Old Tandy Days

[Jerry Crespi]

My first computer was a Sinclair. (Later known as a Timex 
Sinclair.)  It had 4K ram, and a membrane keyboard.
You hooked it up to a TV, and used a cassette tape recorder to record 
any programs you developed.
It hooked me on computing. I still have it.

Then I bought a Tandy Model 4 with 2- 180k single sided drives. I 
developed a personnel record keeping system in filepro.
Because of the 5 report limit per floppy, I sold the Tandy Model 4 
with 2 external floppy drives with my personnel system, and 
manipulated the menus to tell the user when to put another report 
diskette in if needed.
Do you remember that TRSDOS allowed you to password protect the whole floppy?

We bought Model 4 portables to do demos with.  We would drag this box 
that looked like a sewing machine into a clients office and dazzle 
them!  I remember one CEO of a bank reading the riot act to his MIS 
Manager who could not do what we did with the filepro on his 
Burroughs mainframe.

Then when the Tandy 186 came out with its 10meg hard drive, and 
screen resolution, which made the IBM look like my Sinclair.

Then we watched Tandy shoot itself in the foot, and soon after that 
get out of the computer business.

Of course those were the dark ages.  Like taking 8 hours to transfer 
1 megabyte of data on a 300 baud modem. Ah - the good old days.

Jerry