Well it's blogging time again, and It's September again! and it means another SepTandy Spectacular! This year, I'm taking a look at some of the more obscure machines that havent been mentioned much and didnt make much on an impact.
So far in these SepTandy Spectacular ive covered pretty much every famous computer in Tandy Radio Shack's history incuding the TRS-80 Model 1, 3, and 4, The Tandy Color Computer, and the Tandy 1000. But there were other machines in Tandy Radio Shacks history that didn't quite land the impact the other machines did.
So thats what I plan to look at this month, well be looking in the years from 1978 to 1993 at some of these lesser known machines. For Part 1, were jumping back to 1978 and starting with the Tandy 10.
The Tandy 10
Released in 1978, The Tandy 10 Business Computer System was Radio Shack's first attempt to make a business-oriented successor to the TRS-80 Model I. It boasted more RAM, Higher capacity disk storage, and a beteer text display. Unfourtunatly, the computer ended up being a flop and was discontinued after 2 years.
The story of the Tandy 10 begins in 1977 right after the introduction of the TRS-80 Model I. The computer sold even better than Tandy was expecting it to, encouraging them to expand more into the Personal computer market.
Demand ended up being so high that Tandy opened dedicated computers centers just to keep up. The first Tandy Computer Center opened on November 10th 1977, in Tandy Center Mall, The shoping mall situated in the middle of the complex for Tandy's headquarters in Fort Worth Texas.
The first Tandy Computer Center store (1978)
The store not only carried Tandy own computers, but also computers from other manufacturers including MITS, SWTPC, Polymorphic and more, along with perifeals, software, and documentation.
By that point they also started to consider making a complementary machine to the TRS-80 aimed at the buisness market. While the TRS-80 was mainly designed for hobbist, home, and educational use, it wasnt as suitable for larger buisnesses. It's screen was lower resolution than most terminals, the disk drives used lower capacity 5.25 inch disks, and it was typically a spagetti of cables required for periferals.
Tandy figured if they could offer an integrated machine with larger drives and a better display, they could take a chunk of the larger computer market dominated by companies like IBM and Wang Labratories.
So develop the hardware, they partnered with a company called Applied Digital Data Systems to OEM one of their data entry systems for this new machine.
They were founded in 1969 by Leeam Lowin and William J. Catacosinos, and manufauctuerd early MOS/LSI integrated circuits and computer terminals. By the late 70's, they were the largest independent supplier of video display terminals, making them a perfect OEM canadate.
The result war the The Tandy 10 Business Computer System, Released in 1978, exculsivly sold in Tandy Computer Centers for $9,995 dollars, with a local installation fee of $150 dollars, and a local maintenance fee that ranged from $100 to $125 dollars.
An ad for the Tandy 10 in H&E Computronics magazine (1978)
The computer itself was a rebadged version the ADDS System 50, which itself was a variant of the earlier System 70.
The computer itself is an all in one unit integrated into a desk with the computer and floppy drives integrated into a desk, similar to other data entry machines like the HP 250.
The front of the Tandy 10
On the bottom left you have dual double sided 8 inch floppy drives, Providing around 1 MB of storage each. far more than the TRS-80 Model 1 and far more sutible for buisness.
The front of the Tandy 10
On the right you have the terminal itself with an 80 coullum screen, the power switch, power and ready lights, security key, carrier and message pending lights, a print form switch, key volume and brightnes knobs, and a dial for online, local, and offline communication.
The terminal of the Tandy 10
And on the back is a panal that reveals the card cage base motherboard, as well as plugs on the back of the terminal for the power, status lights, keyboard and screen, various switches for different settings and a video level knob.
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The back of the Tandy 10
Powering on the Tandy 10, we get greeted with message saying "48K TANDY VERS 2.0" and a farmiliar A> Prompt. Now being from 1978 and being before the release of MS-DOS would imply that this is running Digital Research's CP/M opperating system. But it isnt, its actually running its own OS called ADOS, though i belive it is still CP/M compatible. Oddly enough, though it was advertised to come with Darthmoth BASIC, this vesion only comes with Microsoft BASIC. Not a bad thing though as MS BASIC was a lot more common.
The back of the Tandy 10
Powering on the Tandy 10, we get greeted with message saying "48K TANDY VERS 2.0" and a farmiliar A> Prompt. Now being from 1978 and being before the release of MS-DOS would imply that this is running Digital Research's CP/M opperating system. But it isnt, its actually running its own OS called ADOS, though i belive it is still CP/M compatible. Oddly enough, though it was advertised to come with Darthmoth BASIC, this vesion only comes with Microsoft BASIC. Not a bad thing though as MS BASIC was a lot more common.
The Tandy 10 in Action
For the hardware of the computer itself, It uses a 8080 CPU, 48K of RAM and displays text at a resoluton of 80 characters by 24 rows, supporting upper and lower case, blinking, underlining, reverse video, and half intensity. It also contains a built in speaker for the keyboard to provide some audio feedback from the keyboard for typing.
As for software, they wasnt a lot. The original ADDS machine was intended to be used as a data entry system and not as a standalone computer. It has a form designer; data was ment to be entered into a form and sent via RS-232 to a mainframe. But since the Tandy 10 has a microprocessor, Tandy matched it up with Peachtree Accounting software to market it as a business computer. Unfortunatly, due to the rarity of the computer, I have not been able to find any disk images of any software.
So why did the computer flop? Well there were a number of reasons. For one thing the Intel 8080 was becoming out of date by 1978 as most had switched over to the Zilog Z80. Another problem was system used 2102-type SRAM chips for its RAM. In order to have 48K, the computer required 128 individual SRAM chips onto a single board, which made it power-hungry and highly prone to overheating.
Also becase of Tandy's restrictive distribution, it locked it away from the main customer base of buisnesses that would buy a system like this.
As a result the system sold poorly, being pulled from the market in 1980, just 2 years after its release, and because they were designed to be integrated buisnes computers that were likely ment to be scraped after use, there rare to find today. In fact I was barely able to find pictures of one!
Though its legacy did live on as Tandy went on to make their own buisness computer from scratch more closely following the TRS-80 Model I, that of course was the TRS-80 Model II launched in 1979. It had basically almost all of the features of the Tandy 10 at a base price of $3450 dollars and could be expanded to match the Tandy 10 for a much lower price. Combine that with better visability and marketing and the TRS-80 Model II was able to have much more success in the market.
As for Applied Digital Data Systems, they were purchase by NCR Corporation, then in tern becoming part of AT&T, then becoming independent briefly before being acquired by SunRiver Data Systems. before branching off to become Boundless Technologies and continuing to previde terminals until 2017.
So thats a look at the Tandy 10, Tandy first and most unsuccessful dive into the buisness computer market.It was a computer with good intentions that utimatly fell short due to design and marketing making it an obscure collectors item today. This concludes Part 1 of the fifth Septandy Spectacular, join me next time as we move forward to 1979, and take a closer look at the machine that replaced it, the TRS-80 Model II.