Tandy Silver

[Bill Vermillion]

Putting quill to paper and scribbling furiously on Wed, Aug 25 09:57  
Bill Campbell missed achieving immortality when he said: 

> On Wed, Aug 25, 2004, Bill Vermillion wrote:
> ...
> >The model 2000 used the 80186. And it was different that the
> >8088/8086 that others were using.  It was the next generation.
> >Tandy wanted to make a better PC - and they did.

> >That machine became the darling of the Autocad world.

> >And the problem with the 80186 is that Intel screwed up in
> >making things compatible. Intel seemed to get alternate
> >versions a bit off from the previous ones. The 80286 was
> >more compatible with the 8086 than the 80186. They seemed to
> >alternate compatibility with generations at times. No one ever
> >accused Intel of making GREAT chips.

> Those of us who had been using the Model 16/6000 with the
> Motorola 68000 chips saw the Intel chips as downright evil with
> their 64k segmented, little endian, architecture. When I first
> met Doug Michels at a TCBUG meeting in Fort Worth, I told him
> I thought he was nuts doing Xenix on Intel rather than pushing
> the Motorola systems.

And those Unix vendors who had been using Motorola chips = Charles
River Data - the company that had a huge blowup frog at all the
trade shows I saw them at - had to make the move to Intel like the
rest of the world.  But they did the same thing that IBS out of
Salt Lake ? did.  They used the CPU as the heart of their own CPU
system.  It had all the glue/hardware needed to make it act like a
real processor like the Motorola, Western Electric, Zilog, etc.,
chip makers.  

> >An aside here. I saw some test against the newer AMDs against the
> >Intel products.  The AMD's outperformed the Intel in 'typical'
> >office applications - but in things that could use mulit-tasking
> >or hyper-threading the Intel chips beat the AMD

> >What was interesting is the amount of power consumed by the best
> >performing Intel chips.  At full tilt they were consuming
> >245 watts of power.  And the first PC had a 60 watt power supply!

> There were some very amusing tests where the CPU fan was
> disconnected on running systems. The Pentium IV chips throttled
> down automatically without damage while the AMD chips left
> smoking craters in the mother board.

Well that has been taken care of by mobo manufacturers on systems
with that chip.   It now has temperature monitoring and if it
starts going critical the power supply is turned off.

That of course can spell disaster in an asychronous operating
system - like Unix - or like the latest MS systems try to be.

Those chips should be avoided for servers.   

> >> 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.

> >The Tandy 3000's were the best engineered 80286 machines on the
> >market.  Tandy wanted to build better machines, and for many models
> >they did, but 'cheaper is better' was what hit the consumer.

> >I've taken 3000s apart after having them running for 3 years and
> >they were virtually spotless inside.  They had a open-cage power
> >supply.  There was a 5.25" muffin fan at the front of the machine
> >that sucked air through a washable filter, blew it across the
> >memory boards, and through the power supply and to the outside
> >are.  All you had to do was slide the computer forward, pull
> >the velcro tab, slide the filter down, wash the filter, dry it, and
> >put it back.

> >Something in the back of my memory says the design was by a
> >Japanese M* company. [I don't recall it if was Matsushita,
> >Mitsubishi, or some other.  It was not Mitsumi [sp] who later did a
> >lot of OEM manufacturing for Tandy.  They were one of the 'cheaper'
> >approaches, not the 'better' approaches of the former.

> >Pulling filtered air through a filter and actually pressurizing the
> >interior of a  device has ALWAYS been the correct way. 

> The Tandy 4000s were pretty substantial as well. I think they
> were the only PCs I saw that had the hard drives rubber mounted
> to protect them from physical shocks. They suffered from the
> standard PC power supply fans though. I still have a Tandy 4000
> here that we use with DR-DOS to burn EPROMS.

I had forgotten that I had one customer on a 4000.  They migrated
from that from an old 6000, that that came from a customer that
upgraded to an AT&T 3B2-310.

I never did see a 5000.  Tandy, Wang, and about 2 other
manufacturers other than IBM were making MCA machines - and the
5000 was one of those.

Too bad - as the MCA had a lot of potential - but the EISA group
pushed "with EISA you can keep all your old cards".   Very seldom
did I see anyone get rid of a computer and keep the cards.
The mulit-port Unix system boards were about the only exceptions
I can think of.

And then those who tried to use standard AT cards where the
manufacturer did not take care to conform the cards to the EISA
standard - found they were ruining the sockets on the EISA
motherboards.

For those who didn't have problems, the EISA specs required the
cards used to be mildly tapered/rounded to be used in EISA systems.
The typical PC card was just cut sqaure from the plated sheets.
That meant you could push one of those cards into an EISA slot
and fold down the EISA fingers.  If you were REALLY LUCKY you could
gently pull up the bent fingers.  If not - well you just lost a
slot on your motherboard.

The first EISA boards ran at 33MHz while the first MCA boards ran
at 20MHz.  But MCA went faster later, and it was an extensible bus
design while EISA was locked in cement as it were.

The last MCA was a 128 bit bus.  That meant you could move
16 bytes to/from memory at one stroke. I don't know that one ever
made it to production stages.  The only buss that comes close
is the 64-bit PCI buss - but that's just starting to come into play
now.

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com