This mini forum is intended to provide a simple means of discussion about the Tandy Radio Shack  2000 computer. If you want to share your own experience or memories, or add relevant information about this system: post a message!

Your release date is off by two years. It was released in September, 1983, not in 1981. The 80186 didn''t exist in 1981, came out in 82. The PC/XT had just barely come out in 1983 as well, and the Tandy came several months later.

I loved my Tandy 2000 with its 3 volumes of instructions, including one for Basic, one for MSDos and one for Multimate.
It also had an Edline program for making a simple data base.
A program on one disc allowed for converting Multimate files to simple ASCII which allowed me to convert to be usable on a later computer. It was a workhorse. I was not interested in games, but more important was the ease of typing and editing a document. The printer did a nice job. It certainly beat using a typewriter!

There are some incorrect data in this article.

The drives are merely 5-1/4 double density 80 track, 720 KB capacity. These drives had been used for years earlier on the TRS-80 Models I and III. Nothing special, they DO NOT require the high-coercivity 1.2 MB floppy media as used on the IBM AT. In fact, the format is identical to that used by the later 720 KB 3.5 inch drives introduced with the IBM PS/2. The Tandy 2000''s 5-1/4 inch drives can in fact be replaced with the 720 KB 3.5 inch drives and freely exchange data on the very same disk format as used by any IBM compabibles using the 720 KB 3.5 inch drives. NOTE this DOES NOT include the later high capacity 1.44 MB disks!

As for the "80186" having done in the Tandy 2000 as a viable product in the computer market, this is hogwash. This article fails to mention that ALL software programs that run on the IBM''s 8088 run with no problem on the 186. The 80186 is a fully-compatible superset of the 8088/8086.

Probably what this author actually means is that the Tandy 2000''s hardware is not fully compatible with the IBM PC, and this was the reason it ultimately did not succeed. While probably true, the Tandy 2000 did survive in the market for 4-1/2 years, much longer than any of the other "workalikes" that were not fully compatible. Many of the bestselling software titles for the IBM like Lotus 1-2-3 and AutoCAD were published in versions customized for the Tandy 2000. For a full list see the Wikipedia article on the Tandy 2000, alot of which I wrote.

Tandy 2000 was impressive on its floor stand, in fact the Tandy/TRS-80 nameplate rotates 90degrees to be cosmetically correct when vertical on the floor stand. Unfortunately only the green screen monitor had a cool stand matching the floor stand cosmetics, I guess because the color monitor was bigger and heavier it didn''t have a raised stand available. Special version of Lotus 123 was superior on this computer than the competition for a year or 2 before they stopped supporting it.

Please, correct the release data, was introduced december 1983, not 1981.
Note that a XT compatible the same year of the orginal IBM PC release is a nonsense.

This was my second computer. I had an elaborate setup of boot disks that allowed me to run a C compiler completely from ramdisk for amazing performace. I used that to learn C programming in college. But the compatibility of this thing was terrible. I think I paid about $3,000 for it back in 1984.

I have restored one of these machines. For some reason I like this machine (perhaps precisely because it is the red-headed step child), but the physical organization of the case is a nightmare. Removing any drive (floppy or hard) is a major undertaking. You cannot remove the floppy drive cage without first removing the hard drive.

It''s also interesting in that the bus connectors are the 96-pin euro-card style (same as the modern N8VEM project).

The newest version of MS-DOS available for this machine is 2.11.03, not 2.0 as in the description.

I am creating floppy images for this machine (DOS and applications) and BIOS snapshots, available at http://166.70.81.49/clc/tech/retro/tandy-2000/. This is a work in progress.

I don''t care what barriers were thought to be the problems with it I usted disliked the system in general. My dad and a friend of his bought out the RS computer store in our city and bought home something like 30 or so of these nightmares. I did just to be fair try to work with them, but I never could get the HD cards I had to work with these. I have to admit that I dod not know as much about networking as I do now but the Coxal cable never would work. Eventually I gave up trying and went back to my Tandy 1000, and the systems turned into Field Mouse Condo''s for the next 2 years till they managed to donate to some school in Mexico. Good riddens to a piece of junk.

the problem had little or nothing to do w/the 80186. The problem predominantly was the location of the video ram, not to mention the chipset it used (different set of registers). S/w written for a cga/6845 would choke due to the fact that nothing it would look for was there! There are other aspects of the h/w that made s/w go bonkers. There are fully compatible 80186 systems out there. They may have required a bit of tweaking, but the ''186 alone is not a barrier to compatibility.

The Tandy 2000 was equiped with 2 double sided Quad Density 720K floppy Drives, not single sided High Density as stated in your description.