Tandy Silver

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Aug 25, 2004, GCC Consulting wrote:
...
>> 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, particularly 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.
>
>I'm having a "senior moment here" but I think instead of using the 286
>processor, they use a 186.  It was something akin to this.  Tandy used a
>slightly different version of the processor everyone else was using.

If I remeber correctly the Tandy 2000 used an 80186, and had enhanced video
capabilities that were (a) very nice, and (b) incompatible with anything
non-Tandy.  The Tandy 3000 was the first non-IBM Microchannel box (and 8MB
of RAM for the Tandy 4000 cost close to 10 grand :-).

>Now, don't take me wrong, I moved a lot of Tandy PC's either directly to my
>clients or to hospitals here in NY.  My wife usually followed my
>recommendations. Especially since most hospital IT departments only spoke
>mainframe.

I sold a lot of Model 16s and 6000s running Xenix before leaving Radio
Shack in October 1983.  When people wanted office productivity tools, I
sold Model II/12s with Scripsit, Visicalc (later Multiplan), and Profile
II.  I never lost a sale to IBM in this category, largely because of the
horrible keyboards and monitors on the early PCs, and the fact that
Scripsit was far and away the best Word Processor available at that time.

Bill
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