success. Thank goodness for the warranty!
I got a 1000TX back in the day. Used it for years as a new teacher. Bought a 3100 486/33 later. I have several TXs now most with VGA cards and one with CF IDE. Boots like it has the ROM.
I managed to get one, a 1984 Tandy 1000 at a auction in 2015, along with a boxed TRS-80 Color Computer 2 16k for a dollar! (I snagged an entire table of stuff for just a dollar!) The 1000 did have it's keyboard, and cables, but no monitor or startup floppy. It comes on, but without the disk, I can't get past the boot screen. Still neat though. I love the Coco, and use it.
I'm kinda in the same boat with my 1000 SX. Ordered the full machine off eBay with no disks. So, I was able to find a Dos disk from some other seller on eBay. When the computer arrived in the mail the monitor wasn't working. So now i have to try to get it repaired or find a replacement. It's fun just owning it again, though. First computer I had as a kid...
It also depends on whether you're happy with playing games on DOSBox, or insist on period accurate hardware. The debut of Young Sheldon made Tandy systems very popular, hence expensive. The good news is that xt to IDE are cheaper and more reliable, and online stores like Texelec sells adapters for PC jr's and Tandys that allow the use of standard keyboards & peripherals.
Great story, I had the same Magnavox monitor in the 1980's for my C-64 and 128. Tandy tends to get overlooked but in the 80's they were as big as Apple, Atari and Commodore. But I think Radio Shacks problem's began when they started pushing computers over stereo equipment and specialty electronics.
The RL was a sort of odd machine for them to sell at the time. They sold it concurrently with the 1000 RLX which did have VGA Graphics. I still have my Tandy 1000TL that I purchased in 1989. It has a 286 running at 8mhz, and is quite a bit faster than the 8086 powered machines. I also installed an original 8-bit soundblaster in 1990. If you're really interested in playing old games on the original machines, a Tandy would be worth owning, otherwise, just use DOSBox. I have mine set up in the corner, and occasionally go through a Sierra Title, just because. :-)
I think you might need to strip pin 6 from the PS/2 keyboard in order for it to work. Pin 6 has (poorly documented) function that is sometimes incompatible with certain hardware like old computers, and some KVM switches. You can use 2 adapters to convert from PS/2 to AT and back to PS/2 to strip the pin. Or you can cut off pin 6 (not recommended). Thanks for another great video.
I have one in my basement. I don't know how well it held up down there. I like that it had a "Home Screen", something that many computers at that time didn't have.
I had an Tandy 1100FD laptop during this era, 4 color monochrome. It could be run in faux-CGA or I think there was some straight mono-EGA mode. It also had deskmate in ROM IIRC. I remember being blown away by my first color laptop but I still miss that thing sometimes. (And have amnesia about its weight).
I had something 2nd-hand that looked exactly like this inside and out but I swear it was a 286 CPU, not an 8086, and I feel like it had more RAM too - maybe 1MB. Also pretty sure it had a 1.44MB floppy, not 720KB, because I remember swapping-in floppies I'd created previously on my 386 machine. It did come with a hard drive, but that failed within days of receiving the machine so it was mostly a floppy-powered machine for me. I never realized it had any special graphics or sound modes though. I don't think any of the short list of dos games I had back then utilized them.
As a Slacker in the early 90s, I remember well the hype that came with the RL. It had no internal fan, so they called it a kitchen computer...it even had an internal modem. It's version of Deskmate could call car rental or airlines directly...way ahead if it's time...
I recently purchased a 1000 SX that is in great shape. The keyboard and joystick look almost brand new. Now I just need a working monitor. This was the original PC I owned as a kid, so for me it's all about nostalgia. I couldn't really see the average person trying to go out and put this machine together if they didn't have a deep interest in it.
I loved my Tandy 1000 SX, except for the 10" Zuckercard 10 meg hard disk I bought. The over clocked 8086 or 8088? , I think 8 mhz? was a blessing. I think the 8086 was 16 bit internal and 8 bit external (to devices)
_"Innovation at _*_it's_*_ very best!"_ gotta love Radioshack typos [they're everywhere] I picked up a 1000EX with its monitor stand and monitor, with NO yellowing whatsoever, for $15 at a popular thrift store.. no one likes Tandys lol
i found a complete Setup of a Tandy 1000 sx with a tandy dot matrix printer in the trash it's in very good condition for being 31 years old no yellowing barly any scratches so i guess you are right hahaha
while in grade school 7th grade, I was the only student to work with the Tandy 1000, my schools (top computer) haha. My science teacher worked with me after school on it. I coded in basic a hangman game on floppy disk. It would give random words and create the "man" to walk over and hang himself when you lost. After that it was useless when the Tandy became a thing of the past. It worked on nothing else but Tandy
DOSBox can be rigged to emulate a Tandy 1000. For those games with Tandy sound that only has PC speaker otherwise, it's nice. Otherwise, yeah, EGA looks like TGA, and in fact, I think I run some of those games using EGA graphics but Tandy sound. Also, VGA is backwards-compatible with EGA, so that helped make more EGA games.
I had some sort of converter for my 1000A which allowed me to use a standard IBM/AT-type keyboard. Of course my T1kA system is long gone, so I have to rely on fading memory to remember the hacks I did back then.
Tandy 1000ex was my first computer, had a few games too. Still have a few of my disks actually. I had Personal deskmate and it had a file called "shiptrak.exe" when you loaded it the screen went blank, you heard a beep and white letters were at the top of the screen saying _"Remove power from the system now!"_ I still wonder what the hell that program was for?
I started out with a Tandy 1000TX that originally had no hard drive and a bad 720K floppy drive I was eventually given a 1.44 meg floppy out of a later model Tandy that was being scrapped. I learned DOS on that, playing "swap the floppy" until I found an XT IDE hard drive controller with its own BIOS that could cheat Tandy's proprietary architecture and support a 40MB hard drive, enough to run DOS 6.22 with room to spare. I still do use older computers for classic games since some of the emulators, (such as DOS box) left me a little cold, there are too many steps to get it to run the program you want it to run and there's no way to write "batch files" like I used to in straight up DOS, which could, once written, execute all of these steps with one command
Tandy 1000TX here! That was my first. Awesome computer. Dual floppies and CGA graphics. Wait I had the 286 version. Later upgraded to 768 ram. Got a co-processor for no real reason except to do fractals.
@7:25 - The HD is not an MFM: the Seagate ST-325x is an XT-IDE HD. So your comment @9:40 for the IDE: you already have one, kinda, because the XT-IDE was slightly different. How much, I don't know. @15:15 about the keyboard: the Tandy Enhanced Keyboard is auto-sensing. It works both on XT-class computers as on AT-class. (I tested that) But I never had one with a PS/2 connecctor, only DIN. Joystick and mouse were actually Coco-compatible. (Coco = Tandy Color Computer 1/2/3)
I had a 1000HX until a couple of years ago. It was misplaced in a move (lost a lot of my old computers in that debacle). I loved DeskMate, which was why it was still in use long after it was useful for anything else. I also had a 2000HD, which was most notable for being one of the few computers that used an 80186 cpu. Lost it in the same move along with my TRS-80 models 1, 3, and 4, Commodores, Sinclairs, TI99, Apples, and Apple Clones. Man I hate that move. I remember having some adapter cables that would allow you to use a standard XT, AT, or PS/2 keyboard on a Tandy.
I think those adapters just change the connector, though; you still need to have a keyboard that's internally matched to the controller. My one silver label Model M is a switchable AT/XT keyboard with a PS/2 connector; if you had an XT Model M with a 5 pin DIN connector you could probably use it with a later-model 1000 using one of those adapters, or you could use my silver-label IBM with an earlier 1000 using another adapter. But I don't think you can really get a keyboard without XT compatibility to work with a Tandy 1000, since they are XT-class machines. At least, I've never seen an adapter like that; I think it'd have to be more than just a cable.
The adapters were wired internally to match the Tandy connector to the IBM standard. They were about 6 inches in length. It has been along time since I used any of them so might not remember all of the details, but I do remember using my standard IBM AT compatible keyboard with a DIN connector from my Compaq DeskPro 286 and 386 computers and using one of those adapters to run a Tandy 1000.
I find the Tandy 1000 as a perfect mix of the microcomputers of the 80s and 90s, and the pc compatibles of the 80s. The ex and he I feel really push that , with a similar form factor to the apple 2 and Vic 20.
trabsferring files I used on serial DOS program called Laplink just needed a serial cable and LL3 you can find it on the download sites, I used to it to transfer Windows 3.11 across laplink to my IBM AT at the time took hours lol
I used to have one of these back in 1991 with good ol' Deskmate OS. I believe it was either the TL/2 or 3... My aunt paid almost $1,200 for this computer! I remember when I tried several times to install windows 3.1 LOL This was before I realized the difference between the 286 16bit and the beginning "32bit"(x86) 386 processor, not to mention a minimum requirement of 2mb of RAM. I also remember removing the PC cover on this machine and trying to stick a Super Nintendo cartridge in the 8-bit XT ISA expansion slots (which ruined the SNES game) thinking that somehow the motherboard slot would load the cartridge. The things I did in my adolescent years 😂
Our first computer was a Tandy TX-1000. No hard drive, but If I didn't draw the hell out of Deskmate. I used it until the mid-90s before we got a 386 knockoff with windows 3.1.
My friend had this one and we used to play family feud all the time. My first computer was a Tandy, it was a little more advanced than this. Came with QBasic. Not sure of exact model number but it was pretty cool.
I think if you have an old mechanical keyboard for a DOS PC that supports Tandy 1000 graphics and sound you just need to get the accompanying Tandy 1000 joystick supplied to get the feel of playing those games as they would have been I guess.
Unfortunately the RL doesn't allow me to add a co-processor or I'd definitely look for one... though there's something kind of funny about running the most old-school x86 processor there is with no help, in 2018. I'm actually surprised it runs as well as it does, though I wish it would run stuff with Tandy Graphics turned on a little smoother.
I always wanted to try a 486 upgrade chip, maybe one of these days. I wish I kept the original monitor and keyboard, but I still have a 1000TL/2 with mouse and joystick.
My first computer was a Tandy 1000TX. It had an 80286 (not Intel, some clone) running at a whopping 8 MHz and 640k of RAM. The graphics and sound were quite good for its time. I played the heck out of OutRun, Marble Madness, and Thexder. It would play Wolfenstein 3D but not well.
TX was my favourite model of all the 1000s. I liked them better than the faster TL, TL/2, TL/3s. I had a 1000SX with 286 Express card, but it was not up to the performance of the TX.
I'm late to this party-- but was the sound/joystick incompatibility issue specific to this model? I had a 1000 SL2 and don't remember ever having a game that wouldn't allow me to use both the joystick and the sound. Since the Tandy was the first computer I ever had, I didn't even know about PC speaker sound for a couple of years after getting into computers :)
What about a DVD burner and burning the operating system and Desk Mate and other software as backups? I liked that I could use it to learn about computers.
saw some mention of pkz or arj, just wanted to say I recall using one if those or similar to copy a games folder that was around 10 meg over to a friends 386 using split compression. it worked like a charm! sadly it's been too long to pull the details from memory..
Transfer via null modem cable? I used that many times with the 386 era with interlnk/intersvr. You would probably find a similiar software dos terminal to transfer?
My family got one from my Grandma complete with one of theism old dot matrix printers. I was about 11. And had no clue how to use a computer. But my best friend was a computer nerd. So he taught me. Slowly things upgraded, and this was forgotten over the years. I was cleaning out my moms house when she passed away about 8 years ago. And guess what I found? Yep, the old Tandy. I still have it to this day! Haven’t booted it up yet. But it does bring back a lot of memories to see these screens and games, ect.. I still remember those recipe screens. With the ingredients list. My mom used that and would print it out!
This was my first computer 😁. Any time I hear that startup sound my heart flutters a little bit
it was my 2nd, my first was a Tandy Color Computer 2. (not going to say how many Tandys I have now lol)
Haha yes that startup sound is unforgettable. Computer would have been dead silent if it weren't for the crazy hard drive. The 720k floppy was always my biggest challenge. Usually id try to find 360k floppy games at Walmart and then copy them to a 720k disk using a computer and my dad's office.
Tandy 1200HD here. And i miss Radio Shack in general. I used to pour over their catalogs and ads.
Actually there were two Tandy 1000 models that came with VGA graphics, the 1000RLX and 1000RSX. But many games require the special 16-color PCjr/Tandy graphics modes in order to provide the improved Tandy sound capability, so on these models you'll often only get standard PC speaker sound.
The Tandy 1000's joysticks are compatible with the TRS-80 Color Computer series, and when Tandy was designing the chip responsible for Printer, Sound, Serial, and Joystick (PSSJ) in the later 1000RL/SL/TL models, they discovered that its joystick port could also easily serve to provide digital audio, known as DAC, which could be used in combination with the PCjr-style 3-voice sound. Thus you can't use DAC sound and the joysticks at the same time, but you can use joysticks and 3-voice sound simultaneously. And the 1000RL has a standard PS/2 mouse port so you should have no problem finding a mouse that works with it.
I saw the "Actually no 1000s had VGA" line in the video and came here to post this, but being that this video is 6 months old you easily beat me to it. I had a 1000 RLX but as you pointed out, it wasn't nearly as useful as an RL HD for playing old games since many games tied the sound compatibility to the graphics compatibility.
I also had a RLX, I was able to trick some games to use the sound with VGA by renaming the support files.
Actually the hard drives were not MFM, but a non-standard 8-bit version of IDE, Tandy called it Smartdrive.
The 8-Bit IDE interface was an idea borrowed from the PS/2 Models 25 and 30 I believe.
A few other lines can be upgraded, like the TL, and a few need special cards, and dip switches changed. Only the original 1000, 1000A, and 1000HD can't have vga installed
I had an RLX, 3-year warranty, because the hard drive kept switching from DOS to DeskMate of its own accord. New drive, no old probblem, I liked DeskMate. Was worth the money to extend warranty in this case. I miss the system!
I remember getting this for Christmas in 87 I think...it came with thexder. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Rip radio shack
Thexder - remember that game fondly, with Moonlight Sonata as the credits music. Also played on mu 1000 that I got for graduation in '85.
Jimi Blues same here! Parents bought me a $1000hx, 1.44MB floppy, no HD.. ($1000), then a friend was selling his 286 40MB HD about a year later for 200$ to pay for a sound card...for his 386... 8/
Dave Triplett Should have got an Amiga or something lol.
On my Tandy 1000 SX I added a parallel ZIP 100 drive. It helps a lot to use games and programs on the machine. Great video ^^
My old SL I had up until a decade ago. Lost it in a storm. So many memories brought back watching this! Outrun, Deskmate, and more.
Another excellent, well documented, and enjoyable video. I remember those PCs. I had a Tandy 1000 HX in the late 80's which I used for homework and more importantly for connecting to BBSs. Remember those? It might be interesting to see a video some day about the fate of those Internet precursors and to perhaps watch you connect one of your PC projects to an existing BBS using a modem (before analog phones are gone too). Again, great video.
"I promise it's in there somewhere, with the Sega Saturn, the vacuum and the cat."
Just brilliant :-)
I haven’t seen a Tandy in a long time. Brings me a lot of old memories.
I did R:BASE programming on a Tandy 1000 with an external hard drive that was as big as the Tandy was. These were inexpensive, but their compatibility was hit or miss. Eventually the small college I was working for started to build their computers from parts and never looked back at the Tandy line. Tandy was also the only manufacture to release a Micro-channel clone. It bombed.
8:04 'Custom Manufactured in the USA' And that's how you realize how old it is.
8:34 But hey, at least it has an RGB monitor!
Thanks for posting this! Brought back a lot of old memories
Great Video lots of good information. A Tandy 1000 RLX was my second computer after a Commodore 64. It was a cool computer for what it was did allot of collage papers on it using Word Perfect... those were the days of blue backlit screen document writers.
A good "Help" system to guide you through using the system. Wish I still had my Tandy RLX 1000 system. With the printer. And monitor.
I had the next model up when I was in middle school into high school. The 1000 RLX non HD version. I didn't realize how different the RL was from the RLX. The RLX had a 286 AMD 10Mhz with a turbo button to slow it down. It came with 640k I believe but was upgradable to 1mb. Also had the fancy new 1.44mb floppy as apposed to the 720k one. Still the awesome Deskmate on the ROM, with DOS 5.0. I wish I still had mine. Thanks for the memories!
I always liked the clean low profile look of the Tandy's over later tower systems.
Wow this brings back memories. My first computer was a Tandy 1000SX with a 20MB HD (on a card) and a 5.25 drive. It was a hand-me-down from my first office job after community college. I loved playing the old Taito 5.25" floppy disk based games (Qix, Operation Wolf, Bubble Bobble, etc.) very well and the Tandy graphics really popped compared to the PC CGA modes.
Thank you so much for this video - it's so nostalgic.
I never had a Tandy - it was never really a thing in Europe or Scandinavia at least ...
I grew up with PCs though - first one being a clone of an XT, with no hard drive and CGA graphics. That was in 1989.
Get a hold of Norton Commander, it makes it so much easier to copy files.
And you can use ARJ , RAR or similar archiving tools to compress files into 720k archives that can easily be transferred :)
I used to have two small batch files that would package a directory and all of it's sub folders and files into an archive-size of my choice, and then another batch file that would unpack it again into a folder given through the parameters. Unfortunately, all my DOS related stuff is packed away at the moment, otherwise I'd have shared the bat files with you. I preferred ARJ back in the DOS days, as it was better than ZIP and less prone to corruption.
9:17 You could use ARJ. its basically like pkzip. but you can break a large program down into any file size segments like 700k to fit a 20mb file to span several floppys.
Heh, came here to say this. ARJ was great for creating spanned archives. PKZIP's volume spanning could only create floppy disk-sized volumes, directly onto the floppies, and it would fail if your disk wasn't completely empty or if it had any bad sectors at all. ARJ could also create spanned archives with a fixed volume size... but it could also just use whatever space was remaining on your floppies, and if you were using fixed volume sizes, it could create them in a directory on your hard disk.
I had an RLX 1000, a couple hard drives later, it was great! Desk Mate was good!
You can easily transfer game of any size using floppy drives. There are many option to create compressed archives. The best one is RAR. You can even use WINRAR to compress and automatically split archive in 720KB parts, just set correct version. DOS version isn't developed for a long time, but if you use legacy WINRAR version, it should be able to automatically create self unpacking archive with DOS executable.
Or you could use DOS RAR on Windows 9x or even XP or 32-bit vista/7. It has user interface similar to Norton Commander.
Tandy 1000 is the best known for it's sound capabilities. Even later games that required VGA to run like Lemmings 2 supported tandy audio. There's even support in many later games that required 386 or even 486. I don't know if there's even a Tandy compatible PC that had those CPUs. That support was probably due to standardized music support in late DOS, with midi files and various playback drivers.
Ah, Bill Bixby(late)! I loved him as "Eddie's Father" and Dr. David Banner on tv!
I hope that everyone bought Tandy 1000's to keep David Banner happy. You really would not like him when he is angry
Dammit, I meant to work that in to the script somewhere and forgot it in every single edit.
Yes!
9:40 Installing ISA 10base-t onto it would be much more fun!
5:39 Well, the 1000 RLX actually did have VGA graphics. I've been looking for one of those machines for years to add to my collection ;)
I had a Tandy 1000SL. It came with two 5.25 in floppy drives. The best game I ever played on it was The Three Stooges by CinemaWare. All their games had great Tandy graphics and sound.
IIRC there was a DOS program called ARJ that I used to compress and break up files to convenient chunks of data back in the early 90's.
Didn't Norton Disk Doctor or Utilities come with a feature like that? They made some OK stuff back in the day.
You can also use PKZIP with the "span disks" option.
Wasn't that Pascal's stuff?
Most software even nowadays has the option to split archives to a certain sized parts, if one is copying stuff from a modern system, 7-zip is not a bad choice either as it still does ZIP archives as well. There doesn't seem to be a 720k option inbuilt, but one can always type the part size manually.
+Kazenov The problem using modern software is what to do after getting the parts on the Tandy. It's not like I can fire up Windows to join them back together. Apparently the original Zip will do it, though, using DOS on both sides. (I assume it'd work from the Windows command line.)
Had a Tandy 1000 but I also had a Macintosh and that was my primary computer - the 1000 was just a low cost way to have a PC compatible. Wasn't a game player so never really appreciated it's virtues at the time. But now I do and kind of wish I still had that 1000 - it was a pretty great design in how it bested the IBM PC Jr, and at much more affordable pricing. A home computer that was pretty good gaming machine and could run PC productivity software.
Hi, cool video, for old PCs you can try getting a parallel Zip drive, those are ridicously cheap, worst case scenario won't with your parallel port, but they cost nothing in the US. Second suggestion is use Norton Commander with a null-modem cable to a newer PC, I do that with an i386 SX that does not work with Zip drives
My dad has one, 8086 and dual 5 1/4 drives! I used to play B.C.s quest for tires on it in sweet green monochrome goodness.
That boot sound.... put a tear on my eye......
I bought an original Tandy 1000 when it came out. It had, 128k, a single 5 1/4 floppy and I had the CGA monitor. I upgraded it to 640k and added a second floppy and a LX80 printer. The awesome tandy graphics made Kings Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry (thanks Sierra!) so awesome in pre-EGA days.
Null modem cable to transfer from a modern system, the same way we copied from computer to computer in the lat 1980's and early 1990's; it still works today.
You had me at Null Modem
The Tandy 1000 was great. The 1000, the TX, and TL were great for the time (and so were other models). However, selling the RL with an 8086 CPU in 1991 and later.... sorry but that was just an outmoded architecture. It definitely WAS a throwback. Tandy didn't keep innovating when they were surpassed by others that had 386 processors and VGA.
I still have my Tandy 2000.
My first PC was a Tandy 1000SX, which I bought primarily to the play the game Starflight. In addition to the "Tandy" graphics and sound, it also had 768k of usable memory, rather than the standard PC-compatible 640k, though not many programs used that much. It also ran at 7.16 MHz.
My first PC was a Tandy 1000 RL Harddrive model. (I still have it) My dad bought it for me for Christmas and sprung for the upgraded 1.44MB floppy drive, but not the 1000 RLX version which had a 286 and VGA graphics.
1:55 First, but not the only. PS/1 was their second attempt at a home-grade machine, and the Aptiva line was the third, and the one that was actually successful to a point. And then the first NetVistas were derived from late-model Aptiva chassis.
Sis and I had Tandy sl2/1000 with no hdd, and only had 640 kB memory and I think it had 1.44 floppy drive. I remember playing hero quest 1 for TGA (Tandy graphics) and it had better sound card then pc speaker. Lol. My high school upgrade from Apple ii2e to Apple Macintosh plus and classic. And I remember that crapy Tandy desktop hahah. Wasn’t there a RXL 286 version. Lol I wanted that system so badly but it was like over $2000 here in Alberta Canada back in the day. Wanted it so badly but could not afford it.
I may even have old Tandy desktop 3.5 floppy disk somewhere. Maybe in storage lol. Can’t remember. But ya we had Tandy sometime early 90’s. And got me into computers. Lol I hated that Tandy system so much cuz compared to Mac plus and classic we had at school which had hdd screen and grey screen and were a lot faster. Everybody else was on 286 or better system, wasn’t till much later I finally was able build my own 486dx system hah. We’ve come such long way since then. Now I’m 40+ yrs old and this video brings back soo many memories. Hero quest 1 and centaurs in TGA graphics and sound on bunch 1.44 floppy’s hahahah
I think we later got 2400 bbs modem and used connect to bbs? Can’t remember lol
The Tandy 1000 back in 1992 was my first MS DOS computer, I bought it used but a complete system, with monitor, printer and a bunch of floppies. my model had no hard drive, but both 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 inch floppies , I learned Lotus 123 on it, I don't see it being of much use today
Thank you for making this video!❤
I would later play "Wheel of Fortune" and used Broderbund brand Cards/Banners software program and the ilk. My former RLX 1000 was strange, its hard drive jumped indiscriminately from DOS to DeskMate 3. I had a warranty. Three hard drives later, success. Thank goodness for the warranty!
I got a 1000TX back in the day. Used it for years as a new teacher. Bought a 3100 486/33 later. I have several TXs now most with VGA cards and one with CF IDE. Boots like it has the ROM.
I managed to get one, a 1984 Tandy 1000 at a auction in 2015, along with a boxed TRS-80 Color Computer 2 16k for a dollar! (I snagged an entire table of stuff for just a dollar!) The 1000 did have it's keyboard, and cables, but no monitor or startup floppy. It comes on, but without the disk, I can't get past the boot screen. Still neat though. I love the Coco, and use it.
I'm kinda in the same boat with my 1000 SX. Ordered the full machine off eBay with no disks. So, I was able to find a Dos disk from some other seller on eBay. When the computer arrived in the mail the monitor wasn't working. So now i have to try to get it repaired or find a replacement. It's fun just owning it again, though. First computer I had as a kid...
It also depends on whether you're happy with playing games on DOSBox, or insist on period accurate hardware. The debut of Young Sheldon made Tandy systems very popular, hence expensive.
The good news is that xt to IDE are cheaper and more reliable, and online stores like Texelec sells adapters for PC jr's and Tandys that allow the use of standard keyboards & peripherals.
I absolutely love king's quest it was so good
My first computer was a Tandy 1000 HX, which I still have. Great little computer.
Great story, I had the same Magnavox monitor in the 1980's for my C-64 and 128. Tandy tends to get overlooked but in the 80's they were as big as Apple, Atari and Commodore. But I think Radio Shacks problem's began when they started pushing computers over stereo equipment and specialty electronics.
Final fail was pushing Cellular when they had nothing else left
to appeal to consumers
The RL was a sort of odd machine for them to sell at the time. They sold it concurrently with the 1000 RLX which did have VGA Graphics. I still have my Tandy 1000TL that I purchased in 1989. It has a 286 running at 8mhz, and is quite a bit faster than the 8086 powered machines. I also installed an original 8-bit soundblaster in 1990. If you're really interested in playing old games on the original machines, a Tandy would be worth owning, otherwise, just use DOSBox. I have mine set up in the corner, and occasionally go through a Sierra Title, just because. :-)
I think you might need to strip pin 6 from the PS/2 keyboard in order for it to work. Pin 6 has (poorly documented) function that is sometimes incompatible with certain hardware like old computers, and some KVM switches. You can use 2 adapters to convert from PS/2 to AT and back to PS/2 to strip the pin. Or you can cut off pin 6 (not recommended).
Thanks for another great video.
I have one in my basement. I don't know how well it held up down there.
I like that it had a "Home Screen", something that many computers at that time didn't have.
I had 2 Tandy Computers and loved them. I am so upset my parents threw them away!
kill them
Sheldon's first computer!! :D
I had an Tandy 1100FD laptop during this era, 4 color monochrome. It could be run in faux-CGA or I think there was some straight mono-EGA mode. It also had deskmate in ROM IIRC. I remember being blown away by my first color laptop but I still miss that thing sometimes. (And have amnesia about its weight).
Always enjoy your content sir. :D
I had something 2nd-hand that looked exactly like this inside and out but I swear it was a 286 CPU, not an 8086, and I feel like it had more RAM too - maybe 1MB. Also pretty sure it had a 1.44MB floppy, not 720KB, because I remember swapping-in floppies I'd created previously on my 386 machine. It did come with a hard drive, but that failed within days of receiving the machine so it was mostly a floppy-powered machine for me. I never realized it had any special graphics or sound modes though. I don't think any of the short list of dos games I had back then utilized them.
As a Slacker in the early 90s, I remember well the hype that came with the RL. It had no internal fan, so they called it a kitchen computer...it even had an internal modem. It's version of Deskmate could call car rental or airlines directly...way ahead if it's time...
I recently purchased a 1000 SX that is in great shape. The keyboard and joystick look almost brand new. Now I just need a working monitor. This was the original PC I owned as a kid, so for me it's all about nostalgia. I couldn't really see the average person trying to go out and put this machine together if they didn't have a deep interest in it.
I had one as well. Nice Shamus picture you have got there, haha.
I loved my Tandy 1000 SX, except for the 10" Zuckercard 10 meg hard disk I bought. The over clocked 8086 or 8088? , I think 8 mhz? was a blessing. I think the 8086 was 16 bit internal and 8 bit external (to devices)
_"Innovation at _*_it's_*_ very best!"_ gotta love Radioshack typos [they're everywhere]
I picked up a 1000EX with its monitor stand and monitor, with NO yellowing whatsoever, for $15 at a popular thrift store.. no one likes Tandys lol
i found a complete Setup of a Tandy 1000 sx with a tandy dot matrix printer in the trash it's in very good condition for being 31 years old no yellowing barly any scratches so i guess you are right hahaha
Yi don’t know about you, but the 1000 hx and ex don’t seem to yellow at all. I’ve had my hx for years and it’s color hasn’t changed at all.
while in grade school 7th grade, I was the only student to work with the Tandy 1000, my schools (top computer) haha. My science teacher worked with me after school on it. I coded in basic a hangman game on floppy disk. It would give random words and create the "man" to walk over and hang himself when you lost. After that it was useless when the Tandy became a thing of the past. It worked on nothing else but Tandy
My family had a Tandy 1000SX and I bought a Tandy 1400LT, which I still have. Unfortunately, the 1000 is long gone! Bummer!
Amazing work!
DOSBox can be rigged to emulate a Tandy 1000. For those games with Tandy sound that only has PC speaker otherwise, it's nice. Otherwise, yeah, EGA looks like TGA, and in fact, I think I run some of those games using EGA graphics but Tandy sound. Also, VGA is backwards-compatible with EGA, so that helped make more EGA games.
This was my first computer and i love it......
I had some sort of converter for my 1000A which allowed me to use a standard IBM/AT-type keyboard. Of course my T1kA system is long gone, so I have to rely on fading memory to remember the hacks I did back then.
Tandy 1000ex was my first computer, had a few games too. Still have a few of my disks actually. I had Personal deskmate and it had a file called "shiptrak.exe" when you loaded it the screen went blank, you heard a beep and white letters were at the top of the screen saying _"Remove power from the system now!"_ I still wonder what the hell that program was for?
I started out with a Tandy 1000TX that originally had no hard drive and a bad 720K floppy drive I was eventually given a 1.44 meg floppy out of a later model Tandy that was being scrapped. I learned DOS on that, playing "swap the floppy" until I found an XT IDE hard drive controller with its own BIOS that could cheat Tandy's proprietary architecture and support a 40MB hard drive, enough to run DOS 6.22 with room to spare. I still do use older computers for classic games since some of the emulators, (such as DOS box) left me a little cold, there are too many steps to get it to run the program you want it to run and there's no way to write "batch files" like I used to in straight up DOS, which could, once written, execute all of these steps with one command
1-800-IBM-PCJR is an adult talk line now! Lol!
Tandy 1000TX here! That was my first. Awesome computer. Dual floppies and CGA graphics. Wait I had the 286 version. Later upgraded to 768 ram. Got a co-processor for no real reason except to do fractals.
The co-processor worked nice in games like Flight Simulator and SubLogic's Jet.
Thank you, I enjoyed watching your video.
I always used Arj or Zip when splitting and moving large files back in the day.
The sound of that booting up is nostalgic af.
@7:25 - The HD is not an MFM: the Seagate ST-325x is an XT-IDE HD. So your comment @9:40 for the IDE: you already have one, kinda, because the XT-IDE was slightly different. How much, I don't know. @15:15 about the keyboard: the Tandy Enhanced Keyboard is auto-sensing. It works both on XT-class computers as on AT-class. (I tested that) But I never had one with a PS/2 connecctor, only DIN. Joystick and mouse were actually Coco-compatible. (Coco = Tandy Color Computer 1/2/3)
I had a 1000HX until a couple of years ago. It was misplaced in a move (lost a lot of my old computers in that debacle). I loved DeskMate, which was why it was still in use long after it was useful for anything else. I also had a 2000HD, which was most notable for being one of the few computers that used an 80186 cpu. Lost it in the same move along with my TRS-80 models 1, 3, and 4, Commodores, Sinclairs, TI99, Apples, and Apple Clones. Man I hate that move.
I remember having some adapter cables that would allow you to use a standard XT, AT, or PS/2 keyboard on a Tandy.
I think those adapters just change the connector, though; you still need to have a keyboard that's internally matched to the controller. My one silver label Model M is a switchable AT/XT keyboard with a PS/2 connector; if you had an XT Model M with a 5 pin DIN connector you could probably use it with a later-model 1000 using one of those adapters, or you could use my silver-label IBM with an earlier 1000 using another adapter. But I don't think you can really get a keyboard without XT compatibility to work with a Tandy 1000, since they are XT-class machines. At least, I've never seen an adapter like that; I think it'd have to be more than just a cable.
The adapters were wired internally to match the Tandy connector to the IBM standard. They were about 6 inches in length. It has been along time since I used any of them so might not remember all of the details, but I do remember using my standard IBM AT compatible keyboard with a DIN connector from my Compaq DeskPro 286 and 386 computers and using one of those adapters to run a Tandy 1000.
Almost like "Christine" rev up! This system was "Bad To The Bone" as the song in the beginning of the movie. If you can get one now, how much?
I find the Tandy 1000 as a perfect mix of the microcomputers of the 80s and 90s, and the pc compatibles of the 80s. The ex and he I feel really push that , with a similar form factor to the apple 2 and Vic 20.
trabsferring files I used on serial DOS program called Laplink just needed a serial cable and LL3 you can find it on the download sites, I used to it to transfer Windows 3.11 across laplink to my IBM AT at the time took hours lol
I used to have one of these back in 1991 with good ol' Deskmate OS. I believe it was either the TL/2 or 3... My aunt paid almost $1,200 for this computer! I remember when I tried several times to install windows 3.1 LOL This was before I realized the difference between the 286 16bit and the beginning "32bit"(x86) 386 processor, not to mention a minimum requirement of 2mb of RAM. I also remember removing the PC cover on this machine and trying to stick a Super Nintendo cartridge in the 8-bit XT ISA expansion slots (which ruined the SNES game) thinking that somehow the motherboard slot would load the cartridge. The things I did in my adolescent years 😂
Our first computer was a Tandy TX-1000. No hard drive, but If I didn't draw the hell out of Deskmate. I used it until the mid-90s before we got a 386 knockoff with windows 3.1.
I played leisure suit Larry on this dammit. How can you have a nostalgia video without playing Larry’s leisure suit Larry
8:35 oh god I thought I couldn't hear a CRT anymore but then that obnoxious beep
I could go online to update things. Fun. I didn't learn to program if BASIC was available through DOS. But not now.
My friend had this one and we used to play family feud all the time. My first computer was a Tandy, it was a little more advanced than this. Came with QBasic. Not sure of exact model number but it was pretty cool.
I had what I remember as the Tandy 1000 RLX....is my memory going or am I correct?
Long time ago!
It still runs true today that if you want to go out & get the latest tech it is crazy expensive.
I had a "clicky" keyboard, mouse, printer, etc. Great deal!
I think if you have an old mechanical keyboard for a DOS PC that supports Tandy 1000 graphics and sound you just need to get the accompanying Tandy 1000 joystick supplied to get the feel of playing those games as they would have been I guess.
I had a 1000 TL. Added a hard drive and math co-processor.
Unfortunately the RL doesn't allow me to add a co-processor or I'd definitely look for one... though there's something kind of funny about running the most old-school x86 processor there is with no help, in 2018. I'm actually surprised it runs as well as it does, though I wish it would run stuff with Tandy Graphics turned on a little smoother.
I always wanted to try a 486 upgrade chip, maybe one of these days. I wish I kept the original monitor and keyboard, but I still have a 1000TL/2 with mouse and joystick.
I eventually bought a Panasonic system that was manufactured by Tandy. It had a single 3.5 inch drive and looked just like the Tandy 1000tx.
Another fail from Tandy Corp - lol. They Also tried selling EX's at Walmart.
My first computer was a Tandy 1000TX. It had an 80286 (not Intel, some clone) running at a whopping 8 MHz and 640k of RAM. The graphics and sound were quite good for its time. I played the heck out of OutRun, Marble Madness, and Thexder. It would play Wolfenstein 3D but not well.
TX was my favourite model of all the 1000s. I liked them better than the faster TL, TL/2, TL/3s. I had a 1000SX with 286 Express card, but it was not up to the performance of the TX.
I'm late to this party-- but was the sound/joystick incompatibility issue specific to this model? I had a 1000 SL2 and don't remember ever having a game that wouldn't allow me to use both the joystick and the sound. Since the Tandy was the first computer I ever had, I didn't even know about PC speaker sound for a couple of years after getting into computers :)
What about a DVD burner and burning the operating system and Desk Mate and other software as backups? I liked that I could use it to learn about computers.
LOL.. EGA cost in 1984.. "Think about that the next time you buy a gforce card."
3:22 Nice "Last Man on Earth" reference.
There was game that I remember worked with TGA and sound with joystick. Was Indy 500 game. Play it so much I broke the joystick haha on Tandy 1000 sl2
saw some mention of pkz or arj, just wanted to say I recall using one if those or similar to copy a games folder that was around 10 meg over to a friends 386 using split compression. it worked like a charm! sadly it's been too long to pull the details from memory..
Good vid. I have a Tandy RLX HD. May have to dig it out.
Great software compatibility and printer.
Transfer via null modem cable? I used that many times with the 386 era with interlnk/intersvr. You would probably find a similiar software dos terminal to transfer?