Kinda late to the party, but I have a few comments. I'm the designer of the Hi-Res graphics card in the M2000. I also designed the Model III/IV graphics cards. I am proud of the M2000 design, as at the time it was the world's fastest graphics card achieving up to 23million pixels/sec writing speed. People NEVER mention that the M2000 was the ONLY computer with smooth scrolling (like DEC terminals) and it could even smooth-scroll double-high, double wide characters. The decisions based on the HW/SW was getting the developers to rewrite applications making DOS CALLS ONLY. The head of Tandy SW at the time was a guy named George Robertson. He firmly (and at times quite LOUDLY, there seemed to always be lots of yelling at Tandy meetings) insisted that no one was going to get access to writing directly to the HW. I was in 1 meeting where I thought he and Mitch Kapor of Lotus were going to have a knife fight in the bathroom. I'll be writing a book, coming out in the fall of 2024 called "Mostly True Tales" about my days at Tandy R&D. The M2000 is just one of MANY examples of the wheels coming off.

I used the Tandy 2000 in the 80's it supported 768KB f DOS addressable memory and the developers at Lotus preferred it, I used Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase, some software had a problem with the video memory location not being the same as the IBM PC; however there was a tool that you could load into the extra 128KB of memory that standard IBM DOS apps did not access that re-mapped the video from the PC software to the Tandy video memory address allowing standard PC apps to run OK on the Tandy. Eventually I had to get a Tandy 1000 which was 100% PC compatible albeit not as good as the 2000. I still have two Tandy 2000s one with the hard drive, they are currently boxed up and have not seen the light of day in probably 15 years

Bought a TI 99 because thats all I could afford, taught myself programming. Scrapped together my pennies and bought dual drive 5150 with all aftermarket addons to lower the price, and it was still a small fortune. Mission accomplished, got a job as a programmer, where I could get a used off lease 6hmz 286 AT for $75, first thing I did was stop at Radio Shack and bought a 10mhz and 12mhz crystals, I was really lucky, mine ran at 12mhz fine. My work AT would only run at 8mhz stable. Years later I went to radio shack to overclock another system, the clerk said we don't sell crystals, but I found them in the electronic parts bins. 😁

as a kid i looked up at the 2000 as the most awsome computer of the time. i miss those days

I had the 1000 RLX Tandy, monitor, keyboard, dot matrix printer, cassette player. The hard drive(20 megabytes) and 3 1/2" floppy drive. The hard disk drive was defective; it jumped between DOS and Desk Mate(nifty GUI) at will. I had a three year warranty, which paid for the new drive, it worked great! I also learned some BASIC programming; I used the cassette recorder with the computer. Years later, the Sensation came out, with a DVD player. I wanted that, but had sunk the money from my grandmother selling my second car, to buy the 1000 RLX.

I have several Tandy 2000s with Vianet capability and a large software library inclusive of Windows 1. I loved the machine. Used it for business. I purchased a PC later for gaming and eventually business and graphic design work.

so i walked into the tandy leather shop in mesquite tx, and while picking up some yards of suede i asked the old woman who was working about the tandy computer company and she had no idea they used to make computers.

My dad almost got this for me... glad he didn't go through with it! Radio Shack salespeople would lie and try to claim that it was fully PC compatible just to make the sale and push the inventory. I witnessed more people return these machines than any other product that they sold. Low and behold the 1000 was a much better machine. Great video Jacob! It really took me back to my young computer days!

The characters on the screen were sharp as a tack. The difference between it and the IBM XT was astounding. It was a cold-blooded machine- booting successfully without it hanging up was an issue.

This was the first computer I ever used. My dad bought one when I was a kid for one of his businesses (he had several...don't remember which one it was for). He put a text-based adventure game called Planetfall on it, that I'd play for hours. This computer is the reason that, to this day, I'm still comfortable using a command line. That was all you had back then!

Seeing what the Tandy 2000 is going for on eBay and the like, I'm starting to regret chucking the two units I had in the garage for years... When I started at the company I still work for today, I brought in two Tandy 2000s, both with the floor stands -- Loved them!

Love the video. Putting together my 2000 now. I have a VM-1 and CM-1 monitor with 2 memory cards so 768k RAM and the external Tandy hard drive. Woohoo

Not sure if this was brought up in the comments below but for clarification - as you said the Tandy 2000 was eventually relegated to backoffice functions running a custom package called SOS (Store Operating System). This ran off of a 2000 with a 10 MB external hard drive and a modem for connecting to Ft. Worth. The integration you mention in the video with the WS-1000 Point of Sale Terminals happened AFTER (or in conjunction with) the retirement of the 2000s. The custom POS terminals connected to a new system over serial which ran Xenix on (initially) a Tandy 3000 HL. The 2000s were not capable of running a multitasking/multi-terminal OS that the Point of Sale system required.

Man computers sure cost a lot back in the day!

The 2000 was actually a machine ahead of it's time. Tandy, trying to compete in the DOS-based market, decided to use the 80186 processor due to to it's superiority over the 8088. I am sure it was naturally assumed that the '86 line was the way computers would go (and, eventually, everything did move that way). However, IBM managed to set a standard with the 8088 and the rest is history. Of note is this: a good portion of the compatibility issues were not due to the processor, but to the graphics. Tandy chose to include higher resolution graphics than IBM, and they positioned the graphics addressing in a memory area incompatible with IBM. As for the catalog of software available, it is true that there wasn't a huge line of software specifically created for or ported to the 2000. However, the Orphans cataloged well over 500 pieces of software which would run on it without issue. There were two Tandy monitors which were compatible out of the box: the VM-1 for monochrome and CM-1 for color. However, other multi-frequency color monitors would work in lieu of the CM-1. Further hindering compatibility was that the BIOS was located on the DOS boot disk, which (to me anyways) makes little sense. They obviously learned not to do this in the 1000 line :P Finally, computer history up until the IBM standards of the mid-80's shows us that almost all expansion cards and connections were proprietary, so it's no surprise that the 2000 would also have such. Though the DB-25 was a standard serial communications port. Thank you for your video, it was a fairly informative introduction, but there's way more to this box than its good looks and awkward system.

Thanks for doing this video! FYI the real reason for the T2000's market failure is that the reigning computer press harbored a hatred for Tandy/Radio Shack and printed malicious opinion pieces on it. Most prominently, ones by a certain Jerry Pournelle of "Chaos Manor" printed in Byte magazine, at the time probably the most influential computer mag of the day. Also the product review printed there, still available for viewing on the web. To these people, they couldn't stand it being a product of the "trash-80" people and sold in neighborhood stores along with CB radios and electronic toys. Word got around and nobody would take the computer seriously, no matter it was the best computer of its day. Oh, and it wouldn't play PacMan or Galaxian... We should mention that Lotus 1-2-3 was the bestselling spreadsheet of the time, and the T2000's max 768 KB of memory meant it could hold the biggest models of any microcomputer, and recalc it at lightning speed. Don't forget also that 1-2-3 also had decent flat-file database capability, and it used the 640x400 color graphics of a fully tricked-out 2000. Yes it was very expensive but no other computer of the day could touch it at any price. Oh yeah, the 720 KB floppy disks made it possible to save giant Lotus models on a single disk as a single file with a single save command!! On a PC/XT even with 640 KB RAM but with only 360 KB floppy disks, you had to segment those giant Lotus models into two separate files and two separate disks, and then later recombine them into a single model when loading back into RAM for further work. Very very big disadvantage!!! Early versions of Wordstar 3.3 and later 4.0 ran fine. For more advanced database work there was the industry-standard dBase II. Of course, the poor sales meant that later Lotus version 2.2, with advanced macro capability, and dBase III would not be made available, and that hurt sales alot more than not being able to run program or game XYZ from publisher ABC. As for me, if you have the very best software of the day -- Lotus, Wordstar and dBase, you just don't need anything else. It doesn't matter that it won't run all those other p.o.s. programs. Lastly, don't forget the Microsoft BASIC interpreter included with the T2000 made full use of its graphics capabilities, and ran much much faster at 8 MHz. This was in 1983. It would not be until 1987 when MS BASIC included code for using hi-res graphics of the EGA board. Back in the day, interpreted BASIC was a serious tool for small business and academic programming. It's only fair to say the T2000 was a most important product of its day and deserves an honored place in computer history! Thanks again, all!

Tandy in many scenarios with their computer models, steered in the direction of being too proprietary vs go with standards pushed in the greater marketplace arena - that they would make this mistake multiple times indicates they were just very slow learners. Getting market share for staying power mattered more that pushing a Tandy-only computing universe

Correction: the 2000s ran the store SOS until 1989. Then they switched to the POS system that used the 1000WS as a terminal. The server was usually a Tandy 4000 running Xenix. When they brought out the POS system they sold the 2000s to willing employees for cheap. I know, I bought one, mainly for the 10 mb hdd and the CM-1 monitor. The 2000s were not stripped down. They had the High res color graphics card drives and 10 meg external drive.

FYI The 1st entire manufacturing run of the 2k was sold to Disney. Disney had proprietary animation software written for the 2k.

The 186 was nearly completely instruction-compatible with the 8086/8088. When it comes to *systems* however, it's virtually impossible to build a PC-compatible system with a 186 CPU, because the 186's built-in clock circuits, memory controllers, and so forth occupy I/O port ranges that are assigned to *different* peripherals in the IBM spec. The Tandy 2000 thus suffered the fate of every other 186-based system out there including the Mindset: it was only "semicompatible" with the PC.

FINALLY!!! Someone else who has heard of the WS-1000! I have been researching those lately with little information found!

Great video. I had never heard of this computer.

And to be fair, if we're going to include the Mac and Amiga in the conversation, then IBM compatibility can't be a fatal flaw.

I would put the Heath / Zenith ZDOS computers in this class, although mine had a hard drive it was not IBM BIOS compatible and could only use the DOS calls. But was able to get around the limitations and use it for years.

Similar to the problems with the Zenith Z-100 and the TI Professional computers. Better in some ways than the IBM PC but different I/O schemes so they couldn’t run PC software that wrote directly to the screen. Those were frustrating years.

Have to admit, this video is pretty well done, and held my attention through. The Tandy 2000 is a very strange machine to say the least, and its nice seeing a video about it. That being said, that looks like a standard 25-pin RS-232. Is the wiring different?

Definitely an interesting machine. And agreed that monitor choices are limited, either a VM-1 or CM-1 for Tandy monitors... or... you COULD use a NEC Multisync II I want to say. Every single one of these I have seen also had a ton of bodge wires like this one did. And you are right, they certainly learned their lesson when they went to make the 1000

What was your source for the information that the 80186 was not fully compatible with the 8088?

I'm confused by one thing. How was the WS "based on" the SL which came "much later?"

HA!, that title is brutal.

Business ORIENTED ... orientated is to say someone has been through an orientation. Oriented means it's geared toward something.

I have one of these. It was my understanding that the machine was made for Windows, rather than the other way around. Radio Shack had so much luck with Microsoft on the Model 1, Color Computer, and Model 100 (all OS written at least partially by Bill Gates himself). The CEO of Tandy, John Roach more or less just submitted the specs Gates gave him. He regretted that decision later. To compete with the MacIntosh, the proprietary floppy drives had to be used so Windows could be run dual disk, and therefore be price and feature competitive. Also. you can use variety of video output solutions. More expensive capture devices work, along with all Diamondtron CRT Monitors, and most NEC Multisync LEDs.

Never saw Windows running on the Tandy-2000 it was just Deskmate.

It would have been illegal to be 100% compatible at that time due to the copyright of the BIOS. Many companies that made compatibles (small ones even) were sued out of existence. Tandy, being a big big company at the time, would most certainly have been sued to death if it had been 100% compatible. Also, the IBM was not golly locked in as the ultimate standard just yet at that time.

We have a few in the museum. They are quite annoying to maintain. Mainly because of the diskdrive(s) and their proprietary format. Also, without (valid) bootdisk inside, the Tandy will only show a blinking cursor. We found a way to write new disks using a 1.2M 5,25" drive. Did you know you can rotate the label? This was to use the stand (as shown on one of the ads). And yes, we have the stand and yes, it's annoying too. The keyboard connector is on the underside of the computer, which is blocked by the stand so you need a... proprietary cable.. yay! Also, there ARE versions with a MFM-disk inside (Tandy 2000 HD) which removes one floppy drive. The idea of Tandy was very good, but they never expected IBM setting a (sort of) standard. Last fact, the Tandy 2000 is Tandy's first 16-bit computer and until the Tandy 1000TL was released, the only real 16-bit machine. The original Tandy 1000 uses, as IBM's PC and PC XT, the Intel 8088 which only has an 8-bit bus so it's more in line with an 8-bit machine.

The machines in the back ran Xenex.

I just found a leather man micro stuffed down the seem if my armchair. That's why I'm here.

Have you ever used a Tandy 2000?

Your completely wrong it ran the store with out terminals sales ticket totals were typed in to the 2K by hand. The terminal you spoke of was connected to a tandy 4000 running SCOUNIX.

I have a Tandy 2000 Network with Vianet, six machines, graphics, multi-boards with extra memory, mouse, modems, and large library of software. Any Interest?😁

The drives WERE compatible with old 360K 5.25 drives. You just had to format the disk to the correct format.

It's amazing that a cheaper, more powerful computer can lose due to not understanding the markets needs

I have the 2500 a much faster pc 386 running at 25mhz with a 33mhz buss the thing hated was how pc makers of that time tried to block you from using any other hardware refusing a standard which come later as this tactic failed I found info on how Tandy tried this with it's monitors a simple missing pin hole prevented any other vga monitor from working on a tandy remove that pin from a vga cable and you got vga with resolution up to 1024x768 but the standard 800x480 looks good on windows 3.0 I refused to buy a pc till they all got past this petty bickering of only use our stuff

NOT REALLY THE 186 IS A CUT DOWN OF A 286

It seems TRS was going more for performance then Compatibility. Sounds an awful like IBM did when the Clones were coming out. Made it even their own IBM programs weren’t compatible with the IBM’s system they tried to make sure clones couldn’t use their stuff. Downfall for IBM And downfall for the TRS 2000’s.

"Oriented" not "Orientated".

What happened to this channel?