LGR - Restoring & Exploring a 1985 Tandy 1000 PC

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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!
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Channel: LGR
Views: 640,278
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: tandy, restoration, tandy 1000, radio shack, LGR, lazy game reviews, cleaning, restore, repair, review, vlog, multimedia, pcjr, ibm, 80s, 1985, 1984, classic, vintage, retro, computing, retro tech, technology, ms-dos, original, floppy disk, 640k, video game, gaming, footage, benchmark, comparison, TRS-80, music, chiptunes, deskmate, sheldon, tutorial, walkthrough, step by step, how to, DIY, sierra, tour, overview, commentary, talking, course, tools, asmr, relaxing, intel, OEM, backup, software, hardware, RAM
Id: malgCK7qHQA
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 18min 44sec (1124 seconds)
Published: Fri Feb 02 2018
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