You may have seen this video previously - due a RU-vid processing glitch, I had to delete and reupload. Unfortunately that lost a few comments - feel free to 're-comment' and I can respond. And remember: don't get stopped in Bad3DVille. Seriously. :)
It's wild but people today don't realize that for a significant period of time, Tandy held down a corner of desktop computing in the US. The Models 1-4, and their expanded-on PCjr series really did call the tune. Who remembers seeing software boxes that indicated "Tandy Graphics compatible"? I sure do.
But, that was one very specific aspect; the graphics. And it was partly because IBM at the time was mainly interested in only providing graphics capabilities for business presentations, not for games, or computer "art". Once "graphics cards" became popular, and CGA and EGA was outdated, and the VGA standard introduced, Tandy standards became irrelevant.
@@tarstarkusz I used Lotus 1-2-3 on ours without any problem. I was still using it into the late 1990's to code with a text editor. I didn't need anything fancy for that.
They were decent computers and certainly far better than IBM's PCjr. They weren't the best value but they were capable of running common small business office apps like WordPerfect 5, DBase II, Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Works, etc...
We had The Source (not sure who came up with that name change idea), and for a while they had electronics supplies but then they went under sadly. I miss being able to just run to a physical store to grab what I needed.
"Unsticking" a Connor drive by physically moving the head with the top off is usually ineffective. Back in the day, we'd heat the drive up with a heat gun, put it in a towel and then swing the towel in a wide arc. The idea is that the heat would loosen up the lubricant on the mechanicals inside, while the movement in the arc causes the head to move back and forth. We almost never pulled the top of the drive off unless we knew the drive mechanism was bad (like an obviously bad bearing noise) and wanted to salvage the platters to make clocks out of them.
I was not ready for the PC Jr keyboard horror sketch, that was highly entertaining. Great video overall. Kinda makes me wanna get a Tandy 1000 but then, I remember I have an Amiga 500 which is just as good.
Many thanks! I went down a bit of a rabbit hole with that sketch. Big thanks to epidemic sound for that awesome haunted house background track. It was perfect!
I'm glad the PCjr I picked up a few years ago came with the "improved" keyboard. I knew the chiclet keyboard was bad, but I didn't know it was also haunting.
I think i have one around here. It’s got normal size keys but you can’t store it with anything on top of it or those keys won’t come back up. Was going to get it working on a z80 project just never got around to it. I think it’s the wireless keyboard, so i’d have to modify it to be a real keyboard.
@@pikadrooThere is a cable that you could connect to the keyboard to make it wired. You can also buy a special USB to PCjr adapter/cable on E-Bay to use it with modern computers.
I've been watching you for quite a while, your skits keep getting better and better, and they already made me laugh my ass off. it's like This Old Tony, but old tech mixed with an acid flashback. that tandy keyboard nightmare break was gold. pure gold. and any one who doesn't agree can sit on a tack!
Hi I'm one of your Aussie viewers my first PC was the CoCo when i was like 7 but I just wanted to say I love your channel and how you present the Finds you've come across and the history of them and your 'Old School' way of Presenting it! Thnx for the awesome content!
You are lucky to be able to have all these nice Tandy machines. I had a Tandy 1000 machine in 1988. It was my first PC and it was my first experience with DOS games like all those great Sierra adventure games as well as my first time accessing local BBS. Plus I was learning guitar back then and had a lot of fun with the 1000's sampling capabilities and music program. I would record my guitar as a sound sample and use it as instruments in the Deskmate music program. Plus I had the printer and loved playing with The Print Shop (which I also had on my Apple II back in '84 up until I got the Tandy.) Great memories.
I worked at RS until about 1993. By that time the Sound Blaster and other cards were soooo common that the support for the Tandy 1000 sound was slipping. But it had been one of the most popular options for a good number of years. By the time the RSX came out the Tandy sound was definitely on it's last legs ,good as it had once been.
This takes me back! I grew up at Radio Shack, we had the complete TRS-80 line (Model I, II, III, 16, the works!)...and then we bought the Tandy 2000 which was our gateway into the IBM-PC compatibles world. We were "wowed" by an impressive demo, but soon found it wasn't really compatible with much. We ran Digital Research's GEM (Graphic Env Mgr) which was pretty cool for it's day. BTW: The keyboard part had be LOLing!!! Your animations are priceless!!!
Your mention of BBS triggered my personal wayback machine. In the very early 80’s me and my (then) wife ran a BBS called “Aphrodite East” out of Northern NJ. It ran on a Z80 TRS-80 model iii with a two 720 MB 5-1/4 inch floppy drives. No hard drive in those days as they still cost $$ thousands. It had two dedicated dial up phone lines for modems. At its peak we had a couple hundred users. Good times!
My very first PC was a Tandy 1000 RSX, with the stock 52MB hard drive. I remember my mother driving me across the city to the one store that had it, advertised in their flyer on a clearance sale for $265 - which was literally ALL my family could afford at the time as we were pretty much dirt poor. Still, this 'obsolete' model started me on my tech journey, playing PC games with my best friend for several years, before I could afford to upgrade - to a Pentium. Here I am today, working for one of the largest telecoms in the world. My entire life now revolves around tech, and it all started with this one humble machine. What a ride.
@3:25 - Marshall McLuhan on Canadian national TV said Finnegans Wake read out loud had college kids saying "It's just like LSD drug", but I didn't realize Kings Quest with a PCjr keyboard was just as far-out!
The 2500 RSX also has the same board, including the Acumos-branded VGA, the AMD 386sx, and the 1MB of onboard RAM. I didn't realize that the SX/33 also had the same board (or a slightly newer revision) until you mentioned it, even though I had worked on both of mine relatively recently. It's good that you were able to repair the drive; finding a suitable replacement drive that would fit with the case bezel of my 2500 XL was a hassle. I really like the look of the later 1000s with the tiny cases.
1000sx was my first PC - scored for cash for a couple of hundred bucks with all of the original receipts. Guy had gone on a credit card spending spree and was in need of quick cash. Upgraded it with the NEC V20 that I got as a free sample from the local NEC rep. Also got a free old 10MB full height control data PATA drive (was passed around as an eval unit and was collecting dust on a salesman's desk) that I put in an old wooden case with a surplus power supply and fan and sat under the 1000 SX. As you mentioned things were moving fast - I sold the system to a local church for what I paid for it - they used it for a mailing list and typing letters so it was perfect for them. Used that cash to build a 286 clone then 386, etc. Fun times.
It still amazes me that there was a time when it was worth it to sell a second hand PC. My Dad never just hung on to old hardware or passed it down :(.. it was always worth decent money on the second hand market. These days I struggle to get rid of anything more than a couple years old.
The intro to Skate or Die sounded mostly correct based on my memory of hearing it on the C-64, NES & PC Adlib. Just sounded almost like it was having a little trouble playing the song in a few places like there wasn't enough CPU power or there was something else holding it back.
Ive got to say your animated pc jr keyboard had me laughing pretty good. Great video and I appreciate the in depth info on getting the sound to work. I appreciate the time that went into this. Id have been over the moon to receive this machine “today” and back in the 90s. I was stuck with a beeper speaker until like 1994 when I finally moved to a 486. I had a 286 for what seemed like ages prior to that with cga until 1991 oof only upgrading to vga in 92. I played and beat (and suffered through) so many games with my cga card. Even Microprose knights of the sky in wonderful cyan magenta white and black 3d wow was I desperate to play computer games eh? Those were the days. Id have loved 16 colors then and dreamed of vga 😂😂
I actually still have my Tandy 1000TL that I bought new in 1989 as a 15 year old. I saved all my pennies for that one. I worked at Radio Shack from late 1991-1996, and did sell the 1000 RSX. It didn't sell well because the 2500 SX/25 wasn't much more expensive, and that 5.25" bay was useful for multimedia kits (CD-ROM drives). BTW, you're missing the RLX in your collection. It was also an AT Class machine (286/10) with 1 expansion slot and VGA graphics.
Interesting. The sites I did my research on said the RLX was an XT class 286, and only had 1 8 bit expansion port. I thought I read because of this the Tandy sound is at the original address for the 1000 series, just adding the DAC. I'm gonna go reread on that! That's so cool that you still have your original TL! I might have kept the TL my school lent me if they had allowed it, but it was too valuable apparently.
@@TechTimeTraveller I really could have sworn it was a 16 bit slot where the RL had an 8-bit one, but we're talking nearly 30 years ago in my old brain. That said, I'm pretty sure it was a full AT box, but who knows? Time to find one and look! 😂
I had a 1000RLX as a LabKitten. It was our first family PC, and after using an Apple II at school, the idea of having a GUI? Oh my stars! No more swapping floppies?! It came with a - humongous for the time - 40MB HD, VGA graphics, and 1 MB of RAM. I remember being very irritated that I couldn't run Windows 3.1/286 on it, because there wasn't enough free upper memory (the system reserved 64k for the onboard graphics, whether you used them or not).
Awesome machine, I would have loved it back in the day 😀 These days I would add a SCSI card and a MWave or Sound blaster 16 😉 All the advancements with SCSI you can add CD, HD/Flash storage and networking all in one package 😊
LOVE the narrative! At 43, I also have fond memories drooling over 386 and 486 machines in Computer Shopper. I have a Tandy 1000 TL/2 that I use daily to connect to BBSes, and I just got the extra RAM chips to boost to 768k so I can play more games. I've been looking for a 1000 RLX for YEARS, followed by the RSX and 2500, but the only ones I have seen are priced as if they're unobtainium :/ Being patient... Great video, dude!
Had a 2500 RSX as a kid. Thing was a beast for its time. Though that time only lasted a year or two before everyone started getting 486-class machines.
Also one of my favorite machines; nice to see a video on this. A few corrections: - The Skate Or Die music is unique in that it bit-bangs one of the 3-voice channels to produce digitized sound output -- no DAC needed. - Modmxt was not modified by FreddyV, it was written completely by FreddyV. - You checked a lot of websites for games with Tandy DAC support, but I didn't see mobygames -- next time try searching there, as it has a dedicated Tandy DAC category. - 4-D Boxing doesn't need port redirection; because it supports the Tandy DAC natively, it also knows how/where to find the Tandy 3-voice at it's 1e0 location. In fact, most games that support the DAC can find the 3-voice chip just fine, as they had to test on the real hardware at some point. And finally: Good grief, the PCjr chiclet keyboard wasn't THAT bad! :-) Of course it wasn't good, but I've worked on keyboards that genuinely incite nightmares.
Always nice to hear from you! Yes Skate or Die had me fooled - someone pointed to it and said it supported DAC, so that was probably confirmation bias at work there. To be honest, I found it difficult at times to discern between bit banging the 3 voice and actual use of the DAC. I'm not confident I got it right in most places. I have about 4 hours of footage that got edited down to 30 min so a lot was left on the virtual cutting room floor - but I did spent some hours perusing different game sites, and Moby was among them. I remember I downloaded Outrun from there but could not get it to use the DAC for some reason. It might have been one of the ones where I couldn't get it to run properly at all because it wanted both Tandy graphics AND sound. I think I downloaded some patches for some software from your site (oldskool) but couldn't make them work. And 4D boxing definitely did not work for me without the redirection. I don't know why, I checked the specs and it should totally have worked. I actually have that on film but for time reasons just cut to me getting it working. Need to figure out what I did wrong there. I think sometimes depending on where you download the game from not everything is there, or there's a different version, etc? And the PCjr keyboard.. type wise it's not the worst, but its line of sight wasn't great, and come on man, that layout.. lol Whoever stamped IBM on that mess should have been flogged! Anyway, it was just an excuse to make a semi-horror cartoon to amuse myself. :) There are definitely worse.. the velcro-sealed hard-as-concrete membrane keyboard the Keyfax uses is the absolute worst. Hope you are keeping well!
I found my Tandy 2500 SX/33 386 in my brother truck bed with whole bunch of other old junk noticing it had a hard drive I grabbed it the pc sat for about 15yrs waiting for I thought a monitor but after reading about removing a pin and vga cable worked this was huge cause now it has vga graphics so I hooked it up to my led tv and the screen was very sharp image another fix was a ps2/usb adapter brings it up to a laser mouse found a old 2x cd drive brings cd games to this system a button battery the latest deskmate and we are up and running windows 3.0 sadly the volume knob was damaged but did get a sound out of it so other than replacing that seems alright hardly a scratch anywhere it a nice system now enjoyed your video
Cool! Someone very generously donated the SX/33 I have... I'm going to dive into it at some point soon. One weird thing though, despite having the exact same board for some reason Tandy removed the MIC jack. Does yours have a MIC jack?
You are so right that’s when computers were computers - dos operating systems - I ran a bbs I ran Maximus and then Major BBS with 4 multi line nodes. Ahhh it was great and the internet came and that was that
I have a Tandy TL/2 my parents bought me new and it still works - even the 20 MB hard drive and monitor still works - never had to do a thing to it - when they had the good old 1 and 2 layer boards lol
In my restless dreams, I see the Tandy 1000 sitting in a Radio Shack playing some game. A robot turns into a plane and flies across the stage. In my old age as I near death, I discover it is called Thexder and I weep for my youth drifting away.
@@TechTimeTraveller Yeah coming across it like, I wanna say 30 years after it came out was a real trip. All this time I thought I'd just invented this game from my childhood but no, it was real.
I added a few minutes and made some changes here and there to make it somewhat worth the second outing. :) Had to add Demonic King Graham to my PCjr nightmare sequence lol
Looking at that oxidation, my guess is that it was on a desk surrounded by plants. I spent my early career as a help desk tech, and I always dreaded the plant desks.
EGA was really rare to me too on anything. The vast majority of 286-class and down that I saw had herc mono or CGA like me. And then we all vaulted to VGA. EGA was for the rich. :)
@@TechTimeTraveller I had exactly ONE CGA monitor, I bought it in 1996 or 1997 to play with. It quickly got sold with a 386 for like $150 ;) I don't miss it. I would like to get an honest EGA now, but I do have a Multisync II which covers a wide array of graphics cards I have (MDA to EGA anyhow, I can even get it to do a 64 color(?) VGA through a two-head VGA card with a 9 pin output)
That version of skate or die theme is blah. But it did sound like more than 3 voices, at least 2 in the chords for the melody, the running background, and the percussion at least. Though I suppose they could pull a side trick and emulate additional voices by rapidly switching between instruments so long as their notes don't have to be played at the same time. Speaking of Sid, I'd have expected them to use that dac to play a digital sample of the guitar. The way the Sid rendered the digi of the overdriven guitar is ::chef's kiss::
As Jim Leonard said in the comments (and he has very deep knowledge of these machines), they fooled me because they bit banged one of the 3 voice channels so it kind of sounds like more voices. The 3 voice is pretty versatile and more than once had me fooled on whether it or the DAC was handling the sound.
@@TechTimeTravellerBit banging, that'd explain it. CPU intensive though. The programmers of the era got quite good at getting around the limitations of the systems. Though I'd wonder why the didn't use the DAC. Maybe playing digital samples through the DAC for the entire theme would take up too much disk space. It's always a compromise. Could be much much worse.
Did some professional work on these. My first (personal) system was a TRS-80 Model 1 that was the first demo machine of the independent Radio Shack I worked for as a teen (I bought this demo with my "store discount"). So, I hacked mine with extra wire-wrapped TTL (to the horror of my parents) & Fig Forth. (It wasn't long before before I was being paid to write and optimize Z-80 assembler. By this time, I worked in several BASIC dialects, several machine/Assembly languages, UCSD Pascal, and FORTRAN and RPG II (IBM Sys/3 Mod 10).
Ha. In 1985 I was 7 also. And we had a PC JR AND just got a used AT AND dad got tired of me on his "real" computers and got a Coleco ADAM for us! You could only play Buck Rodgers on cassette drive so long, so back it was to the AT. The 80s were pretty wild for young "nerds".
If I had the opportunity to pick one of these up cheap, I probably would. But, realistically I have most of my Tandy needs covered in my current collection. (i.e. 1000 SX, TL/3, 2500 SX/33, 3100 Model 10)
@@TechTimeTraveller The TL/3 is a "286," but it's not a *true* 286 because of something to do with the architecture. I can't remember what that delineation is, offhand, but I've seen it pointed out before online. The TL/3 also has the DAC, but I haven't really tested it out much. I need to do a video on mine at some point.
Yep, i got a complete Tandy 1000 RSX setup, and I got a Tandy 486SX 33mhz, that looks like a larger version that has a 3 1/2" floppy and a 5 1/4" bay on top what is that??? 😱😁🤪🤣👍👍🇺🇸
I think maybe the RLX did too.. I was going off the top of my head in that narration. I'm not 100% sure of the production timing for various models. All the Panasonic Business Partners were Tandy - they produced several of their models under various badges they either owned or subbed to. DECstation, Victor, Panasonic, etc. I had the Panasonic one as a kid but have yet to find an example of the exact model for my collection in 15 years of looking.
@@TechTimeTraveller I did see a RU-vid video once where I think somebody compared a Business Partner to a Tandy 2500(?) and they spoke of the relocated hardware addresses.
Going to have to explore the Victor more and see what differences I can spot. It doesn't have the Tandy PSSJ as far as I could see so that may be one difference.
A few people have mentioned it. Unfortunately I'm not that culturally relevant so I had to look it up. I modeled it after some psychedelic interludes I remember seeing in Looney Tunes cartoons.a There's a particularly disturbing one with two mice harassing a cat. I forget the episode name. Also a dash of Beetlejuice. I find that style really interesting and wanted to see how close I could get to it.
Hey would you be interested in my first pc? It's supposedly a 386 upgraded to be a bit more powerful than a standard 486. I haven't opened it myself, but its been kept in the family for years and I'm thinking a creator like you might appreciate.
