Bought a 600 in 86 when I hung out my own shingle. I owned a small interconnect telephone company. Quite a few of the newer Electronic Key Systems were programmed through the use of a 300 Baud rate RS-232 interface. Got it at a great price, worked like a champ, but like I said, the most basic 600 you could get, no bells and whistles at all.
I also got a Tandy 600 at a deep discount for somewhere between $150-200 at my local Radio Shack around 1988. It was my first portable computer even if it was heavy as hell. I used it all thru my community college career to write papers and even a few scripts for stage production (I was a useless theatre major...lol). I lugged the thing back and forth to school and even carried a RS-232 cable so I could print my papers using one of the school's IBM dot matrix printers (attached to a 286 computer). Fun times!
Hahah!! I had one of those. I love the biege look. Used the model 100 through high school, and somehow got a 600. I really don't remember how. And I never could get the 600 to do anything useful. But looked like it had a nice keyboard. 2:10 Well the 200 had a DOUBLE height screen, which aside from docking the 100 was a nice change for more screen real estate. 3:00 80 column and a built in floppy was a nice change over the 100. Not that I ever enjoyed that. LOL!! 3:52. Dang!! That $1,599 price tag would be $4,488.74 in 2023 money! 7:55 Ah that was common for that time frame. I ran into that on the Amiga 3000 computers I had and a few of the others.
I love the way you throw down like that. But I do have to mention that the issue with the Tandy 600s price was marketing, not greed, or actual cost. All of the non 1000/100 (with the exception of the Tandy Sensation) machines such as the 2000 and 4000 were meant to be sold in Radio Shack Computer Centers. When the CEO of Tandy Corporation was setting margins for the Computer Center stores, he set them at 70%, or about double the regular Radio Shack stores. All of the computer center items were very low production as there were only 800 at that time compared to over 7000 regular stores. There were some "Plus Computer Center" Radio Shack stores too, and they would get these computers and stock transfer them to other regular stores. The whole structure was confusing. But the marketing for the Computer Center worked this way, make about 1000 units to send to stores, wait a couple of months, mark them at 50% off, make another thousand.
The Tandy 600 was only meant to be a stop-gap until Radio Shack was ready to begin selling their own full-fledged PC-compatible laptop, the 1400LT. Zenith sold a laptop that was very similar to the 600, the ZP-150, and it was similarly unsuccessful. Both contain lots of parts made by Oki, so it's possible that Oki (a.k.a. Okidata) was the OEM for both of them.
@@vwestlife I just saw your Tandy 1000 video with the original Deskmate which was terrific. But the part that is pertinent to this thread was the commercial at the end stating that the Tandy 1000 was only available at Radio Shack Computer Centers. So I guess I must've been wrong about that to some degree.
@@vwestlife Out of personal curiosity I did a little research (CREATIVE COMPUTING VOL. 10, NO. 11 / NOVEMBER 1984 / PAGE 292) and found out that the Tandy 1000 was actively opposed by Radio Shack President Bernie Appel after CEO John Roach was blamed for a sharp drop in Tandy's stock price with the Tandy 2000. It would appear that the compromise was to only sell the 1000 in 500 computer centers and 800-900 "Plus Computer Center" stores.
@@dintyshideaway9505 The impressive thing to me is that Creative Computing was over 300 pages just a year before it ceased publication. The final issue in December 1985 was only about 100 pages long. We forget just how huge computer magazines were in the pre-Internet era. Computer Shopper was as thick as the yellow pages!
Frankly I want a SBC powered device with the tandy-100 formfactor. Frankly I can see exactly how the x00 line ended up failing. The featureset wanted at the time of the 100 just.... wasn't nearly as appealing as in the 600's time. I personally would have wanted a 100 if there was an easy way to get data OFF of it and in a way word perfect could open for the sake of getting classwork done since my handwriting has always been shit. However it was a VERY barebones affair even a couple years post launch much less a decade after when I would have found it useful.
yeah, if there'd such thing as equivalent to a USB stick back in the mid 80s, the Model 100 type of computers would have been totally amazing, but alas the micro floppy drive was the best the tech could muster for affordable portable persistent storage, which the drives were kind of big, weighty, and used too much power for portable computing battery systems of the day
I bought a Model 200 because I fell in love with its mid 80s clam shell look and decent keyboard - as I thought if I ever designed a retro-themed computer I'd want to use this form factor. but it still works and I've never had the heart to tear it down as fear it might not work after reassemble
Although you're right to ding the Tandy 600 for not being IBM-compatible, you missed another, probably just as fatal flaw: it was ALSO not compatible with its predecessors, the Model 100 and Tandy 200. It would have been one thing to make a decisive break with the past to enable embracing the IBM/MS-DOS future. Or to ignore that future and prioritize compatibility with past products. But this turkey did neither. Model 100 & Tandy 200 buyers couldn't bring their apps over to it. And people wanting to get on the MS-DOS bandwagon couldn't use it either.
guess we need to know which vintage computers to disdain, but still makes me sad as my inclination is to find something to celebrates about all of them - but sometimes there are just plain old stinkers
Wow. That's a lot of nonsense. If they were going to go with PC architecture, they could have easily achieved at least some compatibility. Like maybe let some of the graphics get weird, but at least text mode compatibility should have been pretty trivial to achieve with the hardware they were using. If they didn't want compatibility, they could have just gone super hard on being an enhanced 200. Integrate a TPDD, add features to BASIC, and give it replaceable batteries. Have 40x8 and 40x16 modes for compatibility wtih older models in the line, stuff a faster 8085 in there(with a slowdown switch for compatibility). This seems to be a weird hybrid of both approaches that would satisfy neither group of users, without finding a third group that it would be suited for.
Yea well documented this thing is like the Edsel of computers. I see no retro value here. In the day it might have had some utility in a portable word processor but I see no recreational value.
2:30 "This new system, called the TRS-80 Model 600..." Holy moly. You did it AGAIN. You managed to mess up the name of YET ANOTHER computer you did a whole video on. NO. This computer was NEVER called the "TRS-80 Model 600" - it was only ever called the Tandy 600. Here's a hint. If you want to know the name of the computer you're going to talk about, READ IT ON THE BADGE ON THE MACHINE, THE BOX, THE MANUAL, AND THE CATALOG!
@@jessihawkins9116 My sympathies on having a Tandy 600. Looking at the software listings in the Radio Shack and then Tandy computer catalogs I always felt bad for 600 owners since there was only ONE available program for it: the BASIC cartridge. If Tandy wasn't going to make it MS DOS compatible you'd think they'd at least make it backwards compatible with the massive library of Model 100 (and to a lesser extent) Tandy 200 software! It's a shame since the 600 finally offered an 80 column display, and built in floppy.
Geez you just relentlessly screw up the names of the systems you cover. From WRONGLY calling the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 the "Tandy 100" countess times in your video about it AND in the Tandy 200 video, you now manage, at the 1:10 mark, to mess up yet again. This time you called the Model 100 the "TRS-80 Micro Executive Work Station". NO. "Micro Executive Work Station" was NEVER the actual NAME of the product; it was simply a marketing tag line! And they never put "TRS-80" in front of that tag line.
