Welcome back to part 5 of my fifth SepTandy Spectacular. In the last post we took a the Tandy 600, the the ill fated successor to the Tandy 200. In this post we'll have a look at Tandy's first IBM Compatible laptop: The Tandy 1400LT
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Released in 1987, the Tandy 1400LT was meant to adress all the wrongs in the Tandy 600 line, and be an affordable DOS laptop for those on the go.
Similar to the Tandy 1000 line, the 1400LT was meant to be an answer and competior to an IBM machine, in this case, the ill fated PC Convertible.
The Story of the PC Convertible begins in 1983, When IBM were coming with new ideas for machines to coninue the success of the IBM PC and XT. One idea they had was a laptop similar to the Tandy Model 100, codenamed "Sweetpea", but the design was rejected by Don Estridge for not being PC compatible. Then in 1984 they produced a P-14 prototype machine, but it failed to pass IBM's human factors tests, especially after poor public reception of the display in the competing Data General-One.
IBM eventually came out with the IBM 5155 Portable Personal Computer in Febuary 1984. It was a luggable computer meant to compete with the Compaq Portable. While the 5155 sold well, it wasn't nearly as successful as the Compaq Portable.
But then in 1985, Japanesse electronics giant Toshiba introduced the T1100, A 9 pound, fully IBM Compatible Laptop with an incredibly sharp and readable LCD Screen.
The T1100 was one of the first devices to use an STN (or Super-Twisted Nematic) LCD display to give it an exceptional clarity for time. An STN LCD is an LCD based on a technology that twists the crystals at an angle of around 180 to 270 degrees. The result was a display that was sharper, had the ability to use passive matrix addressing for simpler control of the pixels in the LCD, and much like the TN (or Twisted Nematic) displays they were based on, they were cheap and consumed very little power.
As a result the T1100 was for its time, very lightweight, had exceptional battery life (Of around 8 hours), was fully IBM Compatible, and had a very readable LCD Display compared to other machines of the time. As a result the T1100 was an imediate success and became the first mass-market laptop computer.
IBM took note of this and got back to work on a laptop machine that could compete with it. The result was the IBM PC Convertible (model 5140), launched on April 2, 1986 at a retail price $2,000 dollars. The Convertible got its name as it was designed to be kind of like a desktop replacement machine, as you could actuallly remove the LCD Screen and use it with a full sized monitor at a desk, allowing you to have the same machine at home and on the road.
Though the machine had some success with buisness users, it still ended up being being a market failure due to its high price, limited expandability and ports, and its older specs (it used a 4.77 MHz 8088 at a time when PC's were moving toward the 8 MHz 8086 and 80286). also the screen suffered from readability issues and was soon replaced by versions with screens with both supertwist and a backlight.
Though like other IBM computers, the Convertible did attract attention from other manufacturers looking to capitallize on the market with Tandy being one of them, But Tandy traded the convertible design in favor of including proper ports at a lowerprice.
The result was the Tandy 1400LT Released in 1987 at a retail price of $1,599 dollars.
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On the front of the machine, lies LCD display, dual 3.5 inch floppy drives, Indicator lights for NUM lock CAPS lock and SCROLL lock, standby, and low battery, and the keyboard.
On the right side, is the contrast adjustment wheel, the power switch, and the boot exchange switch. The boot exchange switch is for switch between the internadrives and optional external drives
On the back, there is an 15V DC adapter port, an unsed memory expansion port, a monitor switch, floppy drive port, a printer port, an RGB video port, a composite video port, a slot for an optional 1200 baud modem, an RS-232 Serial port, an External floppy dirve port, and an extermnal keyboard port.
Alothugh the machine doesnt have the same removable screen feature of the IBM PC Convertible, it still can be used in a similar way thanks to the option of using an externail keyboard and monitor. The video out ports are properly CGA compatible, and can use any RGB or Composite monitor you want from the IBM 5153, to the Tandy CM-1, to color TV set.
Same for the keyboard, its a standard XT Keyboard port alloing you to use either an IBM Model F, a compatible 3rd party keyboard, or Tandy's own XT/AT compatible Enhanced Keyboard.
Combine that with the fact that the power switch is on the side rather than a being a more modern soft power key on the keyboard and that means you could effectivly use the 1400LT like a desktop. Granted it isn't as convenient as the IBM PC Convertible and it would be kind of a pain because theres no auto switching so you would have to switch the keyboard and displays everytime manually, but you can do it and have the same machine both on your desk at home and on the road with you.
On the Top there is the battery compartment for holding the rechargable Ni Cad Battery a ventilation grill, the model badge
And finally on the bottom, You have a carring handle, a volume knob for the PC Speaker, a small grill for the PC Speaker, and the expected model information sticker.
Powering on the Model 1400LT is much like other DOS PC's of its day. Just insert your DOS disk in Drice A:,Your Program disk in Drive B: and turn it on.
Much like the 1000, The 1400LT was bundle with DeskMate as an optional opperating enviorment. And its pretty similar to the version included with the original 1000's, its a basic text based version giving you some basic home productivity aids.
Aslo included is a built in setup program accessible by Ctrl + Alt + Ins. Here you can set things like the standyby time, change the CPU speed, and wether or not you want to use the built in dispay and keyboard or an external one.
For storage, you have the previously mentioned one or two 3.5 inch floppy drives, as well as the option of using external drives. Altough the port looks similar, its incompatible with the external floppy port for the Tandy 1000 EX and HX. But Tandy did offer am external 5.25 inch floppy drive from Weltec for $249.00 dollars.
With this drive you could not only use 5.25 inch double density disks with the 1400 LT, but you can boot from them too! by adjusting the Boot Exchange switch, you can set it to either make the 5.25 inch drive the C: drive or the A: Drive. That was a big advantage over the IBM PC Convertible, which could only use 3.5 inch disks only.
That was a big disadvantage because at the time, 3.5 inch disks were still new and while they were steadaly growing, software company adoption was slow. So most of the most popular productivity applications were still on 5.25 disks and unless you had a PC with both 5.25 and 3.5 drives to copy your programs and they have no copy protection, getting any sort of software for 3.5 inch drive based laptops was incredibly difficult.
As for Hard Drives, the 1400LT initally had no way to add a hard drive, but Tandy did offer a 20 MB hard drive option for $1199 dollars. later users figured out how to replace the floppy drive with a hard drive and Lo-Tech later managed to make an XT-IDE adapter that could plug into the unused Expansion slot and use a Compact Flash Card as a hard drive.
Periferals are also well accounted for on the Tandy 1400LT, as you have standard Parrallel and serial ports for connecting everything from printers, to modems, to mice. Though theserial port shares the resources with the internal modem, so you can't use a serial mouse and the modem at the same time. Either way it was also a huge advantage over the PC Convertible which went with an IBM PCjr esqe side card expansion system based on a propriatary ISA bus to add a printer, Video out, and even Serial and Parralel!.
Other perrifreals and accessories included an MS-DOS/GW-BASIC Guide, an optional carring case, and an extra rechargable battery pack.
For hardware, the 1400LT uses an NEC V20 CPU clocked at 7.16 MHz with the option to switch it to 4.77 MHZ for compatibli, 768K of RAM, and use a 16K BIOS ROM from Phonix Technology for IBM XT Compatibility.
The LCD screen that's capable of displaying text at a resolution of either 80 Columns by 25 rows or 40 Columns by 25 rows as well as bit mapped graphics at a resolution of 320x200 or 640x200 for compatibility with IBM's CGA.
It also has a small PC Speaker for sound, and runs on rechargable 12v 2200mAh NiCd battery pack (With an Approximate 4 hour battery life) or the previously mentioned 15V power adapter.
Softwarewise, Obviously it can run MS-DOS and is IBM Compatible, but you would think that it would also be compatible with the verneable Tandy 1000 line as well, considering they share similar names right? Well... No, it isn't compatible with with the 1000 line at all. It really is just a regular IBM Turbo XT Clone in laptop form.
But thats not to say there isn't a lot of software you can run on it. It's a fully IBM XT compatible laptop that can run any type of software you can throw at it, ready to take on some of the most popular productivity programs of the day from Lotus 1-2-3 to Dbase, to Word Perfect, to Quicken.
Games are also plentiful for the 1400LT, as it can run any game made from 1981 to around 1989 without a hitch from Microsoft Flight simulator, Paratrooper, and the Atarisoft arcade ports, to Sierra AGI adventure games, Tetris, and Prince Of Persia.
The 1400LT is also unique in that its one of the few IBM Compatibles that used full compatibility with IBM's CGA Composite mode allowing for certain games to have more color on the screen than the traditional 4.
So how did the 1400LT sell? Well it seems like third times was the charm as the 1400LT had decent sales success. Reviewers praised the machine for its feautures, display and price and its not hard to see why. It provided about everyting the PC Converible could but included a faster processor at a lower price. Though the Convertible did win out on battery life (running for around 10 hours instead of 4), the Tandy proved to be the better machine.
The 1400LT was followed up by the 1400FD, which was lighter, omitted the composite video port, and had an external floppy drive connector, and the 1400HD which replaced one internal floppy drive with a 20 megabyte hard drive.
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All 3 continued to be sold by Radio Shack until around 1991. Not a bad run for Tandy's first laptop PC Clone and it had considereably more success than the Model 600. As for collectors today, while they not be the most Ideal MS-DOS gaming computers, they do hold their charms and are cetainly worth a look to explore the late 80's portable pc experience.
And that concudes my look at the Tandy 1400, a decently designed and decent sales success that got tandy making DOS machines for users on the go. It may have not been the best machine in its class, but managed to cover enough basis to make it fairly popular enough amoung the PC crowd. This concludes part 5 of my fifth SepTandy Spectacular, tune in next time as we move from laptops to PDA's, by having a look at Tandy's ZPDA series.