Tandy Silver

[Bill Vermillion]

On Tue, Aug 24 20:23 , Men gasped, women fainted, and small children 
were reduced to tears as GCC Consulting confessed to all:" 

> John mentioned stupid decisions that were made by Tandy management.

> One biggie, in my opinion, was requiring developers to sell
> programs with a copy of the OS.

> This decision required the user to by the OS over and over
> again thereby increasing the cost of the software. This might
> make Tandy a lot of money to start.

I never saw that with the machines I was involed with.  But those
were primarily Xenix systems.

Was this the Model II system?

Was the OS on the disk with the package.  If so that goes along
with the early floppy based OSes on other small systems.  Some I
recall had only one disk drive so everything had to be there, the
OS, the application and the data.

On the Model I Microsoft required a runtime for the Fortran
if you were distributing programs. And I also  think that was true
for a compiled BASIC - but I may be confusing that latter with the
early PC-DOS.

> Then again, what should one expect from a company who decides
> to use non standard Intel chips in their computers.

Which chips were these?   There certainly weren't many standards in
the early days.  I remember some of the best serial cards for the
PC didn't use the brain-dead 8250 Intel chips.   Those were such a
pain, particulary for those who integrated them into multiport
serial cards, as they could get into a state where only a complete
power cycle would clear those.

Intel became the standard for many things, and in many ways we are
much poorer for it.  I had a system that ran LDOS that used
Zilog serial chips - that could handle up to 500,000bps - in 1983.
Apple used that same chip for floppy access. The Intel chip really
pooped out much over 9600.

The Zilog parallel chip was better too.  

But as is true in so much of the computer world, 'cheaper' is
so often thought to be synonymous with 'better'.  Oh that it were
so.


Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com