Nice form of Y2K compliancy: the decade counter just keeps counting after '9'. '

I just realized that nearly all of the DeskMate 1 & II files beginning with "TW" suggests Tandy may have originally planned to call it something different -- perhaps "TandyWorks"? See also TJBChris's video about Tandy's Workgroup Companion, an optional package which replaced the Host and Mail features in DeskMate 3.x: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/fNmnhNRz1L_YYI0.html

I worked at a Radio Shack store from 1986-1988/9 and actually sold these computers. I even had my own Tandy 1000 at home. It worked until about 1993, mostly word processing biz correspondence.

1987 I was moving office furniture around working for a temp employment agency at the time while in school. I saw a computer running EGA graphics. I was in awe of the higher resolution and color monitor. Back then it was CGA graphics for me.

See, again, I’m not usually interested in older computers but I not only watched intensely for 16 and a half minutes, I found it very interesting and informative. I’ve come to the realization that I’ll watch anything Kevin posts. And, the Tandy commercial with Bill Bixby at the end was fantastic!

There was a time when a new computer on display would always have a group of people gather around it. Each company had their own way of doing things back then, and for most of us it was all new intriguing.

I love how many people in the comments thought you were serious about not knowing "tage" was "stage." Your dry humor seems to go over people's heads and it just makes it funnier. I feel like this isn't the first time I've seen that in your comments sections either.

My dad bought a Tandy 1000 in February of 1985. I wrote a ton of papers in DeskMate while I was in high school.

I had the best teenage years working at Tandy's back in 1983 to 1986 and remember selling these computers. I used to get 10% commission on every sale so was a great money making job.

At 11:41 "tage" is actually "stage", the "s" appears after you exit out of the email briefly.

Another Brilliant Video VWestlife 😊👍

Neat, I had no idea about this text based version of Deskmate. Performance must be pretty nice as well when compared to the later graphical one. (Especially for scrolling in the word processor.)

Super interesting! I am always fascinated by old tech that can do things we take for granted nowadays, back when it was considered groundbreaking

Re: the Y2K bug that's simply incrementing the ASCII code for the decade past the numbers, the original driver Tandy included with the "Smartwatch" clock chip had a similarly amusing flaw: when you go past 1999 it increments the decade digit to "A", IE, Hexadecimal 10, and so on. So here in 2021 when it reads the clock it'll display it's the year "19C1". (DOS itself will actually set the time correctly.) Presumably something genuinely terrible will happen in the year 2060.

Mom and Laura were very high tech for 1984 :-)

Back then most computer companies focused on business customers more so than home users, so I could see this feature being used as a marketing tool to gain large unit sales to businesses and their employees that could afford to have one at home as well. Call it email or instant messaging, this probably sold quite a few units to the business market. Being able to call into work with their "portable word processor" was also probably a big selling point for those business deals on the go.

Love those bright and happy colors of those old cga tandy 1000s.

15:08 The "

I am impressed how slick the interface was and fairly intuitive for its age

Exciting. Like watching retro futuristic pre-internet visionary, showing why mail become obsolete.

The Tandy 1000 EX is the first computer my family ever owned, and my first exposure ever to computers or video games. I have such incredible Nostalgia it. my first Sierra adventure games, and jingle disk!

I was there in 1984. I would often hang around in any of the 2 local RadioShack stores and would purchase mainly stereo stuff like RCA cables, AudioTechnica stylus, cassette tape head cleaner and blank cassettes, etc etc. I bought a pair of Minimus 11's speakers which sounded pretty good. I also started collecting their yearly catalog ( 1980 to later ) and sales flyers. I still have them lol. Those were my youth years...great memories technology wise...

My first computet was a TRS-80 ColorComputer.. My second was a 1000 SX. This video recalled fond memories!

Thanks for the video, Kevin.

I was the customer services manager for Tandy Australia in 1986 till 2000 when we got bought out by Woolworhs, we used Deskmate all the time around the office and in the retail stores to report the days sales figures from the store and back to head office, Deskmate was used with a 3rd party reporting tool that used with a 300baud modem.This was 1986 until 1991, I left Tandy in 2010, I worked there for 24 1/2 years.

very cool haven't an email program this old since I was a kid in the 80's. Neat.

Any video from Mr. VWestlife could and will serve as a historical checkpoint for those Humans of the Future. Even for us who were or too poor or too young to had one of those Amazing Gizmos!

I can only imagine having to teach my family how to use this back in the early ‘80s.

You know by the time the "L" series Tandy 1000s came out, I believe Compuserve (as a popular service), and maybe even Prodigy existed. I'm wondering if Tandy removed those capabilites either in anticipation, or because of compensation from the walled garden providers. When I worked for Gateway 2000 we were forced to pay a premium for Windows and Office because we would not remove Netscape from our standard load.

The Tandy 1000 line of computers are pretty awesome. I've been enjoying my 1000 TX and HX machines a lot. As for the Tandy mail service, the Commodore 64 had Q-Link (QuantumLink) back in the day that also offered a mail service similar to the Tandy Deskmate mail service.

i really like this old type of software

Finally, a video of an old system that does more than just 8 bits games.

I pondered "tage" for rather longer than I should have, before realizing that it might well be bits dropped by the modem. It just occurred to me that I have something which might well be worthy of a "SepTandy" video!

So this is just like BBS. Very neat. Having one Tandy as a server and remote workers dropping reports from overseas deals must have been great sales pitch.

I've been in printing since the mid 90's . People discussing mechanicals and blue lines is a blast from the past. We made blue line proofs until the early 2000's

I remember using that computer in high school and learning to write basic .

Love watching these since I lived through all of it. I owned a Xerox 820-II CP/M at that time since I worked for them and got in 1981, but remember the Tandy well. By 1984, I was working on an IBM Desktop computer and was excited when we finally added a 10 gig hard drive (they usually came with two floppy drives). Your surprise at having to type the caret for a control symbol made me chuckle. Yes, one had to use the caret with reference to control characters in a number of of these software programs.

I had a Tandy 1000EX but I did not have an HD. So when I used Deskmate it was a very long-winded experience. But I loved the concept all in 640K. On a side note, I had a word processor on a floppy disk that had a spell checker the program was called "PCTYPE". Thanks for the video. Although I am a year late.

Thank you so much for sharing this, pretty amazing that you could send and receive emails back in 1984. Love videos like this.

Oh, wow! I never knew DeskMate was so robust!!!

Fun video! I really enjoy these videos on old computers. Computing was a lot of fun for me back then, even though it was a lot of work at times. I got my biggest kicks out of using the modem, whether it be logging onto CompuServe or Prodigy, or even setting up a basic BBS with the com software that came with modems back then.

A WP-2! I had one I got from my uncle that I gave to Tech Tangents. My uncle was a music journalist and when he was travelling, or working from home, he would use the WP-2 to send what he typed up to his office so the publisher and editor could look at it. Nice to see one being used that looks to be in good condition.

E-mail in 1984 is really something. Almost as impressive as the fact that people who have not just one, but *two* active landlines at home still exist in 2021.

Tandy, brought to you by Bruce Banner, and remember kids, dont make him angry, you wouldnt like him when hes angry.

wow this is so cool and impressive for 1984! My generation is so spoiled. Just the fact that I have a computer in front of me right now and can type this comment. I always try not to take the tech we have for granted, everything had to start somewhere and thats why I love exploring the archiology of computers and technology I always learn something new.

I loved DeskMate! I used the '90s version (particularly the audio software) throughout that decade, until I finally found drivers to make things work with the proprietary Tandy 1000 sound chip.

That’s really cool! Thanks for sharing!

Yay! New VWestlife video, life is good.

The 80s were just an amazing period for home computers. So many different platforms, each with their own unique features…computing nowadays is mostly just a huge yawn inducing bore…look…Windows 11… we moved the start menu to the middle of the task bar….d’you like it??

I never even knew there was a text-based version of DeskMate until earlier this year :)

Oh wow thanks for the memories! I used Deskmate so much with my first gen Tandy 1000. Never used the mail (or even knew what it was for), but lots of high school homework was done with the word processor and my epson LX80 printer :)

Oh, this is super cool! And to think that this was pretty much available from the beginning. Well done, TandyWorks.. erm... I mean Deskmate :-)

that is so cool !! i really enjoyed that!!i love 1984 and the tandy was and is a great computer!!incredible!!

this channel deserve more subscribes, among techmoan, the 8-bit guy, LGR, technology connections and chatode ray dude

Amazing functionality for 1984. I wonder how many people actually used it back then.

Jeff will be wondering who the hell is Kevin, since he sent that mail to Laura? :D

My Tandy 1000sl was bought in 87 I still want to get another one.

Computing was a real skill back in the day!

This is the kind of thing that will make Radio Shack a powerhouse into the new millenium.

Urban dictionary definition of tage: 1)something extremely sexy. 2)a dangerous fall during a mountain biking accident. 3)the perfect guy every girl is looking for ;sporty, funny, gorgeous, remembers to call, sexy, not afraid of commitement, has the softest lips, great kisser, super cute, easy to talk to, supportive, completely irresistable, and thoughtful. 4)the prince in a fairytale. 😅 But yeah, the word was stage.

The message at 10:47 had a character missing at the same exact spot as the "(s)tage" message. But it was an apostrophe so it was less noticeable.

Great video! I had DeskMate on my Color Computer II 64 K of RAM, but it didn't have e-mail. But the Tandy 1000 is very superior to the humble CoCo I had. ;-)

Nice setup! Very cool!

I never used this functionality in the Telecom module on my Tandy 1000a, but then again at the time I only had the one computer. I did use it for CompuServe though. I had even found a program published in some computer magazine of the time that was supposed to add Kermit functionality to Telecom (never worked though, it essentially was just hex code with a header to patch the executable). The Filer was awfully SLOW though. Every time you added/changed a record, it would rewrite the entire file (it apparently didn't have a separate index). I tried to use it to build a database of our whole 32mm film inventory at all the film depots around the US. The more I put in, the slower it got.

Really impressive feature. But I wonder how many people thought, meh, who would ever want to use THAT feature- I just want to play hangman on this thing.

First of all, it's always great to start my day with a VWestlife video from Kevn. Great video! Wait, it's not completely Y2K compliant?? What on earth will you do? Quick, look for the sticker on the case saying it's Y2K ready lol obviously I'm kidding but I do remember computers back in 1998-99 having those silly Y2K Ready stickers. They were 3rd party builds that usually were a frankenstein of old and really old parts.

Fun. I still own a model 100. Still works.

As much as I have been around these computers I never once thought about the email app on the early 1000. Excellent video!

This is so cool I was born in October 1985

Reminds me of logging onto a BBS and checking my messages. Albeit in this case can impersonate anyone and there is no authentication :D Holy cow was that really Bill Bixby in the commercial!

Seeing Bill Bixby at the end is such a banger.

So the first thing I Remember and never used was deskmate for TRS-80. I noticed it still had the mail function. But early computer systems need a menu system / group of software programs. When I first started into computers. People was lost and would show up at the shop I worked at. I installed a shareware program called power menu. Then a shareware programs like a database and such. I remember one person who purchased a computer. They brought it in and said it didn't do anything. Found nothing wrong with it. Just booted to a c prompt. So yes having deskmate via Tandy was nice. My first experience with a mail program was on the local University hp 3000 system. It had a built in mail program. I think It was just called mail. LOL

S I actually owned a Tanday 1100FD laptop from around 1990 that features a single 720K Floppy drive and DOS and a monochrome CGA screen. It included a Deskmate shell built into ROM on the machine with the Deskmate productivity software provided on floppy disks included in the box. This provided a very basic GUI/desktop enviroment for the laptop which while not up to par with Mac System software of the time or the soon to be released Windows 3, it wasn’t bad for the late 80’s. Some Home Micro PC’s of the era used (or could use) a similar simplified desktop environment from Digital Research called GEM which was similar to Deskmate. The Atari ST was one such example and I believe the Commodore 64 has a version of GEM available for it. GEOS was another similar desktop environment/GUI that was made available on a number of home micro computer such as the Commodore 64.

DeskMate 0.0 (I guess) was pretty sweet on the TRS-80 Model 4. I didn't really use it, as most of my software library was Model III. Instead, I would just load it up to behold the power and utility that 80 columns could bring. Also, the Model 100 operating system looks like DeskMate--no Mail option, though.

Nice! Funny how the program shows many key commands on screen, but then requires you to hit CTRL-C with no on-screen prompt. User friendly when it wants to be. And I like how Bill Bixby just walks away mid-sentence at 16:13. Maybe he was feeling angry... you wouldn't like him when he's angry.

Thanks for the video! :)

way cool, I wonder how many people bought those 80s PCs but never had a clue how to configure stuff like deskmate email- FWIW I had the Tandy Sensation in the early 90s which had something similar called WinMate but by that time it had Prodigy & AOL preinstalled for email

Those phone numbers might have been Radio Shack stores

That model 100 looks very similar to what I remember using in school but without email capability. The Alphasmart that i remember doing book reports on when I didnt have a computer. I remember when my dad used to have a Tandy 1000 SL looked exactly like yours but it was from the 1990s I believe. I remember he used to use it to play Solitaire or something on it but then for some reason it stopped working or the memory went bad or I think the floppy disc got corrupted because it had no hard drive neat machine.

Not nearly enough comments about how this is COOL AS HELL, hahaha this is exactly what I dreamed the future would be like when I first used a BBS. I mean this was already a decade in the past by then but still

Nice job Kevin. That took me right back to my Amstrad PPC640 which also had a green screen (1988)

wow something so simple as an email was so damn complicated back then.

The Apricot PC, released in 1983, by ACT of the UK could be upgraded with a modem card that allowed it to connect to email services. I don't think the modem was available immediately, so I suspect 1984 would have been the probably year. At very least contemporary with Tandy.

"Dear Jeff: How 'bout a date?" :D

Ah...When Tandy (Radio Shack) still innovated, before they became a cellphone store that sold small electronic parts on the side!

2:04: So happy to see a V.everything life and kicking! i honestly appreciate that you are familiar with the USR model line up!

the subject of emails that old Is always interesting to me. that portable keyboard computer is cool, i sat there for a minute imagining what a modern version could be (as useless as it might be). i know that macbooks have a bar above the keyboard, someone ought to make an application that mimics the appearance and utility of these gadgets, after all i can't imagine what else you'd do with a 2,000 dollar laptop

2:35 -- Imagine that use case. I'm on the road, and I dial my home computer using this serial connection or an acoustic coupler. I would not be holding my breath that everything worked perfectly and my file was home safe on the computer there. Hahaha! That's really interesting, I like that you have the WP-2 and the Tandy 1000 series.

14:00 - Wait, wait, wait... Tandy misspelled "Calendar" in the remote interface? BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

Back in those days I (and everyone else I knew) nearly went insane trying and failing to make computers talk to each other.

5:05 - I like how it gives you a live count of the bytes of RAM being written with data. I never realized how powerful that Tandy WP-2 is. Like an M100 with no programming capability, but with an improved screen. I assume it's 80 columns, which makes it way more useful for BBSs and other terminal work than the M100 is.

BBS's had E-Mail & Quantum Link for the Commodore 64 had it also & CompuServe in the 1980's.

Amazing how this was available in 84. I wonder if it is technically comparable to the email we use today. In a sense it must be I guess. Email today are still text files stored on a server. (With attachements encoded in Base64 in the same file)

Fun video. I have a new respect for Tandy machines now. I'm amazed that DeskMate seems to be Y2K compliant except for the

SMTP or UUCP mail in 1984 : that would probably have been the first general-public implementation of modern e-mail... Turns out neither UUCP nor SMTP protocols are involved. But that is still a clever server-free very simple implementation for a electronic mail service. The remote access - also dirt-cheap simple - is also clever : the files are modified directly on the "server", the remote Tandy WP2 acts as a dumb terminal, with a tcp-like session. That's probably the best solution on a single-tasking MS-DOS machine. Main drawbacks I see are : computers need to stay "on" and idle in Deskmate-wait mode all the time so they can answer modem incoming connections. It can't be used during remote sessions. And users have to pay for these phone connections.

Nice a new video as always I'm here Kevin have a nice week really interesting

R.I.P. Mr Bixby

0:01 for a second or so, I thought that background test card is a part of this brochure. "Pretty cool, but why? Did ot have an optional TV tuner?"

Earlier home computers probably didn't have email, but it was implemented years earlier in academic and industry machines.

From the time before security was invented.