The Last Tandy 1000 | The Really Rare Tandy 1000 RSX! 

I miss radioshack. I was too young to appreciate what it was before it went under

It was sooOOoOoOoOo creepy... I loved it

For sure. What's wild to me now is that they're all gone... Radio Shack was everywhere when I was young!

The Tandy 1000 line was a terrible computer. People remember it because they played with them as children. They weren't trying to bring home work from the office. Of all the Tandy 1000 models, this one is the least desirable, IMHO. It strays too far from the T1000 specifications.

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 Once "graphics cards" became popular, and CGA and EGA was outdated, and the VGA standard introduced, Tandy standards became irrelevant.

@@squirlmy That's not really true. The PC was an extremely poor gaming device for reasons having nothing to do with the video standards. Games lagged far behind VGA. ISA was very slow and the PC itself was pretty slow too. There were never any video card standards that had hardware sprites, hardware scrolling and other gaming features. TGA and EGA remained popular game options into the early 90s. Not to mention price. Few people were sporting 386s with VGA early on. These rigs were very, very expensive. 5 grand easy. People were not buying them for their homes and those who did almost certainly were not playing games on them or allowing their kids to do so. The 256 color 320x200 VGA mode has a large bandwidth requirement. A single VGA screen is 64kilobytes, which is over 3.8MB per second at 60fps. Most games won't need an entire screen of movement, but it does up the ante and a low end 386 would struggle moving such large amounts of data at any reasonable speed. And, of course, you are completely ignoring sounds and readily available joysticks.

@@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.

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.

Same

I shudder to think how many would-be King Grahams were lost to the chiclet keyboard's peevishness.

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.

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!

Yeah I was 100% sure this one was bad.. off camera it made some horrible grinding noises. I just wanted to show the insides for the heck of it.

The rust was pretty bad. I tried to think of a more elegant way.. I did try nail file but it just wasn't helping.

If adrian’s digial derp de der did it. The 8-bit cartel would be applauding. 😂

Sometime fixing things ain’t pretty.

Did I miss out on a new drive cleaning method??

If it seems stupid, but works, it ain't stupid.

Tandy went on for a loooooong time lol. When I got the 1000TL from my school, I was stunned - I thought Tandy was long gone, and that was in 1991. :)

Thank you!! I really would love to have a Speccy but they don't come up for same in my zone often. They seem like awesome little machines!!

So far it's below trend line. :( I was looking at my analytics and indeed the bulk of my audience is around on Sundays. But I just wanted to get it out there. Maybe it'll improve as the day goes on.

That sounds really cool. Glad y'all had a fun time

Miss the days when all people fought over was Star Trek vs Star Wars online. :)

I'm thinking the TNDY port redirector was chewing up CPU. I should revisit this with my 2500SX which is 33mhz and see if it improves.

@@TechTimeTraveller No need, it works fine on any Tandy 1000 as it doesn't use the DAC, but bit-bangs one of the channels for the digitized audio.

Lemmings was fun!

Many thanks!

Awesome. My first PC was a Tandy CoCo 3.

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.

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).

Thexder alternately fascinated and threw me into frustration rages at the same time

@@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.

Many thanks!!!

Many thanks! Means a lot!

Thanks so much! They take forever to make and kill our production schedule but I really enjoy doing them.

LOL edited, I sold this computer at Radio shack.

Yeah I really regret tossing so many things.. including a couple of Tandys.

yeah i just immediately perked up when the game music started playing

Appreciate it!! Thank you!

That went a little off the rails lol. Now I can't quite look at my PCjr the same way.

@@TechTimeTravelleryeah, that got out of hand quick. 😖

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 made sure to add some new stuff just for those who helped me out by viewing it again. Thank you!

It's an option for the future for sure. Sooner or later I'm going to run out of hard drives. It's just for me, the whine of a vintage hard drive really brings me back.

@@TechTimeTraveller have you check also that dude that makes ssd with ide Pata interface. Or a a ssd to ide adapter. Also some ide to SD since the cf cards are getting expensive

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?

@@TechTimeTraveller no I don't think so

No but there a hole for one but it has a plastic cover in it guessing that was not a feature @@TechTimeTraveller

5:00 correction: I googled tandy 2500 and this looks way closer to what I remember.

Like you said they were fine for most home users. They were an intermediate step in price and capability between things like the C64 or Apple ][ and a business-level IBM clone.

@@Sashazur That's a fair point, especially with respect to the apple II. The Apple II was actually more money than the Tandy 1000. The 1000 comes with more RAM, an 80 column screen, "bigger" disk drives and most likely a faster CPU. I know the 6502 is faster at the same clock speed, but they ain't running at the same speed.

Never even thought of that. That makes sense!

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)

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

Basically SN76489 vs. AY8910 - close enough that that makes a lot of sense.

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.

Thank you!!

Covox (speech thing)

@@TechTimeTraveller Thanks!

A childhood friend had an Adam. I remember wondering if the tape drives were going to explode.. they were running so fast.

@@TechTimeTraveller they worked well. And looking back it was before double density drives. They held LOTS of stuff.

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.

Ooooh you have a TL/3.. I think those are even rarer than the RSX. Can't remember the specs offhand.. 386? I wonder what the motherboard looks like.

​@@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.

I think we are ok. No processing errors and after a slowish uptake this am it seems to be going along a normal trend line now. :)

it was a lil rougher than this one but still intact

I reasoned that this drive was already beyond repair.. I think the head mechanism is messed up, and the air seal was pushed in on one side.. possibly someone else monkeying with it before me. I've not had any luck recovering a Conner so was just messing around there. I'd love to hear if there were any techniques that might work to save the next one though.

Sounds like a 2500 or a Sensation? The latter go for big $$$ now too.

What about the year 3535?

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.

Yeah I just did the open drive thing for kicks.. I've never been able to bring a Conner back from the dead. I'm not sure if you can lubricate the heads? When I was first looking at it it looked like the seal was pushed in on one side.. could have been sucking in raw air for a while.

@@TechTimeTraveller Pretty much all drives from the 1990s were auto-parking. The second they lose power, they park by design. When powered on, they don't try to move until the drive has created sufficient lift. Hard disk heads are generally not like disk heads. They don't need any kind of lubricant. They do not ride on the surface of the disk but just above it. They utilize "air bearings" This is why they have to be sealed. There is such little lift that even a particle of smoke is far larger than the gap between the head and the discs. IIRC, it's just under about a micron on average. Modern mechanical drives might have tighter tolerances. I have no reason to doubt your conclusion that this disk was unsavable. I just was mentioning it for FYI in case you have a more marginal case.

@tarstarkusz Much obliged! Yeah I was 100% sure this one was toast.. I actually worked with it for a couple of hours before opening.. always failed the check and always made the grinding noise repeatedly as it tried to initialize.

Adding to conner drive stuff. I've managed to get some back working by getting the head unstick from the melt rubber, the catch is that the spindle must be running while doing this so the heads are flying, doing it with the disk stopped will at least misalign the head, scratch the disk or even cause a head crash. To put it back together it is also advisable to do it with the drive running, the air generated by the disk will avoid any dust particle away. This is how the early platter replaceable drives dealt with dust. Oh btw, to avoid the head getting stuck again to the melt rubber I place a bit of electrical tape on the melting rubber... all this while the drive is running.