Thank you for the trip down memory lane. I was the mechanical engineering manager/ head mechanical design engineer for Tandy Computers in Fort Worth, TX for 10 years (1983-93), from the Tandy 2000 until the division was sold to AST. The Tandy 1000 was my first design there and I am especially proud of the plastic case design that was one piece and attached by 2 FRONT screws. The injection mold for it was a work of art. The sprue was in the middle of the top. As time went on, EMI/RFI became more of an issue and we had to switch to metal cases but to eliminate paint cost and the risk of damage we pioneered the use of vinyl-metal laminates for computer cases. All our sheet metal parts were made in custom progressive dies, raw material off a roll in one end and finished parts out the other end. No secondary operations. This was the most satisfying job I had in my working life, high tech, cutting edge, fast paced, popular consumer products that I could see in any Radio Shack in the country. Not only that but I worked with some of the best people I've ever worked with. Hard to imagine that was 36 years ago near the beginning of my career.
Where did you go after RS sold the division? Did you stay with them, or go with the division and become an employee of AST? One of the things that brought Radio Shack to its end was the lack of internal innovation - the company stopped developing products, and started buying all the same brands anyone could find elsewhere. Imagine if RS had stuck to designing things like the Tandy 1000 series in house, except in other facets of modern technology - things like upgradable routers, or all in the ear voice controlled cell phones.
@@sireuchre AST primarily bought the manufacturing assets of Tandy Computers so those of us who were on the design side became redundant. I actually made a successful transition into the telecommunications industry (Alcatel) which was hot in the Richardson, TX area. Tandy Corporation (Radio Shack) began as Tandy Leather. Mr.Tandy was very much into vertical integration. If he couldn't buy what he wanted at the price he wanted to pay he bought a company or built it himself. Thus most of those cables at the Radio Shack stores (in the early days) were made at Tandy Wire and Cable in Fort Worth. Fortunately for my career, the Asian rim had not yet developed the capability to flood the market with computer clones.
@@scottlong5093 I'm fairly aware of Tandy/Radio Shack's history. Interesting thing is post self production, they basically worked out deals with the Asian manufacturers to make cheaper, or rebranded versions of other brands or products. So many of the RS branded wireless phones were the same as Uniden or other brands, you could hold them up side by side in the store and they had the same moldings.
My first job was in the back room of a Radio Shack. I used to build up the 1000 systems when they were purchased. You had to add the hard drive and/or modem, format the hard drive, and install all the software. it was an interesting job.
These computers put me through college. At 6.25% commission, selling 5 or 6 of these a week with associated peripherals (that $1000 computer became $1600 pretty easily), and suddenly college was an option.
Does commision actually exist still ?. I have had one job (my current) that companies offer promotions (free stuff) for recording sales. What jobs offer things for sales ?.
@@theaceofspades485 Radio Shack worked on commission. If memory serves, it was 6.25% until Thanksgiving week, then 5% during the holiday season. It sucked in two ways - lower commission during peak season, and when people returned their gifts, you had made 5%, but the return was charged back at 6.25%.
@@MAD_SKULL_GAMING It's a computer animation demonstration, made by a guy who later renamed himself "Vektroid" that's made to show the cutting edge in commercial animation ua-cam.com/video/_4gl-FX2RvI/v-deo.html It's kind of a stretch to say it was a Tandy exactly, it was just supposed to be "a PC". The Tandy had lots of neat straight lines, and was recognizable as a PC, so it probably was the model. Which maybe shows just how bland the Tandy looked! So yeah, it's confusing, when Vektroid called himself "Mac Plus" he wan't thinking very clearly, and Apple didn't have a reputation for lawsuits.
I really love this video. It's eerie how the ads and catalog pages and shots of the Tandy 1000 you show take me back to that time, when my life was a lot more fun and exciting and filled with promise than it is today. I left a comment a year ago how the Tandy 1000 was the dream machine I never had, and each time I watch this I get the same bittersweet feeling about the one that got away. Boy, do I miss the days when computers were fun.
Computers are still fun! Like the other guy said download Linux if you want to play, or if not your style take up a cool hobby like Blender on whatever OS. The magic of early games is gone but that is more of a growing up thing. If you like games try Satisfactory or Factorio for example of some modern good games.
I actually paid my college tuition in 1985-89 with this computer typing papers for other students. It's amazing to consider this, but you could pay for your own college with a part-time job, summer job, or doing gigs as I did, typing papers back then.
I so agree , as todays laptops are so expensive not sure why for what they offer as quality is beyond me . We cannot even replace the batteries in new laptops when there's a failure . It goes in the bin and they give you a new one when you're in warranty . If not more in warranty well they say you simply need to buy a new laptop . As those so called über desktops and laptops for gamers "i.e. predator as name or brand" are ridiculously expensive and overpriced imho . I still have a desktop with windows xp pro on it , is more than 12 years old still working .
Hey, really glad I found your channel. My husband passed away a few months ago, and he was a huge computer geek. I've been going through his stuff lately, and I am finding a whole bunch of computer magazines from the 80s and 90s. I also have a lot of books on Basic, Pascal, and Assembler. I came upon your channel because I had found a 6" floppy drive among the stuff and wanted to show the boys how disk drives worked. I have been trying figure out what to do with all this stuff. The kids have protested my getting rid of his Apple II.
The MC10 was my first computer. My uncle bought it for me and got me hooked. My uncle later went to work for Tandy and he sourced components to build me a Tandy 1000 when I was 8. We couldn't get a case so he made me one out of melamine. I loved that computer! Thanks for doing this documentary.
When the 1000 was released, I was working at a Radio Shack Computer Center in Atlanta. I remember we would get truckloads of T1000's and they would sell out in a couple of days, and they would be sold out until the following week, or we could transfer one or two in from another store. There was hardly any selling involved; they flew out the door like popcorn. I worked in more of a technical capacity, doing hardware upgrades (installing modems, etc) and writing demonstration software for the floor models, etc. The first Hard Drive we sold for the 1000 was 5MB. (Five megabytes. Not a typo!). Is that wild? But we loved it! Those were the days. Great video!
I still use a Tandy 1000 in our workshop for programming 2-way radios (of that era). It has the 5Mb HDD drive that was a £3999 option. Together with the 512MB memory upgrade & the serial upgrade board, it cost arounf £6000. However, It still works after 35 years. I've done two repairs...a RAM IC failed which I quickly located & soldered in another. The monitor also went down quite extensively; I spent some hours with the service manual changing electrolytic capacitors & various transistors that had failed in the avalanche the capacitors had caused. I fitted higher temperature ones & 15 years after that repair it's still OK. Richard (UK)
@@ukfmcbradioservicingTango21 512 KB, right? Half a GB of RAM was not very usual in those days... It's just to state clear the newbies the miracles we were able to do with so little memory. :D
Our families first computer was a Tandy 1000. We used it all the way to 1995, when our neighbor built us a new “multi-media” PC with Windows 95. All of my elementary school and middle school papers were written on it and printed on the Tandy dot matrix printer. My brother still has that Tandy and still uses it for old DOS games.
@Jim Man The Color Computer 3 was not an MS DOS computer. So either the first sentence in your post is irrelevant to the rest of the post, or the rest of your post is irrelevant to your first sentence.
You have the best ham radio videos. Ben Eaters building a computer out of discreet logic chips taught me how computers work if you want a step beyond 8bit guy although too technical for some.
Fantastic video as always! It's good to see someone bring up that they actually used a FOUR voice chip... granted, that noise channel is pretty hard to use unless you steal the third channels frequencies, but it's still important to note. A lot of Master System games actually use all four voices at the same time, though I have not seen many Tandy games do that (not even Planet X3, because I wasn't able to find a way to make convincing drums without sacrificing that third channel).
Recently began collecting vintage computers and the Tandy 1000 SX was my first big find! Got it at a recycling plant near my college. Coolest part was that there were still sleeved 5.25" floppy disks labeled for CS courses matching the CRN's of my school! Crazy to think I might own a computer that helped a student like me through his/her degree over 30 years down the line...
ty!!! i was stuck on mainframes at university during this era. i learned assembly, pascal, cobol and yes even basic. playing and then compiling my own MUDs was my thing.
My next door neighbor asked if he could borrow Space Quest 2 from me. I had a PC-DOS noname 386 clone with VGA and pc speaker sound. I was so salty when I heard the glorious 3-Voice Audio on his 16 color Tandy.
This was my 2nd computer. I had a Texas Instruments TI994a with a speech synthesizer. My Tandy had a cassette drive. I would program basic and even went online waaayy back then on channel one and another site I can't quite remember. But it was legit the first social media.m
What a beautiful tribute to this exquisite machine. Thank you so much for the great work and effort put here. I can feel real love to these babies coming from you man. You sir... are a hero. Cheers
My first computer ever and the beginning of my fascination with computers was the Tandy 1000EX. Loved that computer and I, or should say my parents, bought me all the add ons that were available for it. Playing Space Quest on it was a blast, obviously nothing compared to today's games but back then it was great. Buying and using my first modem and finding out about pirate BBS boards was great but downloading something while someone picks up the phone wasn't a fun time. Loved this video as it brought back so many memories..
Haven't seen any of them during the 80s or 90s in Germany. I did spend my formative years playing on a C16, C64 and Amiga, followed by a friend's MSX. Well done and enlightening, as always. A Happy New Year from a fellow retro tech fan. Even though I don't see it as "retro". After all, I was around when it was up-to-date.
Great video documentary on the Tandy 1000. I spent many hours as a 10 year old playing games and hacking DOS programs on it. Got me into computer programming. Great memories.
WOW, this is a HUGE memory trip. I'm 61 and the first computer I bought was a Tandy 1000, I was hooked. I bought it home and I was up all night until I started to hear the birds in the morning. My first hard drive was 20mb, it was about the size of the external floppy drives. From then to now is such a huge jump in tech. LOVED that machine.... Actually, the movie "Electric Dreams" got me well and truly hooked.
I bought my Tandy 1000 at a divorce sale. She was selling her soon to be ex hubby computer and sold everything he had to me for 500 bucks. Being a father of 3 kids and wanted my kids to have access to computers at home I was happy to buy it all. My friends all scoffed at my purchase and yet they all wanted to meet at my house for gaming night most weeks and there was a line waiting to play space quest or police quest on the Tandy. I have to say the Tandy 1000 was a computer that was kept and used longer then most computer systems I ever had. Even when it was getting old and I moved on to a vga machine my kids were still playing and learning on the Tandy. They learned how to write batch files and load a RAM disk with the huge memory upgrade that was in this machine. Made we made a boot disk that created the RAM disk and we had a menu of batch files written down to fire off games and load them or ask to put in a disk and hit enter. My kids really loved dos and were mad when I moved to windows. They thought is was way to slow once the boot disk we made loaded. To this day my kids talk about the fun they had with that machine. Thanks for the video brings back lots of memories of the hours of fun on this machine.
You were a good dad David, and that was an excellent purchase. My dad did the same (except he paid much more, and we were kind of poor, so it was astonishing that he did), and I have the same memory of making batch file menus and playing Sierra games. It introduced me to the world of computing, BBS's, (which I ended up running one), and PC gaming. and I assume it introduced your kids to the world of computer literacy as well. One of the best things you could have done at the time.
I remember playing the original Prince of Persia on the Tandy and think the sound and graphics are amazing! Same with games like Skate or Die (that intro song with the riff using the Tandy sound chip was outstanding), Thexder, Pipe Dream, Wing Commander, all the Sierra and Microprose games... too much fun stuff and the graphics and sound were far superior to any other IBM or pc clone out there.
I had one of those. In 1993. It was a hand me down from my FIL after I got out of the Army. I remember it had a 40MB hard disk (a hard card that sat in one of the expansion slots), and ran DOS 3.3, so the HD had to be partitioned into a 32MB and 8MB partition, because DOS3 couldn't see the whole thing at once. I learned DOS on it and that eventually led me to a career in computers.
When I was a kid, I got an EX. We weren't very wealthy, and buying games were at the very bottom of the priority list (we had government cheese in the fridge lol). I had to make my own. I made many BASIC games including a Photoshop-type app that allowed me to make images, store them in arrays in data files on disk, allowing me to get around the 256k memory limit. Made a poker game using this. Yeah, those days.. and these days, computers are really different.
That's awesome! I've written a few paint programs over the years in DOS and Windows that were really just knock offs of DeluxePaint II, because I didn't think Photoshop was great for pixel art, yet I never finished anything.
I wish you'd mentioned GW-BASIC! It was amazing having access to those graphical and sound features through BASIC. I wrote so many little games...I wish I still had them.
Ha... I tried programming games with GW-BASIC... they ended up basically being Choose Your Own Adventure text games because I didn't know how to do anything other than basically display text, get an input, and go to the next text based on the user's choice. I was a moron. ... I still a moron.
Have you ever played it with anything other than the Tandy 3 voice sound card? Moonlight Sonata sounds god awful, excellent example of Tandy's audio capabilities!
Yeah, I'm glad he's been working on Planet X3 but I kinda hope it slows down a bit... I'd like to have the money on hand to get it when it releases! I agree 100% about Doctor Who, though. This may be the end of the series for me if it keeps up the way it has been.
In our QA company, these were one of the most requested products that developers wanted us to test on and the units my staff wanted to use personally (including me). We had the choice of any machines of the day and I used a turbo-charged Tandy 1000 for quite some time. Great little machines.
Although it was pretty quickly passed on the fast moving market of the 80s, the Tandy 1000 was exactly what the PC Jr should have been, in terms of capability, compatibility, and cost.
“I’m so happy you made this video! My father bought us a 1000 SX and I thought it was crap! It’s a great blessing to know he had gotten us one of the best, and I didn’t even know what I had in front of me! 😭😭😭” (-James)
I don't know, the clones you could buy were mo better but you had to know where to look. Radio Shack definitely had the storefront walk-up biz sewn up for awhile there.
I have a model 100 that I found in the trash at my dad’s shop. I fixed it and it has a math chip in it that at the time costed 1000’s of dollars. I now am learning BASIC with it.
The model 100 cost $600-$1200 (depending on RAM) when new, so there’s no way it has a math chip in it that cost thousands. I had a model 100 back when they were new, it was really cool.
My family's first computer was the Tandy-1000 RL. At school we only had the green screen Apple 2E, so I felt like we were really advanced with this bad boy. The only games I had for it were a triple pack that came in a giant tin for some reason. They were Monopoly(which I could never get to run), Risk, and a deluxe version of Clue with extra rooms. Risk got a LOT of play. and, I guess, the awesome hangman included game.
I had the Tandy 1000 EX with a 300 Baud Modem and loved it as a kid. Would love to find another one to play with. I remember playing Kings Quest I, going on BBS's to play BRE, LOTRD, and TradeWars, and downloading warez. Good times!
@@joeltarnabene5026 Ya, I played Usurper too. Tons of great online games. Did you ever play a game called Galactic Empire? Was on the Major BBS's. Cool game.
Really loved this as it, in some ways, is the story of my early computing history as a home user. I owned at various times, an MC10, COCO2, 1000HX, 1000TL/2, 1000SL and I think that might be all of the tandy's. Loved having DOS in ROM and had a hard time explaining it to people at the time who had amiga's, pcjr's or atari's. I also loved the music program as part of deskmate, especially in the later models as they incorporated wave sampling. You could do some pretty sophisticated stuff with sound right off the shelf. I still use the desk I bought for the HX and have used it for every desktop computer. Has a monitor shelf for the win.
As someone who was stuck with CGA for far too long, Tandy graphics would have been great. I remember running the Juno email client in Windows, in CGA's 640x200x2 mode. The program was designed for 640x480 monitors. I discovered a trick to opening the context menu with keyboard shortcuts, and could make it flip between the bottom and top halves of the program, which would allow me to use free email when I couldn't afford to pay for it. This opened up the ability to use services that could request web pages through email, which gave me this peek into the vastness of the internet on the heels of a dying BBS community. As for hardcards, I worked at my high school doing work study during my last year, fixing school machines that near-incompetent tech department couldn't deal with. Eventually the hardcards would stop working, and my computer teacher taught me that the solution was to take them out, sling them around violently, and put them back in. Worked like a charm! Between him and I, I genuinely think we fixed more PCs and removed more viruses than the people who had the job title to do it.
Hey now... I take offense to that remark LOL I'm well-versed in the 'old' tech. My dad has been involved in working with computers since 1980. His first PC was a TI-99/A. Then he bought something else (probably a Tandy 1000) and with a friend bought a 20 mb drive (they thought, "We'll never fill this up!!"). He has also had internet access since 1988, built a WAN from scratch in 1996.
I'm really curious about how computers evolved from incredibly limited graphics and sound to today's 24-bit graphics and PCM sound. The limitations are completely alien to me, as even the oldest computers I know (from circa 2001) have full PCM sound and 24-bit graphics.
People are interpreting it as "this generation bad", but I don't see that bias in the original comment, unless it was edited. I, personally, actually _didn't_ know much about these early computers until now, but that isn't an insult. I knew about floppy disks and command lines, but only recently have I discovered that early computers had these limited colour depths and sound options, and I find the topic fascinating.
I'm right there with ya! I always assumed they were some cheap alternative, but half way thru this video found myself going to eBay and checking if there were any Tandy 1000 HX on there! HAha. :) Luckily, there weren't.
Yeh, I might pick one up myself, I mean, VGA and CGA graphics! I don't mind that they're a little behind in the market now... I mean we never needed (raytracing on an 8GB RTX3080 4,000,000 yeetaflop GPU) more than 64k RAM.
I still have my Tandy 1000HX from my childhood. It was my first computer and got me into the world of computers. Great little machine for the time. Can’t wait to dust it off and play Planet X3.
Make sure you check out the Tandy music in the game when you can! I tried to make it sound better than anything else on the Tandy, hopefully you and all the other people playing the game get a kick out of it.
Used a Tandy TRS-80 in the US Navy back in '84-'85, long before the clampdown came to stop using off-the-shelf, civilian equipment. To call it a force multiplier would be an understatement. The disks were read/write on one side only, and we learned to cut the proper holes in the opposite side of the sleeve, thus allowing for the memory on each disk to be doubled. Cutting edge stuff! That and formatting the RAM to create a "virtual" disk -- hard drives weren't a thing for us back then. Really nice video, thanks for the walk down memory lane.
Great stuff! I had a Tandy 1000 SL and TL after my Color Computer 3, and I thought both were great machines. I would add that another awesome feature NO computer at the time had was a built in Sound Digitizer! You could pop a microphone in the front of these things and digitize sound, and as a kid this provided us with endless entertainment!
Welp, that's it. I've officially watched every video on your channel. What a wonderful adventure it has been. Thanks for all the great info! I look very forward to the next episode!
I got a Tandy 1000 and dot matrix printer for my grammar school graduation in 1990. Used it all throughout high school and then got a rude awakening when I went to college in 1994 and all the machines were running Windows 3.11!
My first computer I owned was a Tandy Coco3 . Then my dad got me a Tandy 1000 HX. Loved that computer. Loved Deskmate. Loved the music program. Funny story. My dad worked at Commodore, so he had access to Amiga Monitors. So when dad got me and my brother a Tandy 1000 HX, he made an expansion card to use the much better Amiga monitors with our Tandy 1000's. Then my dad bought a third machine. We were at radio shack because my Dad was buying the components to make a third expansion card for his HX. The clerk asked my dad what he was buying the components for. And he said "I'm going to connect an Amiga monitor to a Tandy 1000." The sales guy said "OH no, you can't do that, that is not possible!" Then my dad answered, "Gee, I wish you would of told me that sooner, save me the effort of doing it twice already!" He didn't realize he was talking to the guy that designed the VIC-III graphics processor (commonly called "Bill") for the C65!
@Neb6 Yeah, I really would love to read that book. I know my Dad was interviewed for it :). I used my Amiga monitor for a long time. After the Tandy 1000, I used it with my 386. Then I got a computer that had SVGA, so it was used for my tV and my Playstation 1 and eventually 2. Then when PS3 came out, I got myself my first 1080P TV, and I don't remember what happened to the old Amiga monitor.
Indeed! I've been making good use of it too! I've been making copies of Planet X3's 360K disks on my Tandy and using your adapter combined with the XT-IDE card from TexElec.
The 8-Bit Guy brilliant, I'm really pleased I could help out and I'm really looking forward to getting my planet x3 boxed game, it'll look great with my favourite Sierra games on my study shelf.
Interesting - thanks so much for such a detailed perspective and insight into this great computer. At the time, I wasn't even thinking of Tandy computers because of bad memories with the TRS-80 and all my friends having Apple IIe computers or anything else. Plus Macintosh computers were starting to proliferate and I worked at Kinkos and we got like 3 of them + a laser writer printer and I spent A LOT of off work hours just playing around with those computers. What a fun time to be alive.
My first PC compatible was a Tandy 1000 SL/2. It was a hand me down from my mom's aunt who upgraded to a newer machine. Had 640k RAM, 8086 cpu at 8Mhz, DOS 3.3 in ROM and a 20mb hard card. First game I ever bought for it was Leisure Suit Larry 3 at EB games. I was in heaven.
Thank you for the good history! In 1989 I started exploring BBS systems on my Tandy 1000 SL and discovered tons of freeware and shareware games. But none of those games supported Tandy graphics and sound, so I wrote my own shareware game for Tansy 1000. It was called Darwin's Arena and you can see a demo of it on my channel named "Banjos and Robots".
This computer is awesome. My family was still using one for accounting up to the late 2000's. Definitely has the best version of Hangman. (Dunno which model we have. Much bigger keyboard)The music example at about 10:30 I played that piece in first year for my B.musicI think it's the Tandy 1000 RL 1991.
I had an RLX 1000 with a HD 20 gig. It had a bad hard drive. I had a warranty. That got fixed. I loved Desk Mate, DOS 6.22 and Windows. $600.00 plus tax, pick up at Eastfield Mall in Springfield. The technician could not tell me why the machine jumped from Desk Mate to DOS. Which is why I had the Warranty, it paid off three HDs later. 3 1/5" disk. Awesomness!
Just getting to this. Thanks for posting. I was a DeskMate developer at Tandy HQ in 1988 and 1989, so a lot of memories here. Made some lifelong friends there, although I drew the short straw on management.😀
@@Ugotsta More often on PC games of the time, weird cards that you couldn't photocopy with codes, along with code-wheels or pick x word from a page of the manual etc.
@@hellcoreproductions I recall those too, the early Ultima games made it fun by asking pertinent questions about the game world. That all came later after people tired of being unable to make backups. Backups were essential since floppy disks (and also cassettes) were prone to wear and tear.
My mom loves young sheldon and says the show reminds her of growing up in Texas and how I was like Sheldon as a kid just highler emotional intelligence and not quite as savant as him but I still have Autism to a degree like him. I even have a seat in my livingroom that is in best view and only I sit there. I even loved to go to Radio Shack, they were amazed and raved to my mom how smart I was with tech. I loved going there and getting stuff. I used to go to Comp USA too, when I first decided I wanted a MacBook it just came out and I did 6 months of research. I sold all my old Lego on eBay and after 2 months had enough to get the computer that I had my mom take me to Fort Worth to see it every other day for 4 months stright. I loved that computer and sadly not long after I got it that store closed and not long after the whole company closed. I have more to the story. But you inspired me to share. What's funny is I now fix older Macs collect older tech and sell what I refurb on eBay. Your kinda like me which is really cool and why I enjoy your videos so much. P.s. I look forward to The Orville and hopefully Doctor Who improves. But I'll too keep watching as well.
Thank you so much for this video, you are a LEGEND. I finally figured out my first computer as a child was a Tandy 1000 EX. I remember I needed a disc just to boot the computer up and without the disc it would not work. The disc was a 1.44" floppy not the older 5" ones. I also don't exactly remember if the disc drive was on the side or in front. It's been so long ago. I remember you could open the top slot as well but I believe my father told me to not mess inside of it. Great video
Are you saying that everybody has to like the same kind of videos as you? People are free to like or dislike whatever they choose! It wouldn't be a very interesting world if everybody liked the same thing? Plus, there wouldn't be enough to go around! 😂😂😂
My family bought an AST computer i think it was 1995! But all the knowledge you have in all of these old computers, I am soo impressed, and i follow you channel daily!
That was very interesting, especially from here in Europe, where Tandy computers were mostly unknown! I have only a small thing to note, and it's that maybe it could have been better clarified that "MS-DOS compatible" and "PC/IBM compatible" were two very different things, and only in subsequent years they become basically a synonym.
Good ole Tandy 1000. I remember getting one of these to play with when I was a kid. I think it was already a relic when I got it, but it was still fun to play with. Edit: OMG I remember that joystick! Reminded me of the atari.
I really wish Radio Shack still existed. I always need electronic doo dads, and it would be great to be able to go down the street and find what I need in 15 minutes.
Weird how it's called Tandy, that was the name of Radio Shack here in the UK. I walked into a Radio Shack in Florida in the 90s and was stunned how it was just a MASSIVE Tandy. Even the shelves were the same. It was awesome. Did Radio Shack sell resistors and soldering irons etc? That's all my Grandad would buy when he took me to Tandy, it was just a small shop.
@@leytonjay They sold computers, audio, video, security, radios(AM/FM and shortwave, and also transceivers and police scanners), phones, cell phones, electronic components, and all sorts of hobbyist parts and accessories. I really miss being able to go to the local store for parts, batteries, and accessories. They have a very few stores scattered around the country after the bankruptcy, and they still exist online. I ordered some solder together kits, some solder and tip tinner and a few other odds and ends.
It would be nice if radio shack still existed in it's former glory. By the time they closed, the one local to me anyway, they just kinda sold junk, and weren't useful at all for anyone who actually needed electronic components rather than cheap mp3 players and universal adapters
I had access to a Tandy computer back in HS in '83-84'. It had a green screen, no mouse and I had to put in over 500 lines of BASIC to play a simple tank shoot back and forth game. Extra lines of programming added a hill to shoot over. It didn't have a floppy drive to save the program on, it used a tape deck! It did teach me that I hate coding. Sooooooo much easier these days.
Neat to see these again. We used a Tandy 1000SX and a Tandy 1000TL in 1988-1992. I remember the Tandy 1000TL booting from ROM and using the DOS system. Then we used MS-DOS and of course WIn3.1.
Thank you for this video! I remember Tandy as a store in the UK. They shut down in my home town about when you said they did. I have it so little thought until this video
Reminds me of when Italian manufacturer Olivetti made the M24, a PC business clone that ended up more powerful than the real thing (twice as fast, better resolution, ...).
Where I worked we bought four M24s. I got a chance to work with those and ended up as the System adminstrator, hotline, you name it, for network, servers and 100 PCs :-)
I was thinking abut that: the M24 was there in 1984 so isn't it more powerful than the first Tandy 1000? Sure it needed a super rare Display Enhancement Board to display 16 colors, but it had a faster CPU.
8 bit guy makes such a good production, I'm not sure if he works alone, very well spoken and good voice for the job and a lot of attention to details. Definitely good enough to get backed up for televised short documentaries like the Atari history.
It's very interesting that what started off as PC-jr Graphics & Sound bacame Tandy Graphics & Sound since the former was a failure in the home market. By the way, I think that learning about the Tandy 1000 may have got me into making music for the Master System & Game Gear. All 3 use a variant of the Texas Instruments SN76489/96 chip.
That was mentioned in the video, too! I played with a virtual one in FL Studio for a few weeks. You can do interesting stuff by reprogramming the sounds while it plays, but I doubt computer games really scratched the surface of its capabilities. Like with the AdLib, they only used it as a weak and stupid MIDI player.
I remember there were two (well, maybe more -- but at least two) different monitors you could buy from Radio Shack. The cheaper one had a dot-pitch of something like 0.51mm -- literally more than half a millimeter between pixels! It was SO BAD for text applications. So hard to read! The more expensive monitor wasn't *that* much better, but at least you could read the damn text on the screen. A genuine IBM CGA monitor was the best thing to own with a Tandy 1000 -- but it was rare to see that combination in the real world. Who is going to buy the less-expensive Tandy 1000 PC, and then spring for a $1,000 genuine IBM CGA monitor?
It's strange to see things like "$1000" and "genuine" in the same sentence with "CGA." I spent so many years of my childhood trying to save up $500 to buy a EGA or VGA subsystem to replace CGA. (I mean, it took so long that VGA overtook EGA.)
The Tandy CoCo 3 had a proprietary RGB port and a monitor called the CM-8 for it. You could put an adapter on it and use it on the Tandy 1000 and other PC's of the time, as it was pretty much a straight up RGB monitor, but the dot pitch on that things was pretty miserable as well.
The Tandy CM-5 CGA monitor actually had a whopping 0.63 mm dot pitch and no anti-glare coating. They basically took the cheapest possible color TV picture tube and stuck it in a computer monitor case. It was awful. But the CM-11 (as seen in this video) is really quite good, with a 0.42 mm dot pitch and an effective anti-glare coating. You don't want a dot pitch much lower than that with CGA or else you start seeing gaps between the scan lines. Also Tandy 1000s add an extra pixel between each row of text (so the actual resolution is 640x225), which makes it much more readable than standard IBM CGA, because for example a lowercase g won't touch the top of a capital T on the line below it.
That makes more sense. .51 doesn't seem bad for CGA. I would be surprised if my CGA monitor from Xerox was better than .7. .41 wasn't too uncommon for cheap VGA monitors on Packard Bell, etc. machines around 1989-92, and it was quite fine for 640x480 and below. Average to high-end VGA monitors were .28 to .31, with the best (Triniton) being .25 +/- .02.
Very nice job! My first computer was an Atari 400. (Thanks for displaying one here!) Then a couple years later, I got a Tandy 1000A. I was still very young, but played on it constantly. My favorites were the King's Quest and Space Quest series, and Gunship. Learned BASIC on it. Doodled in Micro Illustrator. Many hours writing papers with Varsity Scripsit. Never did try Deskmate, though.
Man I remember using that computer when I was a kid. My dad had one and we used print shop a lot back then. And the kings quest games.. Definitely have a fondness for the Tandy 1000.
Yeah they were cool. Some classes I took I needed certain pens for notes in each class that I almost....almost considered getting a pocket protector until I saw revenge of the nerds.
The prices on these were insane ($4,999 in 1984 is equivalent to around $12,500 in today's dollars). In 1988 I was impressed painting on an RS computer at the mall Radio Shack sporting 640x200 at 16 colors. My C 64 back home was 320x200 in 16 colors and 1 color in 640x200 (with the color "squares" of the text 16 colors able to "color in the 640x200 mode on the C64). In 1989 I dove deep into a totally different full color dream and gaming experience with the Amiga 500 (256 colors in 320x240 and 320x480, with 4096 using hold and modify HAM) with 640x480 at 16 colors out of 256 pallate. But Amiga was 16 bit, later 32. These were amazing times.
Back in 1981 i worked as an apprentice in an Aerospace company Quality department They had a top of the range TRS80 system with all the peripherals, costing that sort of price, for keeping their quality records on.. They even had a designated Computer Operator to look after the computer. I took in my newly purchased ZX81 to show my boss and he was so impressed he took the afternoon off to go and buy one for his kids.
I loved mine, a Tandy 1000SX, I bought it as soon as the 20Mg Hard Drive was available, before long I added a 286 board, and my tech life was off and running. I used it until 1993 when I got my hands on 486 boards in racks. I even ran OS2 on it, and downloaded an early Linux, though I had no luck running it. I upgraded with a second HD 40Mg, and SVGA card, 3.5 FD, I was a nerd for that stuff, and some that never worked at all. Computer Shopper Magazine was read cover to cover. I ran Windows on it and MS-DOS 6. Good times.
Thank you for the trip down memory lane. I was the mechanical engineering manager/ head mechanical design engineer for Tandy Computers in Fort Worth, TX for 10 years (1983-93), from the Tandy 2000 until the division was sold to AST. The Tandy 1000 was my first design there and I am especially proud of the plastic case design that was one piece and attached by 2 FRONT screws. The injection mold for it was a work of art. The sprue was in the middle of the top. As time went on, EMI/RFI became more of an issue and we had to switch to metal cases but to eliminate paint cost and the risk of damage we pioneered the use of vinyl-metal laminates for computer cases. All our sheet metal parts were made in custom progressive dies, raw material off a roll in one end and finished parts out the other end. No secondary operations.
This was the most satisfying job I had in my working life, high tech, cutting edge, fast paced, popular consumer products that I could see in any Radio Shack in the country. Not only that but I worked with some of the best people I've ever worked with. Hard to imagine that was 36 years ago near the beginning of my career.
Kudos to you. :)
Where did you go after RS sold the division? Did you stay with them, or go with the division and become an employee of AST?
One of the things that brought Radio Shack to its end was the lack of internal innovation - the company stopped developing products, and started buying all the same brands anyone could find elsewhere. Imagine if RS had stuck to designing things like the Tandy 1000 series in house, except in other facets of modern technology - things like upgradable routers, or all in the ear voice controlled cell phones.
@@sireuchre AST primarily bought the manufacturing assets of Tandy Computers so those of us who were on the design side became redundant. I actually made a successful transition into the telecommunications industry (Alcatel) which was hot in the Richardson, TX area.
Tandy Corporation (Radio Shack) began as Tandy Leather. Mr.Tandy was very much into vertical integration. If he couldn't buy what he wanted at the price he wanted to pay he bought a company or built it himself. Thus most of those cables at the Radio Shack stores (in the early days) were made at Tandy Wire and Cable in Fort Worth. Fortunately for my career, the Asian rim had not yet developed the capability to flood the market with computer clones.
@@scottlong5093 I'm fairly aware of Tandy/Radio Shack's history. Interesting thing is post self production, they basically worked out deals with the Asian manufacturers to make cheaper, or rebranded versions of other brands or products. So many of the RS branded wireless phones were the same as Uniden or other brands, you could hold them up side by side in the store and they had the same moldings.
Thanks Scott. Let's MAGA everyone.
I'm so lucky my dad bought a Tandy 1000 because it was cheap.... But a better kid's computer than the business alternatives. So fun!
My first job was in the back room of a Radio Shack. I used to build up the 1000 systems when they were purchased. You had to add the hard drive and/or modem, format the hard drive, and install all the software. it was an interesting job.
Tandy was always a mystery to me as a kid. I would see Tandy options when you started a dos game but I had no idea what it was.
Same. But I don't think Tandy computers were ever available to buy in my country.
Man....your comment sure is USELESS
Same here.
Ohayou!
@@InsaneHaloMaster - maybe, but you just had to outdo it, didn't you?
These computers put me through college. At 6.25% commission, selling 5 or 6 of these a week with associated peripherals (that $1000 computer became $1600 pretty easily), and suddenly college was an option.
Fun Fact: this computer was featured in the "Macintosh Plus" Music video.
@@RandoView ?
Does commision actually exist still ?. I have had one job (my current) that companies offer promotions (free stuff) for recording sales. What jobs offer things for sales ?.
@@theaceofspades485 Radio Shack worked on commission. If memory serves, it was 6.25% until Thanksgiving week, then 5% during the holiday season.
It sucked in two ways - lower commission during peak season, and when people returned their gifts, you had made 5%, but the return was charged back at 6.25%.
@@MAD_SKULL_GAMING It's a computer animation demonstration, made by a guy who later renamed himself "Vektroid" that's made to show the cutting edge in commercial animation ua-cam.com/video/_4gl-FX2RvI/v-deo.html It's kind of a stretch to say it was a Tandy exactly, it was just supposed to be "a PC". The Tandy had lots of neat straight lines, and was recognizable as a PC, so it probably was the model. Which maybe shows just how bland the Tandy looked! So yeah, it's confusing, when Vektroid called himself "Mac Plus" he wan't thinking very clearly, and Apple didn't have a reputation for lawsuits.
I really love this video. It's eerie how the ads and catalog pages and shots of the Tandy 1000 you show take me back to that time, when my life was a lot more fun and exciting and filled with promise than it is today. I left a comment a year ago how the Tandy 1000 was the dream machine I never had, and each time I watch this I get the same bittersweet feeling about the one that got away. Boy, do I miss the days when computers were fun.
Linux made computers fun again for me. I'd love to buy a Raspberry Pi sometime too...
Computers are still fun! Like the other guy said download Linux if you want to play, or if not your style take up a cool hobby like Blender on whatever OS. The magic of early games is gone but that is more of a growing up thing. If you like games try Satisfactory or Factorio for example of some modern good games.
I actually paid my college tuition in 1985-89 with this computer typing papers for other students. It's amazing to consider this, but you could pay for your own college with a part-time job, summer job, or doing gigs as I did, typing papers back then.
EMH Naw, everyone today is well aware college has become a vicious debtors scam.
EMH Tell me about it. There are security jobs that only pay $13-14 an hr but require bachelors degrees in criminal justice for absolutely no reason
@EMH And I hope you know why!
I so agree , as todays laptops are so expensive not sure why for what they offer as quality is beyond me .
We cannot even replace the batteries in new laptops when there's a failure . It goes in the bin and they give you a new one when you're in warranty .
If not more in warranty well they say you simply need to buy a new laptop .
As those so called über desktops and laptops for gamers "i.e. predator as name or brand" are ridiculously expensive and overpriced imho .
I still have a desktop with windows xp pro on it , is more than 12 years old still working .
defiraphi my first laptop was an IBM thinkpad, probably circa 2002. Still works.
Hey, really glad I found your channel. My husband passed away a few months ago, and he was a huge computer geek. I've been going through his stuff lately, and I am finding a whole bunch of computer magazines from the 80s and 90s. I also have a lot of books on Basic, Pascal, and Assembler. I came upon your channel because I had found a 6" floppy drive among the stuff and wanted to show the boys how disk drives worked. I have been trying figure out what to do with all this stuff. The kids have protested my getting rid of his Apple II.
The MC10 was my first computer. My uncle bought it for me and got me hooked. My uncle later went to work for Tandy and he sourced components to build me a Tandy 1000 when I was 8. We couldn't get a case so he made me one out of melamine. I loved that computer! Thanks for doing this documentary.
When the 1000 was released, I was working at a Radio Shack Computer Center in Atlanta. I remember we would get truckloads of T1000's and they would sell out in a couple of days, and they would be sold out until the following week, or we could transfer one or two in from another store. There was hardly any selling involved; they flew out the door like popcorn. I worked in more of a technical capacity, doing hardware upgrades (installing modems, etc) and writing demonstration software for the floor models, etc. The first Hard Drive we sold for the 1000 was 5MB. (Five megabytes. Not a typo!). Is that wild? But we loved it! Those were the days. Great video!
Anton Nym This was a very well-written comment. :)
I still use a Tandy 1000 in our workshop for programming 2-way radios (of that era). It has the 5Mb HDD drive that was a £3999 option. Together with the 512MB memory upgrade & the serial upgrade board, it cost arounf £6000. However, It still works after 35 years. I've done two repairs...a RAM IC failed which I quickly located & soldered in another. The monitor also went down quite extensively; I spent some hours with the service manual changing electrolytic capacitors & various transistors that had failed in the avalanche the capacitors had caused. I fitted higher temperature ones & 15 years after that repair it's still OK.
Richard (UK)
@@blackneos940, Thank you for noticing. All good wishes for a blessed 2019!
I can imagine someone saying "Why would you want a 5MB hard drive? You'll never fill it up!"
@@ukfmcbradioservicingTango21
512 KB, right? Half a GB of RAM was not very usual in those days... It's just to state clear the newbies the miracles we were able to do with so little memory. :D
We’ve had tons of great 8 bit guy videos in 2018. Here’s to an even better 2019. Also super excited for planet x3.
Our families first computer was a Tandy 1000. We used it all the way to 1995, when our neighbor built us a new “multi-media” PC with Windows 95.
All of my elementary school and middle school papers were written on it and printed on the Tandy dot matrix printer.
My brother still has that Tandy and still uses it for old DOS games.
I love that all the computers in your collection look brand new. It really helps bring me into the time period! :)
@Jim Man The Color Computer 3 was not an MS DOS computer. So either the first sentence in your post is irrelevant to the rest of the post, or the rest of your post is irrelevant to your first sentence.
@@nowthatsjustducky wrong comment
H July I think 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
Most likely he cleans them all to the point they look (like) brand new.
@@jamesvillalobos4891 thats exactly what he does and i think thats obvious if your iq is above 3 and a half
Yours are among the best computer documentaries out there. Well done.
Fully agreed
i like 8bitguy also. kevin your video on battery bank balance helped me rewire mine, thanks!
They will be after killing Techmoan...
Indeed. 😉👌
You have the best ham radio videos. Ben Eaters building a computer out of discreet logic chips taught me how computers work if you want a step beyond 8bit guy although too technical for some.
I remember looking for a dos game and then getting so excited when I would see "Tandy 16 color" support. SCORE! I wish I kept my tandy 1000.
The 1996 8-Bit Guy AST employee pics alone earn this video a like!
I still have a set of AST MS Windows 3.0 on 5 1/4 floppy disks .
Me too.. although I had a quick flash of PTSD trauma when I saw that aspect phone in the background! ;-)
Fantastic video as always! It's good to see someone bring up that they actually used a FOUR voice chip... granted, that noise channel is pretty hard to use unless you steal the third channels frequencies, but it's still important to note. A lot of Master System games actually use all four voices at the same time, though I have not seen many Tandy games do that (not even Planet X3, because I wasn't able to find a way to make convincing drums without sacrificing that third channel).
Recently began collecting vintage computers and the Tandy 1000 SX was my first big find! Got it at a recycling plant near my college. Coolest part was that there were still sleeved 5.25" floppy disks labeled for CS courses matching the CRN's of my school! Crazy to think I might own a computer that helped a student like me through his/her degree over 30 years down the line...
ty!!! i was stuck on mainframes at university during this era. i learned assembly, pascal, cobol and yes even basic.
playing and then compiling my own MUDs was my thing.
Nice! Never even seen a Tandy machine. My only experience is with the Tandy sound option in DOSBox to get the richer 3 voices in Space Quest :D
Hey Phil, nice to see you here!
haa my best friends had one we used to play old sierra games like origional lisuresuit larry n such lol fun times
@Scott Page USMC All the Space Quests may still be on sale from GOG elsewhere like it is in the UK. ;-)
My next door neighbor asked if he could borrow Space Quest 2 from me. I had a PC-DOS noname 386 clone with VGA and pc speaker sound. I was so salty when I heard the glorious 3-Voice Audio on his 16 color Tandy.
Yet to play with Tandy sound on Dosbox mostly SB and midi.
This was my 2nd computer. I had a Texas Instruments TI994a with a speech synthesizer. My Tandy had a cassette drive. I would program basic and even went online waaayy back then on channel one and another site I can't quite remember. But it was legit the first social media.m
What a beautiful tribute to this exquisite machine. Thank you so much for the great work and effort put here. I can feel real love to these babies coming from you man. You sir... are a hero. Cheers
Considering it came with Planet X3, no wonder it was the best! :)
😆
Nice!
Yea!
My first computer ever and the beginning of my fascination with computers was the Tandy 1000EX. Loved that computer and I, or should say my parents, bought me all the add ons that were available for it. Playing Space Quest on it was a blast, obviously nothing compared to today's games but back then it was great. Buying and using my first modem and finding out about pirate BBS boards was great but downloading something while someone picks up the phone wasn't a fun time. Loved this video as it brought back so many memories..
Haven't seen any of them during the 80s or 90s in Germany. I did spend my formative years playing on a C16, C64 and Amiga, followed by a friend's MSX.
Well done and enlightening, as always. A Happy New Year from a fellow retro tech fan. Even though I don't see it as "retro". After all, I was around when it was up-to-date.
Great video documentary on the Tandy 1000. I spent many hours as a 10 year old playing games and hacking DOS programs on it. Got me into computer programming. Great memories.
WOW, this is a HUGE memory trip. I'm 61 and the first computer I bought was a Tandy 1000, I was hooked. I bought it home and I was up all night until I started to hear the birds in the morning. My first hard drive was 20mb, it was about the size of the external floppy drives. From then to now is such a huge jump in tech. LOVED that machine.... Actually, the movie "Electric Dreams" got me well and truly hooked.
I bought my Tandy 1000 at a divorce sale. She was selling her soon to be ex hubby computer and sold everything he had to me for 500 bucks. Being a father of 3 kids and wanted my kids to have access to computers at home I was happy to buy it all. My friends all scoffed at my purchase and yet they all wanted to meet at my house for gaming night most weeks and there was a line waiting to play space quest or police quest on the Tandy. I have to say the Tandy 1000 was a computer that was kept and used longer then most computer systems I ever had. Even when it was getting old and I moved on to a vga machine my kids were still playing and learning on the Tandy. They learned how to write batch files and load a RAM disk with the huge memory upgrade that was in this machine. Made we made a boot disk that created the RAM disk and we had a menu of batch files written down to fire off games and load them or ask to put in a disk and hit enter. My kids really loved dos and were mad when I moved to windows. They thought is was way to slow once the boot disk we made loaded. To this day my kids talk about the fun they had with that machine. Thanks for the video brings back lots of memories of the hours of fun on this machine.
You were a good dad David, and that was an excellent purchase. My dad did the same (except he paid much more, and we were kind of poor, so it was astonishing that he did), and I have the same memory of making batch file menus and playing Sierra games. It introduced me to the world of computing, BBS's, (which I ended up running one), and PC gaming. and I assume it introduced your kids to the world of computer literacy as well. One of the best things you could have done at the time.
I remember playing the original Prince of Persia on the Tandy and think the sound and graphics are amazing! Same with games like Skate or Die (that intro song with the riff using the Tandy sound chip was outstanding), Thexder, Pipe Dream, Wing Commander, all the Sierra and Microprose games... too much fun stuff and the graphics and sound were far superior to any other IBM or pc clone out there.
Yikes. Why did you even marry if you were going to divorce?
Literally discovered this channel a few days ago and it's quickly becoming 1 of my favorite channels on UA-cam
Scope lgr too
You are not alone!
I had one of those. In 1993. It was a hand me down from my FIL after I got out of the Army.
I remember it had a 40MB hard disk (a hard card that sat in one of the expansion slots), and ran DOS 3.3, so the HD had to be partitioned into a 32MB and 8MB partition, because DOS3 couldn't see the whole thing at once. I learned DOS on it and that eventually led me to a career in computers.
When I was a kid, I got an EX. We weren't very wealthy, and buying games were at the very bottom of the priority list (we had government cheese in the fridge lol). I had to make my own. I made many BASIC games including a Photoshop-type app that allowed me to make images, store them in arrays in data files on disk, allowing me to get around the 256k memory limit. Made a poker game using this. Yeah, those days.. and these days, computers are really different.
That's awesome! I've written a few paint programs over the years in DOS and Windows that were really just knock offs of DeluxePaint II, because I didn't think Photoshop was great for pixel art, yet I never finished anything.
XLNT adventure ;-)
I wish you'd mentioned GW-BASIC! It was amazing having access to those graphical and sound features through BASIC. I wrote so many little games...I wish I still had them.
GW-BASIC was cool. I missed those features in QBASIC (which was otherwise superior, and even works on later Tandy 1000s).
Ha... I tried programming games with GW-BASIC... they ended up basically being Choose Your Own Adventure text games because I didn't know how to do anything other than basically display text, get an input, and go to the next text based on the user's choice.
I was a moron.
... I still a moron.
I hope The 8-Bit Guy is still alive and living. The history about the Tandy computer is great.
I spent SO many hours playing Thexder and all things Sierra on my 1000HX as a teenager.
Man, I miss that computer.
Thexder was amazing.
@@Bxtskul1l Those of us who experienced Thexder on the Apple IIGS feel genuine pity for you guys. :)
Have you ever played it with anything other than the Tandy 3 voice sound card? Moonlight Sonata sounds god awful, excellent example of Tandy's audio capabilities!
I feel ya Brother!!
Sierra only published Thexder, they didn’t make it.
Am I the only one who paused to read the text at 10:05, a hidden message from the inner David within 8-bit guy?
I just read it and agree with him 100%.
Kevin Bhasi, I did pause to read after you posted this!! Good hidden message!
Yeah, I'm glad he's been working on Planet X3 but I kinda hope it slows down a bit... I'd like to have the money on hand to get it when it releases!
I agree 100% about Doctor Who, though. This may be the end of the series for me if it keeps up the way it has been.
Glad I'm not the only one who watched The Oroville
No you not
Perfect episode. Great return to those times. I like the way you put everything (for exampe prints, videos, advertisments from the era). So good.
I love your videos. Even my wife who is not into retro computing enjoys watching them with me. You have a new patron on Patreon ;)
In our QA company, these were one of the most requested products that developers wanted us to test on and the units my staff wanted to use personally (including me). We had the choice of any machines of the day and I used a turbo-charged Tandy 1000 for quite some time. Great little machines.
Awesome history lesson. It was interesting to see the link between Tandy and AST. My first home computer was an AST 486 DX2 with Windows 3.1.
Wow. I bet that was super sweet at the time.
Although it was pretty quickly passed on the fast moving market of the 80s, the Tandy 1000 was exactly what the PC Jr should have been, in terms of capability, compatibility, and cost.
“I’m so happy you made this video! My father bought us a 1000 SX and I thought it was crap! It’s a great blessing to know he had gotten us one of the best, and I didn’t even know what I had in front of me! 😭😭😭” (-James)
@Jim Man Yeah. You already made your point.
And the OP said, "One of the best", not "THE best".
I don't know, the clones you could buy were mo better but you had to know where to look. Radio Shack definitely had the storefront walk-up biz sewn up for awhile there.
How old were you exact time
@@ThePalmermark “4th Grade Maybe 🤔, whatever that age range is.” (-James)
I have a model 100 that I found in the trash at my dad’s shop. I fixed it and it has a math chip in it that at the time costed 1000’s of dollars. I now am learning BASIC with it.
The model 100 cost $600-$1200 (depending on RAM) when new, so there’s no way it has a math chip in it that cost thousands.
I had a model 100 back when they were new, it was really cool.
18:52
That slicked back hair tho
My family's first computer was the Tandy-1000 RL. At school we only had the green screen Apple 2E, so I felt like we were really advanced with this bad boy. The only games I had for it were a triple pack that came in a giant tin for some reason. They were Monopoly(which I could never get to run), Risk, and a deluxe version of Clue with extra rooms. Risk got a LOT of play. and, I guess, the awesome hangman included game.
I had the Tandy 1000 EX with a 300 Baud Modem and loved it as a kid. Would love to find another one to play with. I remember playing Kings Quest I, going on BBS's to play BRE, LOTRD, and TradeWars, and downloading warez. Good times!
Retro Crunch
Yea, bbs door games was the best. Really liked Usurper in addition to the ones you mentioned. Was a gateway into MUDs for me.
@@joeltarnabene5026 Ya, I played Usurper too. Tons of great online games. Did you ever play a game called Galactic Empire? Was on the Major BBS's. Cool game.
Retro Crunch
Yea, GE!
And the fantasy empire game Falcon’s eye, but I think that came later. About the time when LOTRD came.
Retro Crunch
By the way, there are telnet bbs’s still running these games of you ever want a nostalgia fix without having to get a modem.
@@joeltarnabene5026 I've played them. I even use to dominate league 777 and 444 for years in BRE. Hotsville. But that's been a while. :-D
This channel is oddly calming...
If you can get past the clogged sinus issue.
No. It's calmingly odd.
@@zelphx I guess if the 8 bit guy fixes his sinus, the channel will not be the same.
Not for me. He talks way too fast. Still the videos are too long and boring.
Mikey McMikeFace if its boring then dont watch it??
Really loved this as it, in some ways, is the story of my early computing history as a home user. I owned at various times, an MC10, COCO2, 1000HX, 1000TL/2, 1000SL and I think that might be all of the tandy's. Loved having DOS in ROM and had a hard time explaining it to people at the time who had amiga's, pcjr's or atari's. I also loved the music program as part of deskmate, especially in the later models as they incorporated wave sampling. You could do some pretty sophisticated stuff with sound right off the shelf. I still use the desk I bought for the HX and have used it for every desktop computer. Has a monitor shelf for the win.
As someone who was stuck with CGA for far too long, Tandy graphics would have been great. I remember running the Juno email client in Windows, in CGA's 640x200x2 mode. The program was designed for 640x480 monitors. I discovered a trick to opening the context menu with keyboard shortcuts, and could make it flip between the bottom and top halves of the program, which would allow me to use free email when I couldn't afford to pay for it. This opened up the ability to use services that could request web pages through email, which gave me this peek into the vastness of the internet on the heels of a dying BBS community.
As for hardcards, I worked at my high school doing work study during my last year, fixing school machines that near-incompetent tech department couldn't deal with. Eventually the hardcards would stop working, and my computer teacher taught me that the solution was to take them out, sling them around violently, and put them back in. Worked like a charm! Between him and I, I genuinely think we fixed more PCs and removed more viruses than the people who had the job title to do it.
ahhh....bbs's and long distance phone calls.....lol
Most people in today's generation have no knowledge of all these early players. Thanks for bringing back some history!!!
Hey now... I take offense to that remark LOL I'm well-versed in the 'old' tech. My dad has been involved in working with computers since 1980. His first PC was a TI-99/A. Then he bought something else (probably a Tandy 1000) and with a friend bought a 20 mb drive (they thought, "We'll never fill this up!!"). He has also had internet access since 1988, built a WAN from scratch in 1996.
I'm really curious about how computers evolved from incredibly limited graphics and sound to today's 24-bit graphics and PCM sound. The limitations are completely alien to me, as even the oldest computers I know (from circa 2001) have full PCM sound and 24-bit graphics.
People are interpreting it as "this generation bad", but I don't see that bias in the original comment, unless it was edited. I, personally, actually _didn't_ know much about these early computers until now, but that isn't an insult. I knew about floppy disks and command lines, but only recently have I discovered that early computers had these limited colour depths and sound options, and I find the topic fascinating.
I’ve always looked down on Tandy as a brand, but now I kind of want one! The DOS ROM and form factor of the hx and original 1000 👍
I'm right there with ya! I always assumed they were some cheap alternative, but half way thru this video found myself going to eBay and checking if there were any Tandy 1000 HX on there! HAha. :) Luckily, there weren't.
I’ve got one that’s never been used before. Perfectly clean on the inside. Nothing ever installed
It's the computer which started my career.
I've got an 1000HX sitting in a box in my basement lol. Was my first PC.
Yeh, I might pick one up myself, I mean, VGA and CGA graphics! I don't mind that they're a little behind in the market now... I mean we never needed (raytracing on an 8GB RTX3080 4,000,000 yeetaflop GPU) more than 64k RAM.
Every time you see a reference to Planet X3, take a shot.
The Obsolete Geek Sure, but I think taking a screenshot might be a bit easier.
When will you make a new video?
Made it to 8:30, cirrhosis has set in.
@@EricHallahan Ha. That's what I thought he meant before thinking again about it.
Drinking game.
Had one as a kid, it was awesome being able to hook this up to my buddy's 50" big screen TV to play California Games hours on end!
This was the PC of my childhood.. Paving the way for a future in computers...THANK YOU TANDY 1000
I still have my Tandy 1000HX from my childhood. It was my first computer and got me into the world of computers. Great little machine for the time. Can’t wait to dust it off and play Planet X3.
Make sure you check out the Tandy music in the game when you can! I tried to make it sound better than anything else on the Tandy, hopefully you and all the other people playing the game get a kick out of it.
My first pc also. I dont know what happened to it...
All Sierra games.
"Wow, a sales price of under 999" the martian says, of the $998.95 computer -_-
But I think that was satyrical
Hey, the price is just out of this world. ;)
They are technically correct, the best type of correct
It is an estimate.
Those Martians may have been inspired from the popular _Mork & Mindy_ TV series that had ended its network run a few years prior.
Used a Tandy TRS-80 in the US Navy back in '84-'85, long before the clampdown came to stop using off-the-shelf, civilian equipment. To call it a force multiplier would be an understatement. The disks were read/write on one side only, and we learned to cut the proper holes in the opposite side of the sleeve, thus allowing for the memory on each disk to be doubled. Cutting edge stuff! That and formatting the RAM to create a "virtual" disk -- hard drives weren't a thing for us back then. Really nice video, thanks for the walk down memory lane.
Great stuff! I had a Tandy 1000 SL and TL after my Color Computer 3, and I thought both were great machines. I would add that another awesome feature NO computer at the time had was a built in Sound Digitizer! You could pop a microphone in the front of these things and digitize sound, and as a kid this provided us with endless entertainment!
Amigos Retro Gaming I did too! We had a TL and I did digital sound editing in 1990! Way ahead of its time.
Welp, that's it. I've officially watched every video on your channel. What a wonderful adventure it has been. Thanks for all the great info! I look very forward to the next episode!
I got a Tandy 1000 and dot matrix printer for my grammar school graduation in 1990. Used it all throughout high school and then got a rude awakening when I went to college in 1994 and all the machines were running Windows 3.11!
My first computer I owned was a Tandy Coco3 . Then my dad got me a Tandy 1000 HX. Loved that computer. Loved Deskmate. Loved the music program. Funny story. My dad worked at Commodore, so he had access to Amiga Monitors. So when dad got me and my brother a Tandy 1000 HX, he made an expansion card to use the much better Amiga monitors with our Tandy 1000's. Then my dad bought a third machine. We were at radio shack because my Dad was buying the components to make a third expansion card for his HX. The clerk asked my dad what he was buying the components for. And he said "I'm going to connect an Amiga monitor to a Tandy 1000." The sales guy said "OH no, you can't do that, that is not possible!" Then my dad answered, "Gee, I wish you would of told me that sooner, save me the effort of doing it twice already!" He didn't realize he was talking to the guy that designed the VIC-III graphics processor (commonly called "Bill") for the C65!
@Neb6 Yeah, I really would love to read that book. I know my Dad was interviewed for it :). I used my Amiga monitor for a long time. After the Tandy 1000, I used it with my 386. Then I got a computer that had SVGA, so it was used for my tV and my Playstation 1 and eventually 2. Then when PS3 came out, I got myself my first 1080P TV, and I don't remember what happened to the old Amiga monitor.
LOL. Yeah, and Amiga & Atari had 3.5" drives, whereas EX had a five inch.
It's fantastic for me to see my PLUS-ISA/R adapters for the EX / HX appearing in your documentary David - I just love your collection of 1000's too!
Indeed! I've been making good use of it too! I've been making copies of Planet X3's 360K disks on my Tandy and using your adapter combined with the XT-IDE card from TexElec.
The 8-Bit Guy brilliant, I'm really pleased I could help out and I'm really looking forward to getting my planet x3 boxed game, it'll look great with my favourite Sierra games on my study shelf.
That was such a good watch!
Thank you for doing these.
They're a real internet treasure.
Interesting - thanks so much for such a detailed perspective and insight into this great computer.
At the time, I wasn't even thinking of Tandy computers because of bad memories with the TRS-80 and all my friends having Apple IIe computers or anything else. Plus Macintosh computers were starting to proliferate and I worked at Kinkos and we got like 3 of them + a laser writer printer and I spent A LOT of off work hours just playing around with those computers. What a fun time to be alive.
My first PC compatible was a Tandy 1000 SL/2. It was a hand me down from my mom's aunt who upgraded to a newer machine. Had 640k RAM, 8086 cpu at 8Mhz, DOS 3.3 in ROM and a 20mb hard card. First game I ever bought for it was Leisure Suit Larry 3 at EB games. I was in heaven.
Thanks for the Member Berries, the 1000 SL was actually my first box!
Thank you for the good history! In 1989 I started exploring BBS systems on my Tandy 1000 SL and discovered tons of freeware and shareware games. But none of those games supported Tandy graphics and sound, so I wrote my own shareware game for Tansy 1000. It was called Darwin's Arena and you can see a demo of it on my channel named "Banjos and Robots".
This computer is awesome. My family was still using one for accounting up to the late 2000's.
Definitely has the best version of Hangman. (Dunno which model we have. Much bigger keyboard)The music example at about 10:30 I played that piece in first year for my B.musicI think it's the Tandy 1000 RL 1991.
I had an RLX 1000 with a HD 20 gig. It had a bad hard drive. I had a warranty. That got fixed. I loved Desk Mate, DOS 6.22 and Windows. $600.00 plus tax, pick up at Eastfield Mall in Springfield. The technician could not tell me why the machine jumped from Desk Mate to DOS. Which is why I had the Warranty, it paid off three HDs later. 3 1/5" disk. Awesomness!
i liked the mouse, printer(dot matrix). And playing "Jeopardy" and "Wheel of Fortune" as well as "Print Shop" I used it in college.
Just getting to this. Thanks for posting. I was a DeskMate developer at Tandy HQ in 1988 and 1989, so a lot of memories here. Made some lifelong friends there, although I drew the short straw on management.😀
My chillhood nightmare in MS-DOS : The copied game not working.
Back when they used to embed copy protection into the floppy disks.
@@Ugotsta More often on PC games of the time, weird cards that you couldn't photocopy with codes, along with code-wheels or pick x word from a page of the manual etc.
@@hellcoreproductions I recall those too, the early Ultima games made it fun by asking pertinent questions about the game world. That all came later after people tired of being unable to make backups. Backups were essential since floppy disks (and also cassettes) were prone to wear and tear.
@@Ugotsta Yup, though in the UK we had a fair few games where the manual was re-written in British English but the copy protection didn't match!
I spent more time trying to copy and run a game than I ever did playing them. Needless to say I was not very good at either but was enjoyable.
My mom loves young sheldon and says the show reminds her of growing up in Texas and how I was like Sheldon as a kid just highler emotional intelligence and not quite as savant as him but I still have Autism to a degree like him. I even have a seat in my livingroom that is in best view and only I sit there.
I even loved to go to Radio Shack, they were amazed and raved to my mom how smart I was with tech. I loved going there and getting stuff. I used to go to Comp USA too, when I first decided I wanted a MacBook it just came out and I did 6 months of research.
I sold all my old Lego on eBay and after 2 months had enough to get the computer that I had my mom take me to Fort Worth to see it every other day for 4 months stright.
I loved that computer and sadly not long after I got it that store closed and not long after the whole company closed. I have more to the story. But you inspired me to share. What's funny is I now fix older Macs collect older tech and sell what I refurb on eBay. Your kinda like me which is really cool and why I enjoy your videos so much.
P.s. I look forward to The Orville and hopefully Doctor Who improves. But I'll too keep watching as well.
Thank you so much for this video, you are a LEGEND. I finally figured out my first computer as a child was a Tandy 1000 EX. I remember I needed a disc just to boot the computer up and without the disc it would not work. The disc was a 1.44" floppy not the older 5" ones. I also don't exactly remember if the disc drive was on the side or in front. It's been so long ago. I remember you could open the top slot as well but I believe my father told me to not mess inside of it. Great video
I used one of those Tandy monitor stands for my Amiga 500. It worked perfectly!
I don’t understand the ppl who dislike this kind of vids.
a lot of people still prefer regular porn, you know
@@hipwave I bet one of them was that guy from the Business User's group that was butthurt about Tandy joining in on standards.
Are you saying that everybody has to like the same kind of videos as you? People are free to like or dislike whatever they choose! It wouldn't be a very interesting world if everybody liked the same thing? Plus, there wouldn't be enough to go around! 😂😂😂
My family bought an AST computer i think it was 1995!
But all the knowledge you have in all of these old computers, I am soo impressed, and i follow you channel daily!
I wish I still had my 1000 SL. That ad brought back memories.
What's interesting about the time Tandy was dropping off, users either went to NES, Amiga or custom 3/486. I went Amiga and 486. Best of both worlds!
Before owning my beloved Amiga 500, my father bought me a Tandy 1000 computer with a 3.5” disk drive. I loved that machine!
Lol Bill Bixby from the Incredible Hulk i remember that AD i am 45 i guess i am getting OLD lol
BadKarma 714
Those were the days!
Meanwhile William Shatner did the Commodore VIC-20.
And Bill Cosby pushed the TI-99/4A. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Bixby as "Itenerant Day Laborer" on Hulk and as "Upscale White Collar Guy" on the Tandy ads both had the same hairdoo ;). OMG I'm using emoticons!
Back then he was probably "Bill Bixby, from "The Courtship of Eddie's Father."
That was very interesting, especially from here in Europe, where Tandy computers were mostly unknown! I have only a small thing to note, and it's that maybe it could have been better clarified that "MS-DOS compatible" and "PC/IBM compatible" were two very different things, and only in subsequent years they become basically a synonym.
Good ole Tandy 1000. I remember getting one of these to play with when I was a kid. I think it was already a relic when I got it, but it was still fun to play with.
Edit: OMG I remember that joystick! Reminded me of the atari.
I really wish Radio Shack still existed. I always need electronic doo dads, and it would be great to be able to go down the street and find what I need in 15 minutes.
Weird how it's called Tandy, that was the name of Radio Shack here in the UK. I walked into a Radio Shack in Florida in the 90s and was stunned how it was just a MASSIVE Tandy. Even the shelves were the same. It was awesome. Did Radio Shack sell resistors and soldering irons etc? That's all my Grandad would buy when he took me to Tandy, it was just a small shop.
@@leytonjay They sold computers, audio, video, security, radios(AM/FM and shortwave, and also transceivers and police scanners), phones, cell phones, electronic components, and all sorts of hobbyist parts and accessories. I really miss being able to go to the local store for parts, batteries, and accessories. They have a very few stores scattered around the country after the bankruptcy, and they still exist online. I ordered some solder together kits, some solder and tip tinner and a few other odds and ends.
Radio shack is still open, they’re just mostly online now because they closed many locations
It would be nice if radio shack still existed in it's former glory. By the time they closed, the one local to me anyway, they just kinda sold junk, and weren't useful at all for anyone who actually needed electronic components rather than cheap mp3 players and universal adapters
Radio Shack wasn't my type of store. I prefer places like Micro Center. My radio shack got replaced with an AT&T store.
I had access to a Tandy computer back in HS in '83-84'. It had a green screen, no mouse and I had to put in over 500 lines of BASIC to play a simple tank shoot back and forth game. Extra lines of programming added a hill to shoot over. It didn't have a floppy drive to save the program on, it used a tape deck!
It did teach me that I hate coding. Sooooooo much easier these days.
Neat to see these again. We used a Tandy 1000SX and a Tandy 1000TL in 1988-1992. I remember the Tandy 1000TL booting from ROM and using the DOS system. Then we used MS-DOS and of course WIn3.1.
Planet X3 looks particularly good in Tandy mode. I really enjoy this game.
@@herbiehusker1889 ua-cam.com/video/nBtas1yBRxw/v-deo.html
16:01 I got that exact model computer desk from Radio Shack. That thing lasted for years.
Thank you for this video!
I remember Tandy as a store in the UK. They shut down in my home town about when you said they did. I have it so little thought until this video
The best part about the SX was that the matching monitor stand worked PERFECTLY with my Amiga 500. 🤪
Reminds me of when Italian manufacturer Olivetti made the M24, a PC business clone that ended up more powerful than the real thing (twice as fast, better resolution, ...).
Where I worked we bought four M24s. I got a chance to work with those and ended up as the System adminstrator, hotline, you name it, for network, servers and 100 PCs :-)
I was thinking abut that: the M24 was there in 1984 so isn't it more powerful than the first Tandy 1000? Sure it needed a super rare Display Enhancement Board to display 16 colors, but it had a faster CPU.
8 bit guy makes such a good production, I'm not sure if he works alone, very well spoken and good voice for the job and a lot of attention to details. Definitely good enough to get backed up for televised short documentaries like the Atari history.
It's very interesting that what started off as PC-jr Graphics & Sound bacame Tandy Graphics & Sound since the former was a failure in the home market. By the way, I think that learning about the Tandy 1000 may have got me into making music for the Master System & Game Gear. All 3 use a variant of the Texas Instruments SN76489/96 chip.
That was mentioned in the video, too! I played with a virtual one in FL Studio for a few weeks. You can do interesting stuff by reprogramming the sounds while it plays, but I doubt computer games really scratched the surface of its capabilities. Like with the AdLib, they only used it as a weak and stupid MIDI player.
I remember there were two (well, maybe more -- but at least two) different monitors you could buy from Radio Shack. The cheaper one had a dot-pitch of something like 0.51mm -- literally more than half a millimeter between pixels! It was SO BAD for text applications. So hard to read! The more expensive monitor wasn't *that* much better, but at least you could read the damn text on the screen.
A genuine IBM CGA monitor was the best thing to own with a Tandy 1000 -- but it was rare to see that combination in the real world. Who is going to buy the less-expensive Tandy 1000 PC, and then spring for a $1,000 genuine IBM CGA monitor?
It's strange to see things like "$1000" and "genuine" in the same sentence with "CGA." I spent so many years of my childhood trying to save up $500 to buy a EGA or VGA subsystem to replace CGA. (I mean, it took so long that VGA overtook EGA.)
The Tandy CoCo 3 had a proprietary RGB port and a monitor called the CM-8 for it. You could put an adapter on it and use it on the Tandy 1000 and other PC's of the time, as it was pretty much a straight up RGB monitor, but the dot pitch on that things was pretty miserable as well.
The Tandy CM-5 CGA monitor actually had a whopping 0.63 mm dot pitch and no anti-glare coating. They basically took the cheapest possible color TV picture tube and stuck it in a computer monitor case. It was awful. But the CM-11 (as seen in this video) is really quite good, with a 0.42 mm dot pitch and an effective anti-glare coating. You don't want a dot pitch much lower than that with CGA or else you start seeing gaps between the scan lines.
Also Tandy 1000s add an extra pixel between each row of text (so the actual resolution is 640x225), which makes it much more readable than standard IBM CGA, because for example a lowercase g won't touch the top of a capital T on the line below it.
That makes more sense. .51 doesn't seem bad for CGA. I would be surprised if my CGA monitor from Xerox was better than .7. .41 wasn't too uncommon for cheap VGA monitors on Packard Bell, etc. machines around 1989-92, and it was quite fine for 640x480 and below. Average to high-end VGA monitors were .28 to .31, with the best (Triniton) being .25 +/- .02.
Very nice job! My first computer was an Atari 400. (Thanks for displaying one here!) Then a couple years later, I got a Tandy 1000A. I was still very young, but played on it constantly. My favorites were the King's Quest and Space Quest series, and Gunship. Learned BASIC on it. Doodled in Micro Illustrator. Many hours writing papers with Varsity Scripsit. Never did try Deskmate, though.
Man I remember using that computer when I was a kid. My dad had one and we used print shop a lot back then. And the kings quest games.. Definitely have a fondness for the Tandy 1000.
Oh, Print Shop! I loved that program. :) My family had a different sort of PC than a Tandy, but that program was such fun.
Gosh, I remember those pens with the digital clocks on them! Straight-up 80's!
I had one of those... Not the smoothest writing pen but the coolest next to the calculator watch
Yeah they were cool. Some classes I took I needed certain pens for notes in each class that I almost....almost considered getting a pocket protector until I saw revenge of the nerds.
Good memories of the good old Radio Shacks Tandy Computer. I remember them floppy drives and loading DOS and the cga monitors. Great Post
The prices on these were insane ($4,999 in 1984 is equivalent to around $12,500 in today's dollars). In 1988 I was impressed painting on an RS computer at the mall Radio Shack sporting 640x200 at 16 colors. My C 64 back home was 320x200 in 16 colors and 1 color in 640x200 (with the color "squares" of the text 16 colors able to "color in the 640x200 mode on the C64). In 1989 I dove deep into a totally different full color dream and gaming experience with the Amiga 500 (256 colors in 320x240 and 320x480, with 4096 using hold and modify HAM) with 640x480 at 16 colors out of 256 pallate. But Amiga was 16 bit, later 32. These were amazing times.
Back in 1981 i worked as an apprentice in an Aerospace company Quality department They had a top of the range TRS80 system with all the peripherals, costing that sort of price, for keeping their quality records on.. They even had a designated Computer Operator to look after the computer.
I took in my newly purchased ZX81 to show my boss and he was so impressed he took the afternoon off to go and buy one for his kids.
The original 1000 was a great system! some of the later systems with higher CPU clocks offer some of the best coverage for DOS gaming around.
I loved mine, a Tandy 1000SX, I bought it as soon as the 20Mg Hard Drive was available, before long I added a 286 board, and my tech life was off and running. I used it until 1993 when I got my hands on 486 boards in racks. I even ran OS2 on it, and downloaded an early Linux, though I had no luck running it. I upgraded with a second HD 40Mg, and SVGA card, 3.5 FD, I was a nerd for that stuff, and some that never worked at all. Computer Shopper Magazine was read cover to cover. I ran Windows on it and MS-DOS 6. Good times.
Damn i saw one of these a week ago in a thrift shop, but passed it cause it was so yellowed, but damn didn´t know what it was. Now i´m bummed.
Daniel Lopez go get it
There's nothing like being bummed up the bum.
Interesting. I had a friend, while growing up, with one of these. Never actually saw it in use but he said he played Kings Quest on it.