Firing Up a Tandy 1000TL

#notseptandy #tandy #pc While working away at my SWTPC PR40 video I decided to take a break and fire up this Tandy 1000 TL I bought for $40. The TL was the first computer I ran my BBS on and this one more or less is exactly the same. Nothing groundbreaking here; just a fun little diversion.

[TechTimeTraveller]

The SWTPC PR40 printer video is almost there.. it's been a bit of a process getting a 45 year old printer working! Thankfully it's just down to editing now. Whilst working on that I decided to fire up this cheapo Tandy 1000TL, convinced it would yield some interesting repair footage - alas, it worked perfectly! Can't win. :)

[jterry]

Anything Tandy makes me smile. I spent so many hours in the stores. My fondest memories.

[fartzerelli]

I had one of these and used it from 1990 to 1994!

[mattalki]

I still have my original Tandy 1000TL that I purchased new in 1989. It's set up in my office for retro DOS games. It still works perfectly. At the time, I didn't really need VGA graphics. It wasn't until 2 years later when KQ5 and SQ4 came out that VGA really became almost necessary. I did play along with 16 color versions of Sierra titles until I finally had to upgrade in 1993. The empty ram slots are to upgrade to 768K of memory.

[autturret]

The freakin' 1000 TL. One of the prizes of my collection. The first PC I had was an old Packard Bell PB500 turbo XT clone, with CGA. The 1000 TL is the XT class machine I wish I had back then because of course the 3-voice chip for sq. wave sound, the 8-bit Tandy DAC for digitized sound, and the TGA II graphics. It came with CM-5 monitor. Took me awhile to find a good CM-11 monitor, this monitor I found came with a 1000 SL. Or was it the other way around?

Upgraded with the 128k video RAM expansion and 80287 math co-processor. Too bad nobody has figured out a way to use it for anything other than video, the motherboard architecture doesn't seem to allow for any other use. Has of course the XT-IDE and CF card solution.

I've had it for about 6 years, have been using it semi-frequently. At least once a month. Playing around with TASM and Turbo C or playing some games.

Only troubles I've had was the floppy disk drive took a dump shortly after obtaining the machine. Can't believe i managed to find an actual replacement floppy disk drive, but I did. Still going strong. If this drive ever dies, I know how to make a legit new floppy cable for a standard 1.44 mb drive, and I know how to edit Sergey's FDC BIOS to disable the 1000 TL's onboard FDC, and use the fantastic Sergey FDC card. Already did it with the 1000 SL. The FDC enable/disable in the Tandy 1000 SL/TL setup programs do absolutely jack shit.

For shits and giggles, I ripped some CD music to 8-bit WAV files, copied them to the CF card, and used the 1000 TL as jukebox. About 30mb on average per song. On a period correct HDD, just one of the WAV files would have been the entire HDD.

[TheEPROM]

I found mine in a electronics rcycaler we all went to in the US. I was over there visiting some friends with my partner. Grabbed a load of other goodies to. Getting it all back was interesting. But mine survived going in a suit case with not much padding other than a blanket & a few other heavy goods all the way to the UK. Hooked it up to a step down transformer & my IBM 5150 monitor & keyboard & it worked. Was a good find as they don't exist in the UK.

[williamharris]

5th!
Seriously, though, I have fond memories of this series. I received a Tandy 1000 SL for Christmas in 1988. I continued to use it until 1993 or so when I upgraded to a 486. Sadly, Tandy cut corners on the SL by not shipping with a full 640K of RAM, and then using main memory for the video system. A hard drive an "optional extra". At the same time, Deskmate was very easy to use; it was my first ever encounter with a GUI. Having DOS in ROM made it very fast to boot. I was also able to use my Coco joystick in lieu of a mouse. Tandy graphics were amazing, but not widely supported.

[FrethKindheart]

I had a Tandy 1000EX back in the day. Loved that computer. I upgraded it from 256k to 384k RAM, and from a 640k 5 1/4" floppy to a 1.44m 3 1/2" floppy.

[QuaaludeCharlie]

I have an RL that I Love, I got Leisure suet Larry, I got the Geo 3 and Breadbox GUI . Great computer .

[rodneydaub]

2:50 I had one of these when I was a kid! it was one of the first IBM Xt clones that was 350$ or so new. I loved it. I had a 10mb MFM drive that I could not put in the case, wires went out the back

[AmyGrrl]

I had a Tandy 1000 TL/2 growing up and I miss that computer so much. I often think about picking up that computer again. Would love to get the Tandy 1000 TL/3 since it has the faster CPU.

[andystandys]

Very nice. I have a TL/3. I’m missing that little steel tray for the empty 3.5” drive bay slot that should be inside. I’ll probably never find one.

[GORF_EMPIRE]

I sold lots of the Tandy PC's back in the day as an employee or Radio Shack. Fun machines.

[PaleozoicPCs]

Re: the "missing" bank of memory: TLs shipped with 640k, of which 128k is actually "owned" by the video chip and shared with the CPU to backfill on top of whatever memory it "owns". (Which in this case is the two banks of 256k under the row that has the four filled slots and four empty sockets.) Because at minimum the system has to use 16K of that RAM to emulate CGA graphics (more for the Tandy-specific modes) a "640k" Tandy 1000 doesn't have 640k for DOS, at best it has 624K. (I think TLs actually may reserve even more than that by default, their behavior is a little different than the "X"-series 1000s I'm more familiar with.)

If you fill those empty sockets with 4x 41464 RAM chips (64kx4 bit) so it has "768k" (that's what the BIOS will say) the RAM owned by the video chip will no longer be shared with DOS and you'll have a real 640k machine. It'll also *slightly* speed the machine up in the rare circumstance you fill RAM up enough you're running code in the shared memory because that's slower than the CPU-owned RAM.

That said I'm not sure what the deal is with the video corruption you're seeing, it should work "fine" without the upgrade.

[dianeramakers]

Cool! This was my first computer. But I didn’t like that the standard 5 1/4” floppy drive did not work. It needed a piece of tape on the plug to prevent a short circuit.

[AmazingJeeves]

Tried to comment earlier, but I guess it didn't save. Great video – especially for someone like me here in Fort Worth where the Tandy name gets lots of love.

[OCROldComputerRebuilds]

way cool you got a working tandy system I have a 2500 sx I had a he!! of a time getting to work, but i did. I just got a vary nice 1000 TL with a Hdd card and drive I plan to do a video on soon. Thanks for posting this video.

[douro]

I actually had one of these with a 20MB Western Digital hard disk...and I received it infected with AntiEXE. It had a matching Tandy CGA monitor and a Microswitch keyboard.

[rutabagasteu]

In 1988 we had Tandy 1000 SX computers to do homework on. Two 5.25 floppy drives, 512 megs of ram. 20 meg hard drive on a card. Ran Lotus 1-2-3 and I think Word Perfect. I don't remember the video, maybe CGA or VGA. We connected to BITNET, not regular Internet. The computer was an XT compatible.

[MrEnyecz]

Running the PSU without load may not be the very best idea, is it?