Product designers at Tandy described the Tandy 600 as a machine with the features that users of the Model 100 and the Model 200 most often requested: an 80-column screen, a disk drive, and more RAM.
Although powered by a CMOS version of the 8088 CPU, the Tandy 600 wasn't IBM PC compatible. It had a 80-column x 16 line LCD display, a built-in 3.5" floppy drive, an internal 300-baud modem and 32 KB of basic battery-backed RAM expandable up to 224 KB.
The Microsoft operating system was comprised of the System Manager that handled file management for the disk drive and Microsoft Works 1.2 which gathered five applications: Word, a word processor whose files were compatible with the PC version of Microsoft Word; Calendar, an alarm-driven appointment scheduler; File, a database manager; Telcom for driving telecommunications activity; and Multiplan, reportedly a "99.5 percent version" of the PC spreadsheet.
Custom applications could be placed in the ROM slot occupied by the Multiplan ROM. All of the applications placed in this slot - including Multiplan and the optional BASIC interpreter - could be copied onto disk then loaded in RAM
The Japanese-made Tandy 600 was a light and well designed machine. However, it quickly suffered from the competition of portable PC compatible systems and didn't sell well.
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