Tandy Corporation, Part 3

It was interesting that Radio Shack found a "second life" in making IBM Compatibles that were very much their own, particularly with the improved graphics described in the article.

In the late 1980s when I was in high school I traded my TRS-80 Color Computer 3 for a 286-based clone which came in a big box with many expansion slots and that you plugged a keyboard and monitor into, like a modern full-size desktop computer. One of my friends I shared programs with had a Tandy PC which had a built-in keyboard but used an external monitor like a Commodore 64 or my CoCo -- there was a period in which they were fiercely competitive and influencing the industry. They didn't survive Win 95.

Mountain_Skies• 1 year ago

Radio Shack rebadged lots of products from outside sources, with the CoCo I/II being mostly a Motorala design for the AgVision terminal. The CoCo 3 is notable because so many of the improvements were driven by in-house processes. I wondered if maybe some of the people who worked on the CoCo 3's improved graphics were behind the Tandy Graphics used by the 1000 line but nope, turns out they went back to what worked for them and copied IBM's modes from the PCjr.

If you still have an interest in the CoCo 3, the port of Attack of the PETSCII Robots is coming along.

PaulHoule2• 1 year ago

For me it was all about OS-9 at the end

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9

which had a decent C compiler at the very least. I was checking out everything I could about Unix from the public library and creating my own version of as many Unix tools as I could. In terms of OS, the Coco 3 was head and shoulders over anything else you could get up to that point. It even had a windowing system that was a lot like Plan 9.

At some point though I was frustrated with there not being a lot of software for it and I did a data processing job for my Uncle Bob that paid for a new 286 machine although if I knew how much value it made for him I should have asked enough for a 386. The 286 was a massive step up in performance -- in high school I developed a CP/M program for a teacher using a Z80 emulator that was 3x faster than any Z80 could you buy!

mrandish• 1 year ago

I was a huge fan of the Coco since it was my first computer in 1981 and I progressed from 4K in 1981 to 16K to 64K and from the Coco 1 to Coco 2 with full four slot expansion pack, internal video, modem, keyboard, RAM (256K!) and lowercase video mods and two double-sided floppy drives. I ran a large users group and flew around the country to various Coco shows including the first Rainbowfest. However I have mixed feelings about the Coco 3 because by the time it was finally announced I'd already moved on to the Amiga. I wanted to be blown away and love the Coco 3 but by late 1986 the market was evolving rapidly and the Coco 3 was just "okay". Sure the 6809 was still the best 8-bit CPU ever made and OS-9 was still wildly overpowered but the new graphics and sound were only "okay" and not exciting. If the Coco 3 had launched with those specs a year or 18 months earlier, it would have been compelling.

I knew some of the top developers who had close contact with the execs at Tandy in charge of the Coco product line. They'd been working on an expanded new Coco to ship in 1984 or 85 called the Deluxe Color Computer but it was derailed by two things. First, Tandy kept delaying investing in a new Coco because of the consumer computer crash of '83 and Commodore's cutthroat price-warring. Also, Tandy's much higher revenue PC compatibles were selling extremely well. Pouring scarce design resources into a new sub-$500 non-PC computer just wasn't a priority. Tandy's computer sales people also didn't have any interest in selling low-end models when they were moving dozens of >$1,200 PCs at once to businesses.

The other thing that delayed the Coco 3 was Tandy deciding to rely on Motorola's forthcoming RMS graphics chipset (https://archive.org/details/TNM_Motorola_Raster_Memory_Syste...). The specs of the chipset looked very competitive with up to 32 colors from a 4096 color palette at 320 x 200 and 16 colors at 640 x 400 with up to 8 sprites, horizontal and vertical smooth scrolling and hardware display lists. While demos from the bread board prototype looked good, the chipset delivery dates kept slipping due to bugs in the taped out chip. Ultimately, Motorola ended up cancelling the RMS chipset entirely when they realized that the Amiga was going to be better and the Atari ST was going to be cheaper than 68000-based RMS-based systems.

At that point Tandy had to start over for the Coco 3. They ended up hiring a contractor to quickly design a gate array for graphics and that's how the Coco 3 ended up both late and with less than state-of-the-art graphics. It's unfortunate because an RMS-graphics based Coco with an Hitachi 6309 CPU at 3.58 Mhz would have blown away the Commodore 128 in 1985 and even been quite competitive against the Atari ST in both graphics and CPU speed while selling for less thanks to having a less expensive 8-bit CPU.

thijson• 1 year ago

I remember watching my friend play A10 Tank Killer on his Tandy 1000SX, it was almost unplayable, something like 1 frame per second.

We used that Tandy 1000 SX to measure the speed of a bullet, using a tight assembly loop written in DOS debug that polled the joystick fire buttons. One joystick fire button was hooked to a sound trigger next to the gun. The other button was hooked to a switch downrange on a target.

rbanffy3• 1 year ago

I really love this website, and this series on Tandy is a delightful trip back in time.

BirAdam• 1 year ago

Thanks! I write because I enjoy it, and it really helps when people say they like reading it.

rbanffy3• 1 year ago

I loved those machines when they were new. Now I like them even more for the perspective having been near them gives me.

strictnein• 1 year ago

Not a huge deal, but the screenshots for Leisure Suit Larry are actually for Leisure Suit Larry 2. Played a lot of the first one as a kid. Inappropriate, but also just fun to explore the world and see what you could do and interact with. And you could kind of just exist in the game world.

rzzzt• 1 year ago

Or just walk off the road at the starting screen.

It took a loooot of time to memorize the entry quiz questions, full of trivia from a time and place for which I was nowhere near old enough to exist!

geocar2• 1 year ago

I think the quiz was LSL1. You just pushed alt-x (or maybe ctrl-alt-x) to skip it.

LSL2 had the "little black book" with phone numbers. You could type 555-0724 IIRC and get in.

The real answers to these things were in the box, you weren't really expected to know that much about dumb stuff, this was just novel forms of "copy protection" to make sure you got the game (and everything with it) instead of just a copy from a friend...

christkv2• 1 year ago

As a European playing Sierra games in the 80s we always wondered what a Tandy was

fredoralive• 1 year ago

You didn't have Tandy shops in your country then, I guess?

christkv2• 1 year ago

Nope the only reference i had was that it was an option i could select in graphics and audio settings. Weird that nobody imported them though.

nsxwolf• 1 year ago

The Tandy 1000 HX is one of the most beautiful personal computers ever made.

aurizon• 1 year ago

Radio shack/Tandy clung to a sea of small parts as surface mount came in. Most of these parts went for scrap. As surface mount dominated the repair/salvage of most parts became uneconomic. Without the parts 'albatross' around their neck they could have given Dell or Compaq a better run for the money. Hack labs across USA/World keep small work alive with shared infrastructure, surface mount, hot plate reheaters etc, CAD design and low cost mailed board makers are very much a thing these days

Tandy Corporation, Part 3

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