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