You have a very calming voice. Sometimes when I go to sleep I start your videos on my phone.

... "Tandy 1000SL that you can see on the background there". Like it just happened to be there these days. Well, as every subscriber knows, it was ALWAYS there!. A whole decade of highly enjoyable video content production has been witnessed by that good old guy. Hats off to it.

14:10 I can’t believe that having a PC speaker volume control was not standard on computers of this era. I remember not being able to play certain games because it was either too early in the morning or too late at night, and the speaker loudness would have woken everyone up. Easy enough to create one if you know how, but I didn’t.

That was my 2nd comp, had it from 86'-94'. Looooooooved that machine. Eventually got the memory bumped to 512kb and added a 2nd 5 1/4" drive so I could copy stuff (then later replaced one with a 3 1/2"). Lasted through all the Sierra games until they required mice. Wrecked two joysticks for it playing BC's Quest for Tires, Thexder and Silpheed. Also wasted tons of hours with Bubble Ghost, California Raisins and Double Dragon. Never did manage to get the Light Pen for it though. Ran on MSDOS 3.2. Thanks for the memories @VWestlife!

I picked up a 1000 SX a couple of years ago. I bought it because I needed the monitor that was being sold with it. It came with a 20 Mb hardcard installed. A big money upgrade at the time.

This is a lot of effort to go through in order to play Leisure Suit Larry and Maniac Mansion! I approve!

Can't wait for Part 2: Electric Boogaloo

The Bus Mouse was a very classy upgrade for this machine.

Happy to see you doing the old computer reviews again!

I've tricked out my own 1000SX quite a bit. Personally, I don't like the V20 upgrade because one of the biggest strengths of the SX is that it provides 100% compatibility with 4.77mh required software. I've upgraded it with a 286Xpress accelerator -- a 286 on an ISA card -- a 8087 and 80287. The card gives me 4 different speed options -- 8088 @ 4.77 or 7.16mhz, and the 286 @ 7.16mhz with Cache Enabled/Disabled -- all of which can be changed in software or with even with keystrokes if you have the program loaded in memory. I also have a Trackstar-E in it which is an Apple IIe on an ISA card -- essentially making the the Tandy a 2 in 1 PC/Apple computer. I'm using an XT-IDE + IDE-CF adapters, since the only CF-Lite that I could find had a rear slot didn't fit the Tandy. I do still need to get a serial card for it, for mouse support but I was able to find an original boxed smartwatch for it -- I'm glad to see that we have alternatives for that though!

Saw that thumbnail and thought this was a Techmoan video.

The light pen port was used with dual monitor cad/cam systems, some digitizers for autocad also used it. lots of software used it in fact, software that was all in the 10,000-15,000 $ range which is why most do not/did not know how prolific the light pen was, Ive seen 30 of them in one office :)

Awesome! I love videos about old computers and especially long videos of such - I hope you do more computers after the Tandy!

The light pen was available at their Computer Center stores (11- and 01+ stores). It was special order at 01- stores.

I see VWestlife video, I give thumbs up. I’m a simple man!!

The SX is an awesome PC in the Tandy range!

The 1000 SX, the computer (I bought used) that got me through college in the 1990s and my darkest years of poverty. It wasn't fancy, but with a 14.4K modem and a local Freenet, it kept me online. I've had better computers, but this is the one I have nostalgia for. 2:50 - The keyboard may be non-standard, but in terms of quality and durability, it was only bettered by the Model M. 4:30 - I bought an internal bracket and put in a 3.5" drive. The panel cover would no longer fit, but usability beat aesthetics. 6:00 - Yup. Had the cable, connected to my dot matrix. Fun times, seriously.

it feels like it's been forever.....love your channel.......

This brought back some memories...

A great video as always. These older systems are great fun.

Great job and commentary. Be sure to rewind the CF card every week.

What a nice comprehensive video on a classic... thank you!

Fantastic video; I love it! Great job!

That’s awesome man. Congrats on getting that old computer running again. I also like the noise of old hard drives. I hope to get a fake sound generator for my win98 box. The SSD is fast but I miss a grinding HDD.

The 1000SL was my first computer and I have been looking for one for a while now.

This was my first PC. I think it was Christmas time 1985. I worked at the local Shack when I was a kid and the owner let me take it home and just took payments out of my checks. Mine came with MS-DOS 3.12 and Deskmate. The onboard 16 color graphics were an amazing value for the time. MIcroprose: F19 stealth, Gunship, and Red Storm Rising . Thanks for this video!

Amazing video. So well done.

It's crazy to think that there are hundreds of frames in this video, thousands. Each frame is a picture that would have taken me an hour or maybe longer to download on my old 2400 bps modem. Not that my pc from back then could even display all the colors in one of these frames, but it could at least display 256 of them! I take so much modern technology for granted. Still though, I had so much fun tinkering around with that thing. Staying up all night trying to find numbers to dial for new bbs to visit. Spending hours downloading a shareware game, then even more time trying to make it run.

Holy balls, does that POST beep and floppy seek test ever bring me back to my toddler years 😭 What the heck, yours takes only 15 seconds to count up 2 GB of free space? My Epson takes almost that long to count up 60 MB. Maybe because I'm running a mechanical hard drive. Brotip - replace the firmware on the XT-CF card with the "XT+" firmware that takes advantage of 80186/80188-compatible CPUs like the V20. I'd be interested to see if you get even better speed. That's a lot of great info about floppy drive setup tweaks.

My first computer was a hand-me-down Tandy 1000EX, this was in the early 90s.

Nice! This is the model i'd want if i had room for a Tandy 1000

This video has inspired me to clean up my Tandy 1000sx.

looking forward to part 2

Love it! I'd still love to get my hands on an old TL/2, RLX HD, and/or RSX HD!

I love the form factor of that computer. I used to have a 1000 EX and dreamed about having one of these.

Get your Tandy 1000SX computer on sale at Radio Shack for only $599.95: ic.pics.livejournal.com/grayflannelsuit/13548407/6367/6367_900.jpg Hurry, offer expires April 26th, 1988!

Nice machine. I recently acquired a Tandy 4000 from recycling. Its power supply was dead, so I'm needing to replace that before I can test the rest of the machine.

great video on these very cool tandy computers which i am new to..wish i had your computer now how !

...and thanks so much for sharing all of this!

Please continue! I have my Tandy 1000sx and monitor waiting for Resurrection

Great Machine. Great Video.

Belleville, NJ...that was my local Radio Shack growing up. It was in a strip mall on Main St. with a Fayva shoe store, Mickey Music record store, Blimpie sandwich shop, Trust Company of NJ bank, Belleville Tobacco where I got a photo with "Macho Man" Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth, Grand Union supermarket, and others. My family's first home computer was bought at that Radio Shack- a Tandy 2500SX. The strip mall is still there, but that Radio Shack is gone.

For another mouse option, you could also track down an old CoCo color mouse and plug it into joystick port 1. That's what we did with our HX back in the day.

I’m not sure but I think the 6 in 96 may be a 0 so 1990.

Nice!! I had a Tandy 1000SX that I bought used in 1992 -- it was all tricked out with everything you mentioned, minus the math coprocessor. And of course, it had a 20MB MFM hard card. I loved playing Sierra games on it -- the Tandy sound and 16 colors were sweet as hell, for its day.

Awesome!! Inspires me to dig out my Old Tandy 2500 SX/33 I've had for a long time now. One of my friends also recently gave me an old TRS-80 128k Color Computer which I've had loads of fun on so far, I just haven't had a decent way to load other software to it yet haha.

Love the video! Thanks!

I love this type of videos 🙌😏👍

MMMMMMMMH! BEAUTIFUL MINI TOWER!

Do you have a patreon? ...I am extremely thankful for the thoroughness of your content. It is unrivaled on this platform.

Something that would make old PCs through ATs and clones faster was using faster than minimum speed RAM chips. The key to that was the loose tolerances in the RAM timing windows. For example to do a RAM write the RAM had to be ready no later than Y time but *could be* ready as early as X. The minimum RAM speed specified would put the ready time for reads and writes closer to Y than X. Using faster RAM chips would make the RAM available closer to X than Y, closer to the start of the window than the end. If you installed RAM ridiculously faster than the slowest allowed, like 70ns when 150ns was specified, then the RAM would be 'born ready'. The instant the system started the read or write cycle windows the RAM would be able to provide or accept the data *right then*. Then the next read or write cycle could start as soon as the first one was finished. But in some cases the RAM speed made no difference because the computer was designed with fixed length RAM cycles. For example if the window for the start of a RAM cycle was 20ns long it would wait precisely 20ns for the RAM to be ready to begin - even if the RAM was ready to begin a read or write at 1ns after the cycle start window. Then the rest of the cycle would be set to a fixed time, even if the RAM was able to be read or written in half the time. The computer would sit there for however many nanoseconds twiddling its digital thumbs until the end of the cycle and the next cycle start window. One place you can easily tell the speed difference is in an IBM PC/XT that has the audible ticker and number count on screen during POST. With the 150ns RAM specified it goes *TICK* *TICK* *TICK* *TICK* *TICK* *TICK* *TICK*. Put 70ns RAM chips in and it goes *BBRRRRRRRRRRRRT* because the RAM is always already ready at the very start of every part of a read or write cycle while 150ns is getting close to being too slow. Back in the day, 70ns DRAM chips were hellaciously more expensive than 150ns. I used to scavenge faster chips from dead "Turbo" 8086 clones, 80286 clones and even some early 80386 clones. The same kind of loose RAM timing was often used in the early times of SIMM RAM, but by the advent of the 72 pin SIMMS RAM timings were tightened up a lot so there was little speed to be gained installing RAM much faster than specified. Could get a *little* bump mostly only detectable with benchmark tests.

A computer video! 😍

The very first computer I owned myself. I sold it back in the days of the 386 to a friend's dad. I was always fearful that I charged him too much for it not fully realizing how much it had depreciated by then. How bizarre that it's probably worth more now than what he paid for it. I had the 2 drive version with the CM-5 monitor and I think I had a Star Gemini 10X printer to go with all that. It came with a full suite of word processing and other office type software. Deskmate I believe.

I used this computer in college up until late 1996. At that point I was mostly using it for word processing (with a dot matrix printer) and very slow internet access through Prodigy.

1000SX machines that shipped with two 5.25 drives had A: on the bottom drive. The one we had is still in the parents’ basement in near mint condition. We Used it from the time we got it in the mid 87 until 92 or so.

Great video. I'm in the process of doing many of these upgrades to my 1000 SX right now. I've ordered a math co-processor - I got the C8087-2 with the gold on it. Is there any difference between the ones with the gold and the ones without?

I keep hoping to run across one of these or a PCjr. We had these in my computer class in '87. Funny thing was, they were bought new at that point so I'm guessing the school got a pretty good deal on some old stock. Was my first intro to PC's and GWBasic. Prior to that all I had was my Atari 400 and a tape drive, so everything was an upgrade for me. :)

Update on my Tandy 1000sx. It now has a ISA IDE to SD card with MSDOS 6.22 and I'm getting DRAM to upgrade it's memory to max at 640K! Update! The Tandy is now at 640KB of memory!

that was simular to one of my first PC's i had and learnt on

You should look into getting an IDC crimp tool, ribbon cable on a roll and the connectors to make cables yourself! I've found it to be way easier and reliable, and in the long run, it ends up saving money if you find yourself fixing up stuff from back in the day regularly.

This take me back we owned a Tandy 1000 TX with 768k of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. It was one of the ISA hard drives on a card. Plus we had a 3rd party keyboard which was an omikey keyboard with dip switches for configuring the keyboard and one of the combinations of the switches made it compatible with a Tandy 1000 computer thanks to a PS2 to Tandy adapter. Also it was a very clicky keyboard. But sadly the keyboard met its sad demise on a base board heater. But our tandy met its sad demise when it refuse to boot anymore because of the hard drive dying. If i still owned that computer I would have replaced it with some sort of flash solution and also the Keyboard was dying as well. We also had the Tandy printer that was capable of printing in color. My dad got a 1200 baud modem so he could do his school work since he went back to college at the time.

Got one of these cheap a while back and it came with a Tandy-specific hard card, which is miraculous because I never would have found one cheap otherwise. Got a TRS 80 3000 keyboard to use with it, which is pretty badly yellowed

That PC was used for the POS I worked for RS, I know a lot about the company and the parts

Of funny! I put an inport Microsoft mouse in my SX as well. Just feels like it fits! Nice and period-specific.

How did you get the RAM working properly? I bought the same Texas Instruments 4256 10NL chips. I also read that that 15NL should be used. I was wondering what you did.

Too bad you couldn’t have found one of those floppy drives for the Bondwell laptops you had. I would love to have seen those work.

Man I wish I still had my old Tandy computer that I got from a yardsale when I was a kid, but my mom made me give it away to some of her relatives that were visiting from Texas :(

• I've seen some keyboards that have a Sleep key in the same place as that Hold key. That's even worse because instead of just pausing the (ACPI) system, it puts it into standby mode which is not just really annoying, but it adds a power-cycle, and thus wear-and-tear to the components, especially the hard-drive. • If the dust caused problems that bad, I would assume Tandy Labs' "new" tobacco-stained HX will have problems too. ☹ • The stripes don't mark pin 1, they're just a reference to make it easier to plug it in the same way on both ends, so you can plug it in upside down, as long as you do the same on the other end (assuming the cable doesn't have a key-pin). • You like the sound of old hard-drives? 🤨 Including old RLL/MFM drives with interrupters? 🤔

That adress at NJ is now a Subs Store "Blimpie"

Great video. I wonder if that CF benchmark was bottlenecked by the hardware it is plugged into haha.

Tandy 1000 SX owner since 7 years, it's really great to see. Mine's mostly full now, serial, 2 lpt, 640k, 31mb rll drive, 360k drive, adlib, etherlink III, rtc, Iomega zip, syquest sparq and a trackball and I also have a couple of questions: I wasn't aware of that dallas rtc, it'll be much more useful than having that isa card taking up a slot. Do they work in any mother boards, or is it just something that works on tandy 1000's ? And also, will you keep that scsi card ? I may buy it off of you if not too expensive (ebay prices are way out of my reach for those...), been looking for an 8bit scsi card with a boot rom that would work in my tandy, I have only 16 bits ones that don't work in it, tho there is still one I haven't tried yet, I'll give that a try later. As for putting a 720k drive, I don't really see the point in doing so, it it for convenience ? If so, why not just put a zip drive or any other big capacity media that can go on a computer like this ? Even if it is an XT there is still a lot of options.

I'll bet you're fun at parties :) Just kidding, I loved the information. Our family had one of these when I was 12, so it brought back so many magical memories... Programming in gw basic, playing Thexder, buying my first Sierra graphical adventure game at Radio Shack (Space Quest!) Simpler times.

I had both.. and several other 1000's later on in generation

Hi, was wondering if you know about the audio subsystem? My 1000SX stopped producing sound from the audio chip. I still hear beeps from the PC speaker, but the 3-voice audio no longer plays. Any ideas? Thanks

Had the NEC CPU, math coprocessor, 640 memory and a 10 MB hard drive. Later I added a 1.44 MB floppy.

Great

Still have my Tandy 1000 with two 5.25 floppies; RAM upgraded to 384K.

Could you please show that SCSI drive in action (in part III maybe)?

It would be great if you could demonstrate a gotek drive on an old PC machine!

I had a Tandy 1000 with 3.5 floppy drive. and it looks like yours on screen. my Tandy 1000 came with a hard drive and some games like: Roboman, Battle Chess, Tetris and some kind of word document with if you can I did find program the Tandy 1000 Hard Drive drive.

hi kevin your awesome!

What connection do the floppy drives have? I have this exact computer with dual 5.25" floppy drives, and I am looking to connect the drives to a USB adapter I have, to read my old discs! EDIT: I guess you show the connection at 17:39 and explain it afterwards.

My first DOS computer was an XT, with the MB replaced with a 286 after a few years, so I never owned a Tandy. I was unaware that the Tandy 1000 used the same joysticks as the TRS-80 Color. That was the first computer I ever used. Unlike the Atari and other game systems, the TRS-80 Color joysticks were analog, offering excellent positioning control for games that utilized it. The compact flash card interface is a more elegant internal storage solution than the full length ISA "Plus Hardcard 40" that I installed in an thrift-store sourced NCR PC4, a two floppy all-in-one PC clone. It seems your biggest disappointment with this Tandy 1000SX is the keyboard. It would probably cost more than all your other upgrades combined, but if you can find a Northgate Omnikey, I understand those had dip switch settings that would make them compatible with the Tandy 1000 series, were "clicky", and had a 101-key layout. Looking forward to Part 2... Would love to see a benchmark comparison with and without the math co-processor.

Nice video. Out of curiosity would you ever do videos on old Macintosh computers?

I need a V20 and XT-CF adapter for mine, fortunately it already has a 3.5 inch drive, albeit 720k.

Nice! Are you coming back to vintage computers?

The number 5291 at 17:43 probably means that it was manufactured in the last (52nd) week of 1991.

I didn't even know there was a Tandy 1000 AX, I've never heard of that.

Best way to remove permanent marker is to use Rainex and a cottom swab. It works flawlessly on ABS plastic

Really cool! Would windows 3.11 work on it?

13:16 Bent pin on one of those RAM chips

Hi All, nice video, i really hate those Dallas chips, my P-100 has one and i have purchased 4 replacement chips that are advertised as new / refurbished / working - and none work, i have given them to a friend who done the remote battery mod and i use either a CR2032 housing or a 2 x AA battery housing and only 1 works, but there is a catch, you need to remove it , wait 30 seconds, insert and reboot, you get 1 chance, it always detects the hard drive irregardless, but it will only save the data once, i get 1 chance for quick reboot and then the HD works, after that its is nothing. You can try all you like it will not work unless you power down and then pull the chip out and start again. As for the CF card, i have a Pentium 2, and it runs a IDE2CF card with a 4Gig card, it is partitioned with 2 x 2Gig, with Windows 98, it works fine and is very fast, initial fdisk and formating from memory was very fast - Yes mine also doe snot have access from the rear of the card and i need to open the case, but that is about 2 times a year i need to do it as the machine has a USB cat 5 network card and USB2 add on card via PCI bus BTW if you go with Gotek, there is a simplified win 3.1 modified image that runs on a single 1.44 floppy, it is auto boot and unzips into ramdisk ( you need 8meg or more ) Win 3.1 runs well, just remember if you want to save any documents to save to a real floppy or change the gotek drive letter Regards George

Hi. Looks like a pin is not in on one of the RAM chips on the 2nd bank, closest to the vent slots.

Did you ever get a Gotek working on the SX? Much as I tried, I simple could not get it to work.

Out of curiosity: why did you insist on making the 3.5" disk drive the A: drive? As far as I know, booter games always came on 5.25" floppies, so wouldn't it be more practical to keep the 5.25" drive as the A: drive? Or did the Tandy 1000 allow booting from either the A: or B: drive? The dual floppy PC we had at home when I was a kid had a BIOS that could only boot from the A: drive, or the hard drive, if one was installed, but not from B:. I know there was this software that allowed you to create a special chain load disk that you would put in the A: drive that would make the computer boot from B:, but that would still be less practical, since you would have to put that helper disk in your primary drive, whenever you would want to boot something in B:.

Love that machine, it’s just to bad that the audio out port is only outputting one of the 3 voices (4 with the DAC)

Weird how the Tandies went with the same inscrutable designations that car companies use to confuse us on their car models/trim levels (SL, SX, HD, etc)

😎🍻👍

Did you ever get the math coprocessor? If so did it make a difference? Thanks

Pretty sure that doesn't say 96 on the warranty sticker but 90...