Welcome back to part 8 of my fifth SepTandy Spectacular. In the last post we took a look the Tandy WP-2, a dedicated word processor that scoed big in the budget writing market. In this post we go back to PC's with the Tandy 1100FD.
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Released in 1989, the Tandy 1100FD was was an early subnotebook laptop designed to run MS-DOS.Like the WP-2 and the 1400LT, It could be considered to be another close cousin/spiritual successor to the Tandy 100.
In order to understand why Tandy created the 1100FD, you need to look at what was happening in the computer industry around that time. By the late 80's, Battery powered laptop portables were starting to become the standard for computing on the go. Improvements in LCD displays had help bring along laptops that were smaller, lighter, and power consumtion droped so much it was possible to run it off batteries rather than be tied to an AC Outlet, making them much more viable for portable computer usage than CRT's.
The industry was starting to imbrace the 3.5 floppy disk format which brought similar advantages in addition to providing twice the storage capacity. Laptops were also starting to catch up with desktops in preformace. Toshiba had introduced the T3100 in 1986, equiped with an Intel 80286 CPU and an EGA compatible Gas Plasma Display, it was the first AT compatible Laptop.
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By 1989, laptops had advanced considerably. NEC had introduced the ProSpeed 386CSX that year, making waves as the very first IBM Compatible laptop with a color LCD Screen as well as includong a Intel 386 CPU as opposed to the 286. Displays were also advanceing to flouresent based Paper-White Backlighting, power saving mesures were startinf to be included to improve battery life, and machinesw like the Macintosh Portable introduced built in pointing devices.
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But there was a problem, Most of these Laptops were still pretty big and bulky and were still very expensive at around $5,000 to $11,000 dollars, while machines like the older Tandy 100/102 were retailing for $599 dollars. It didnt take long for manufactures to come up with the idea to marry the power of an IBM Compatible Laptop with the smaller form factor of the Tandy 100 line, giving bith to the modern Notebook computer.
The first company to take a dive into this idea was NEC once again, who introduced their Ultralite Notebook commputer in 1988, for $699 Dollars.
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The Ultralite was very small at 1.4 inches tall when closed, and weighing just 4.4 pounds, making it the smallest and lightest laptop availible at the time, and very close to the form factor of a laptop today. The way they acheved this was by ditching an internal floppy drive, and instead using a battery backed RAM based hard drive, propriatary RAM and ROM Cards for storage and loading additional software like Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Works.
While it was certainly an impressive deivce, it ended up failing in the market place due to the lack of a proper hard drive, and the use of the slower 8086 CPU. Still other manufactures toyed with the concept, with machines like the Zenith Minisport and the Compaq LTE appearing not long after the Ultralite's debut, journalists began referring to any A4-sized computer as "notebooks", to distinguish them from the larger laptops.
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Much like other Tandy Portable computers, Tandy OEMed the design from an existing computer, in this case the Panasonic Business Partner CF-150B. It's exactly the same, except it lacks the backlight the Panasonic model had.
The Tandy 1100FD was released in 1989, at a retail price of $999 dollars with the price later dropping to $799 dollars.
On the front of the machine, lies the LCD display, with a contrast slider to the left, the keyboard, and a latch to lift up the lid.
On the right side, you have the built in 3.5 inch floppy drive.
On the back, there is a panel revealing a slot for an optional 2400 BPS dial up modem, a parralel port and a serial port.
On the left side, there's a 9.5V DC power jack and the power button.
On the top theres a compartment for the rechargable battery and the cover for the modem upgrade.
And finally on the bottom, there's nothing more than some rubber feet, and the expected model inforemation stickers.
Powering on the 1100FD drops you sraight into a version of DeskMate, where your free to either use the built in programs or boot to the included version of MS-DOS on disk. There is also a ROM based drive with some basic utilites as well
Storage wise, you have the internal 3.5 floppy drive, but oddly enough, Tandy never made any external drives for the 1100FD. However it is possible to use external parralel port drives like a Microsolutions Backpack Drive or even an IOmega Zip drive with a newer version of DOS.
Other perrifreals and accessories included the afformentioned Modem option and extra rechargable battery packs.
For hardware, the 1400LT uses an NEC V20 CPU clocked at 8 MHz (with the option to run at 4 Mhz, Yes 4Mhz, slower than the original IBM PC!), 640K of RAM, and use a 32K BIOS ROM from Phonix Technology for IBM XT Compatibility.
The LCD screen is a 7.7 x4.75 inch STN, green monocrome display using an MN5504 Chip Set 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 1800mAh Lead Acid battery pack (With an Approximate 5 hour battery life) or the previously mentioned 9.5V power adapter.
Softwarewise, Much like the Tandy 1400LT, the 1100FD is effectivly an IBM Turbo XT Clone, So its basically a middle of the road machine when it comes to proformace. Its not as slow as a stock 4.77 Mhz XT but not as fast as a 286 either. It can be slightly picky about what games you run on it, So some older PC Booter games will run too fast and anything made after 1990 or so will run too slow. Also the LCD screen has a considerable ammount of ghosting so fast moving action games are not suitible either.
However, considering who this machine was targeted at, which would have been mainly buisness users, it worked fairly well. Programs like Lotus 1-2-3, Dbase, Word Perfect, Quicken and others work just fine on the 1100FD, and in addition to the Serial and Parralel ports on the back to connect up modems and printers, it could effectivly give you a portable office you throw into your breifcase and take with you from buisness trip to buisness trip.
So how did the 1100FD sell? Answer: Fairly well. InfoWorld gave the 1100FD a score of 6.4 in comparison of other notebooks in their March 19, 1990 issue, putting it at #4 for the 8 machines they tested, behind the Compaq LTE, Compaq LTE 286, and the Toshiba T1000SE.
The 1100FD was followed up by the 1110HD in late 1991, which had a faster 10 Mhz CPU and a 20 MB Hard drive. Unfortunatly, these used a 2.5 inch ide-xt hard drive made by conner which is notorious for being prone to failure overtime making them unusable without a boot disk as DOS was supplied on the HardDrive instead of in ROM.
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Both to be sold by Radio Shack until around 1993, around the time Tandy sold its computer buisness to AST. 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 1100FD, a middle of the road, but admirable notebook for the buisness market that remains a nice collectible today. It may not have the same appeal as something like the IBM thinkpads or the Copaq LTE series, but still manages to hold its own as one of the smallest laptops of 1989. This concludes part 8 of my fifth SepTandy Spectacular, tune in next time as we move from laptops to back to desktops, by having a look at Tandy's first IBM Compatible Laptop, the Tandy 2000.
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