Wow thanks for all that information. I never realised there was so much to the Tandy line of computers. By the way, you may have already figured it out but, Control-Q is XON hence the error message about flow being already on.
Tandy also later sold a Hard Disk Interface for the Coco that could use the primary drives as well - but since the drives were very expensive (for the Coco market), not many people used them (they usually went third party SASI ,SCSI (Disto, Kenton, Diskmaster, etc.) and later MFM/RLL drives (Burke&Burke) which were *much* cheaper. I know Steve Bjork had one of the Tandy ones back when they first came out - he had either a 35 MB or the 70 MB drive, I can't remember which. (The Coco version required OS-9 Level 1 Version 2 and a 64K Coco with a floppy controller, floppy drive and Multi-Pak Interface to run).
Wow, I had no idea that the wide board is actually doing emulation of a drive controller! Was wondering why it had so many more ICs on it while my Tandy 6000 internal board has like 2.
A bit off topic from this 8-inch rabbit hole I've fallen down, but why on Earth didnt Tandy offer an INTERNAL hard drive for the III/4? Tandon made some in the exact size and form factor to fit those drive bays and IBM and others made use of that. And third party companies offered them for the III/4 too (although not as much as I'd expect). But Tandy kept pushing these physically huge drives for the III and 4 even though the compact all-in-one design of those two computers was one of their biggest selling points - no complicated mess on your desk like the Model I and CoCo
Tandy / Radio Shack made quite a bit leasing the 16B and 6000 systems to small businesses, along with terminals and software for Xenix. It was equivalent to about $1000 a month to begin with and they probably kept those leases active through the 90s. I remember a few doctor and vet offices running on Tandy 6000 systems through the mid to late 90s.
I don't care if I have been doing computers since mid 91. 8" is all I need to smile. :) Now, at the end my understanding was 1.2mb 8" using both sides of the disk? Like the HD 5.1/2" ?
