Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing!
And this is the Tandy 1000, one of the more influential PC compatibles of the
1980s, especially in terms of gaming. And this was sold by RadioShack at the end
of 1984. *startup fans whir, beeps occur* Not a very loud machine! And it started
at a price of $1199 for a base unit like this one with 128 kilobytes of RAM and a
4.77 megahertz Intel 8088 CPU and one double-sided floppy
disk drive. There were plenty of later versions of course but this one right
here is an original 1000. Specifically this one is the 1000A which was a
motherboard revision that corrected a few issues and provided some handy new
upgrade options. And yes, I've talked about more capable Tandys like the
RL/HD in the past. But I think it's worth taking a closer look at the original
model since I find it fascinating and it's also just becoming increasingly
hard to find. Plus I just love the look of these original machines they have a
very friendly aesthetic and fewer angles and more curves than anything IBM was
doing. Which is notable since the 1000 was initially advertised as having "more
features than an IBM PC for $1,000 less." And it was true! The Tandy 1000 featured
superior sound and graphics capabilities compared to the IBM PC/XT, which when
similarly equipped could run at least another thousand dollars. Yet, amusingly
they accomplished this not by imitating the XT but rather by cloning the IBM PCjr -- which was IBM's ill-fated home computer released in March of 1984. But
let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Because to understand the triumph of the
Tandy 1000 you need to understand the drawbacks of the TRS-80 line. You see
when RadioShack first started selling the TRS-80 in 1977 they were one of the
few big players in the home computer market in the USA, and they had plenty of
success with the TRS-80 machines over the next four years. But when the IBM PC
came along in 1981 the market was shaken up in an irreversible way. Suddenly the
focus shifted from machines like the TRS-80 Model 4 running the CP/M
operating system to IBM PCs running MS-DOS. And so begun, the clone war has.
Tandy's first attempt at an IBM PC-like was the Tandy TRS-80 Model 2000. Now
there's a mouthful of a name. While the 2000 was built to run MS-DOS and sold
rather well, almost no programs from the IBM PC ran on it due to its differing
architecture and BIOS. Meaning consumers who preferred high PC compatibility looked to its competitors. So Tandy began work on the
1200 and the 1000: two IBM PC compatibles. The 1200 was a PC XT clone geared
towards business users and the 1000 cloned the exciting new PCjr for the
home market. But while the 1000 was highly compatible
with PCjr software, Tandy made some smart adjustments to the hardware side
of things. They removed the costly and underutilized dual cartridge slots, added
three PC bus expansion slots, and replaced the awful infrared chiclet
keyboard with a wired a full travel keyboard. Representing Tandy, Ed Judg
even described the Tandy 1000 as "what the PCjr should have been" at one point.
But being aware of the PCjr's compatibility failings he clarified that
by saying "we tried to maintain as much compatibility with the jr and the PC as
we could, but if it came down to being more compatible with one than the other
we leaned toward the PC." But also towards the TRS-80 because the 1000 was intended
as an upgrade path for existing TRS-80 owners, featuring ports that were capable
of using the same keyboards, joysticks, displays, printers, and various other
input/output devices as the TRS-80 line. Though while this was a great selling
point for current RadioShack customers what really made the 1000 so successful
with PC gamers for a time was amusingly the components of the failed PCjr it
was copying. Namely the graphics and sound. *Silpheed plays with graphics and sound being all awesome* Compared to the ridiculously limited MDA,
CGA, and PC speaker sound of the PC and the XT, the PCjr (and by extension the
Tandy 1000) was miles ahead with its 16-color graphics and SN76489 tone generator. The odd twist of fate here is that while the PCjr was a nasty failure for IBM, the Tandy 1000 went on to become a huge
success for RadioShack. So much so that its graphics and sound modes became
known as "Tandy compatible" instead. Talk about a final death blow for the PCjr.
I love stories like this and I was super psyched to finally play with an original
Tandy 1000 as a result. Unfortunately, when I first got this machine, as shown
in unboxing a while back, it had a few problems, besides just being a bit dirty.
Not only was I expecting it to be the more capable SX model, which it wasn't,
but it was also supposed to have a working floppy drive, which it didn't.
Thankfully getting inside the Tandy 1000 is quite simple. There are just two
screws on the front of the case here and then it just slides off, revealing a
rather lovely interior. But unfortunately getting to the floppy disk drive is much
more of a pain. Everything is attached to this metal assembly that's just really
annoying to work with. There are three screws on front, one screw around the
side, and then you have to remove this big plastic panel on the back that's
covering up more screws. And then two more come out right there. Thankfully
they are at least standard flat head screws. Unlike these that are actually
attached to the floppy drive itself, which are 7/32 sized hex head screws, or
bolts. Not only more annoying to work with but I don't have any tips that can
convert to that size that are small enough to fit in this little slot here.
So you kinda have to balance it in place and then get your driver in there, it's
just it's an annoying thing. Anyway once the floppy drive assembly comes out of
there then you can get to the disk drive itself. And then there's just a little
metal piece on top of there which thankfully unscrews normally, and you can
get into the floppy drive here. And I was just gonna clean the heads with a little
bit of a swab alcohol tip thing right there, and hopefully that'll be fine. And
while I'm at it I'm gonna replace those annoying hex head things with standard
Phillips head screws. Because screw that I don't wanna mess those again. And we'll put in the Tandy version of MS-DOS 2.11 disk here that it
came with. And lo and behold it works just fine now! Just put in the time and
date, and we can read the directory and do whatever we need to.
Yay working floppy drive! Now to get to the cleaning of this and we'll have to
remove the disk drive itself to see the rest of the motherboard. And now as I
mentioned earlier it's quite a delightful looking thing, I think. Just a
very nicely laid out, pleasing board design. It's a nice blend of simplicity
and complexity, I don't know I just like looking at this thing. But it would look
a whole lot better if it was clean so I got a shop vac here and we're just
gonna dust this thing out as much as I can. And hey we can already see things a little bit better here, including the 8088 CPU
by Intel here. Although that is indeed an AMD logo on the chip. Yeah this was back
in the day when AMD was manufacturing processors for Intel, not just making
their own based on the compatibility of Intel. This is an Intel chip under AMD's name. And you can also see that second socket above it and that is a spot to put the
8087 math coprocessor if you wanted. One of the features that was added to this
1000A revision. Now I thought that these little specks were like some more bits of
something to be dusted away, but apparently not. They just appeared to be
on the board. So really the interior of this thing
wasn't too terribly dirty, just had a layering of dust. So I just went over
everything with an anti-static brush and just kind of loosened up the crap that
was kind of caked on there and then went over it with a vacuum again and
everything seemed to be pretty good. And yeah check out the view of the Tandy
speaker there, it's a little larger than the one that's on the IBM PC and it's
ridiculously loud. Also quite enjoyable is this power switch. Needed a little bit
of a dusting as well and yeah. It's not as enjoyable to me as say, the IBM PC's
big clunking red one. Still though, feels pretty nice, a lot better than modern
power switches. Really the biggest thing that needed cleaning on this machine, at
least on the base unit, was the fan in the back. And yes it does have an exhaust
fan -- many PCs didn't at the time, but this one does. And yeah I'm just glad that
this thing was in such nice shape when I got it. Just a light dusting for
everything from the tray bracket metal thing that holds the floppy drives to
the plastic in the back of the computer just
needed some light dusting. And there we go! And since we're in here may as well
do some quality of life upgrades. Starting with this 1MB RAM
board from Lo-Tech. I've bought a few of these now and they're really handy for
upgrading computers that don't have a lot of conventional RAM. In this case
since it's an original 1000 it only has 128K of RAM. Not much at all,
so I configured this to upgrade it to 640K. And once its installed in there
and you boot up the computer and lo and behold you have the full 640K! Which
"ought to be enough for anyone," har har. Unfortunately this does not add DMA to
the system so it still lacks that. And I also have another Lo-Tech card here
that I want to install, this is the XT-IDE, or really their version of it: the
XT-CF ISA compact flash adapter. This right here will allow me to use one of
these IDE to CF adapters and then a compact flash card as a hard drive. So
you just stick one of those in there then stick the card in place and then
attach it to the back. I've got one of these that installs to the rear bracket.
You can use any of them but I just find this one to be rather convenient. And
then connect it with a cable there and tada! We have a hard disk solution so we
can boot directly into DOS without having to rely on floppy disks or
anything like that. I'm actually not sure if this will run on the original 1000
but I know it does on the 1000A. And yeah this is not one of the computers
that has DOS or Deskmate or anything built into the ROM, you needed to boot
from something. So this is a nice convenient solution in my case. And yeah
check it out: now we can boot into GW-BASIC from the DOS installation that
I put on the compact flash card, allowing me to run one of my "favorite" programs of
all time. And we can also run Tandy Deskmate version 1.01
which this came with. Now this is just a text-based version, this is before
Deskmate went all graphical. It's just in black and white, it's incredibly simple.
But it does allow you to view files for text and print out things that way, and
also allows you to manipulate some worksheets to do budgets and stuff, and
kind of a Rolodex filer system for your clients, and a calendar for your agenda.
You know, business-oriented kind of home management office type of stuff. It
was a nice bonus and came with Tandy computers for a very long time. Although
every single one of them that came after this were better, this one is darn
simplistic. Yeah I gotta cleanse my palate a little bit with a game here
let's try out Paku Paku! *Pac Man-like sounds play* *yep, sounds are still playing* Oh yeah that is awesome,
I love how versatile this game is even though it's not necessarily using a
whole lot that is specific to the Tandy. In this case it is using the Tandy / PCjr sound. But it's actually using the 160x100 16-color [text] mode of
CGA here. Whereas something like King's Quest 2 is actually using Tandy sound
and graphics and just looks and sounds amazing, check it out. *subjectively amazing graphics and sounds proceed to play* All right well now that we know
everything is working fine then it's time to get to the rest of the cleaning
process. And yeah the case needed a little bit of attention, there were
some scuffs and grimy bits. And you could tell where fingerprints had kind of
touched a few places a little too much over the years. So yeah just a little bit
of basic cleaning with water and vinegar and then just going over that very
lightly with a magic eraser to pick up any of that excess dust. Because this is
one of those plastic cases that's not painted, but it does have a pattern in
there that mimics kind of a powder coat paint. So you don't have to worry about
lifting paint off of there you can just sort of scrub and get the dirt out of
there that way with a magic eraser. It works pretty well in my experience as
long as you don't go too hard. Honestly sometimes even like, just water and a
microfiber cloth and a tiny little bit of baking soda will do the job,
anything that's just a light abrasive should work fine. The keyboard itself was
looking quite nice as well all things considered. It even had the cork feet
still intact on the bottom. But then around the front
yeah, you can tell there were some little droppages of like, food or drink or
something, who knows what. I started scrubbing away with my wood grain
toothbrush here and then I noticed that the little doohickeys above the function
keys -- these are actually removable. I knew that these were spots where you would
slide in overlays to let you know what the function keys did in say, Lotus
1-2-3 or whatever. But I didn't know that this one actually had the little
blank pieces installed still. So yeah I just removed those really quick and got
to scrubbing away and yeah, that's much better. Time to scrub the rest of this
thing down and enjoy the satisfying satisfaction of cleaning old hardware. *satisfying brushing and scrubbing sounds occur* Well I dunno know about you but I'm feeling
better. And while I was at the keyboard I wanted to take a look at the switches
underneath the keys themselves, because somebody was telling me it's a form of
mechanical something or other. I'm just a keyboard geek so I always want to check
it out. This looks a little bit different than a lot of the photos that I've seen
online but apparently these are Fujitsu leaf springs, the third generation of
them. They're not clicky keyboard keys but they are pretty darn satisfying.
They're very light to the touch but they're not too light, and they're not
terribly loud either. I mean they're just pretty decent keyboard keys for the mid-80s like this on a computer that was cheaper and didn't do buckling springs.
I'm also quite fond of the way these little feet in the back flip up: you
actually press down on them from the top of the keyboard and then rotate them
around to make them do their thing. I don't have any other keyboards like this
and it amuses me. And no, in case you're wondering this does not come with a
mouse. That was still considered an optional peripheral at the time. And it
wasn't uncommon to see people using a light pen instead, which it has a
dedicated port for in the back of the computer, right next to these RCA outputs
for connecting to a TV instead of a monitor. That's not to say that mice
weren't available because they certainly were, especially a couple years later. Now
the original Tandy 1000 could also make use of the TRS-80 Color Computer mice
but this one is pretty much just your standard 9-pin serial connector and
works just like a regular Microsoft compatible mouse. And yeah after wiping
everything else down with a little bit of water and vinegar once again and then
inserting those little overlays into the top of the keyboard right back where
they used to be, everything is back in order and it's a very clean-looking
Tandy 1000 personal computer keyboard once again! Now onto the monitor, which
in this case is a Tandy CM-11 CGA and Tandy compatible RGB monitor. And it's
looking a bit dirty, especially this spot right here where there's some sticker
residue that looked rather stubborn. Thankfully though this is not a problem,
just gonna be using some Goo Gone (not sponsored) and rub it in there. Let it
soak for a minute then then just kind of rub it out and then repeat quite a
few times over the course of about 10 minutes. And there we go, it goes away
eventually and you're left with a nice clean looking CM-11 monitor. Well at
least it will be once I wipe down the rest of it. It was uh, quite caked in just dusty residue. Uou couldn't really tell until you
started wiping it down with paper towels and then you looked and you're like "wow
everything is really dark brown." So yeah much cleaner now, everything is looking
good, it is time to set this thing back up and enjoy some games. So enjoy! *lots of game sound effects and music play through the Tandy speaker* *they just kind of keep playing for a while here* Well that's about it for this video of
the Tandy 1000 Revision A! I think it is a wonderful little machine. I am
infinitely fascinated by the Tandy graphics and sound mode because it does
what the PCjr set out to do, but then does it so much better because they had
so much better support. And yeah you could upgrade it and do all sorts of
cool things! Still though, it's obviously rather limited. You saw Lemmings there
running kind of like garbage. I mean, this is still a 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU. And then games like LHX here just barely run at all, even
though it technically supports it. Like it meets the minimum requirements but just barely. You know, that's to be expected though, these are games from
like the early 90s. However, everything from 1981 to 1989 or so runs pretty darn
well all things considered. And often looks better than it would running on
like a standard IBM PC or compatible with CGA graphics. And of course you have
that Tandy sound -- the sound is one of the biggest appeals to this, and in fact I
will be revisiting that in the future. Because I have a card that actually lets
you add Tandy sound to any PC-compatible, more or less. That's gonna be fun to mess
with but anyway, that is all for this video. And I hope that you enjoyed
watching what I just showed! And if you did then perhaps you would like to stick
around and check out more LGR things. There are always new episodes coming out
every Monday and Friday right here on this very channel. And let me know in the
comments what kind of experience you have, if any, with the Tandy 1000 series
of computers. I love hearing firsthand stories about Tandy computers from back
in the day. And as always thank you very much for watching!
