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Opinions of the Tandy 1000 TX

C

Chromedome45

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Jul 6, 2009
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Location
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I just got one off of epay and was wondering what you all think about it?
I used to have the original T1000 many years ago (1984) and loved it. :D
It was my first PC compatible with a whopping 128K RAM and 1 floppy and
a green monochrome monitor. :)
 
Well, I have one, and I like it.

Pretty peppy, considering it's age.

It came to me with a blank 42MB hard card, so, I put the original Tandy DOS and the appropriate version of Deskmate on it. Looks good.

Looked better when I put a Lava 8-bit VGA card in it and installed the VGA driver for deskmate on it.

When I liquidate my vintage equipment soon, The TX and my loaded Apple ][+ are the two that I'm going to miss the most.
 
Mine is a 1000SX and it's a fun machine. I lucked out and got a complete rig, monitor and all. Even though I really want one fo the all-in-one units, this is one of my favorites. Pretty easy to use and so far it's stood the test of time for staying working, so it's been quite reliable.

Where is Terry during all this Tandy talk?
 
I have a floppy-only TX, it works great. The options for keyboards are limited, but the original SX/TX keyboard is still one of the best I have used and quite reliable. The TX's built-in composite video output is a plus if you don't have a CGA monitor.
 
Sounds like it will be a nice little addition to the collection. :)

I do have a CGA monitor I can use with it and it also it has a hardcard in it too. Although the hardcard supposedly isn't working. No worries i'll try to get it to go. If not I have a few controllers and Harddrives to try in it. Might have to yank the 40MB IDE out of my Epson Equity.:(
 
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Yeah, sometimes it's possible to get those hardcards working again, at least in the short-term. Also, I seem to remember reading that the hard disk drive can be removed from some hardcards and replaced with another one attached to the same card (so that you don't need a new controller).
 
Zachary said:
Yeah, sometimes it's possible to get those hardcards working again, at least in the short-term. Also, I seem to remember reading that the hard disk drive can be removed from some hardcards and replaced with another one attached to the same card (so that you don't need a new controller).
Click to expand...

These so-called "hardcards" were basically long metal brackets which contained a regular MFM or RLL controller (With the ISA interface sticking out under the container) and the hard drive. In most cases, both the controller card and the drive could be removed from the metal casing (which was half open) by removing screws. Those metal brackets were nothing more than a way to mount drives into desktop cases that lacked the expansion room for an 3.5" drive, but did have enough slot space.

Personally, I wouldn't bother trying to look for an MFM or RLL drive, and just order the excellent XT-IDE card, that a group of talented fellow forum members have been designing. It allows regular IDE drives as well as CompactFlash cards to be used as hard drives, even on PC/XT computers that normally wouldn't support IDE. CompactFlash cards are much faster, silent, more reliable, and they consume less power. See this topic for ordering information:

http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?t=18242

(Yes, this may be construed as spam, but since it's a project on this very forum, and also a very awesome one at that, I expect to get a pass for that... 8-) )
 
Hi digger thanks for the response. I allready have an XT-IDE that i ordered from hargle :cool: took me about an 1 hour to build. I was intending to use that along with a 540MB Maxtor drive which I have allready partioned and formatted. Great little piece of hardware. Just waiting on some BIOS updates. It seems to have some problems with disk utilities. But other than that I love it. :D Oh and I don't consider this SPAM our members have designed and built it as you mentioned. Really great work...
 
I have a Tandy 1000 RL and it's one of my favorite boxes out of my collection. It's a really fast box for an 8086, and it's tiny to boot due to it's production date. Fantastic thing to have. Mine's got in-ROM Microsoft DOS 3.30.22 and a HDD, as well as a 720K floppy drive. I don't have a monitor for it, though, so I had to populate it's only 8-bit ISA slot with my only 8-bit VGA card, :(. If I can get my hands on a compatible monitor I will stick something more useful in there. :)
 
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