This is not that Tandy 1000 however, this Tandy 1000 was found at Value Village in Everett WA in 2007. THere was also a Tandy CM-5 color monitor I missed out on that probably went to this computer there too. I only paid $10 for it, in I believe September or October of that year. It was pretty much a mint 1985 Tandy 1000A when I started, with the 640K memory expansion board already installed, and dual Floppy Drives (no hard disk).

I took some initial gut shots of the machine the day I got it in 2007 and as you can see it was a pretty bone stock machine at the time. I already had an XT at the time, and sorta' kept this one third in line (as I also had a Tandy 1000 EX that I snagged at Goodwill just the week before), and had to order a Tandy 1000 keyboard for it.

Early on I ran it off of Floppies only and highly considered keeping this as a bone-stock collectable. However, the lack of a nice and new-like keyboard, or a proper Tandy monitor, started minimizing what could be done with the machine. During that time, I ran the default Tandy 1000 MS-DOS 2.11 diskettes from TV Dog's (Tandy 1000) Archive. It was used with a IMTEC EGA monitor, and later a NEC MultiSync JC-1401 Monitor that was a Boeing surplus item..

Later on, about a year later, I got one of the early XT-IDE boards from VCFED (then called "VCF" or "Vintage Computer Forums"). I believe it's a REV 1.1 board, back when they were still 40-pin IDE. The Tandy 1000 got a 540MB Seagate Hard Disk installed in it, crammed into a cardboard "drive cage" I built with Duct-Tape - so as to hide the fact this computer had now been modified. It also had an ethernet card added to it though I did not get that going until about 2009 or so. This was pre Mike Brutman's mTCP suite, so I was using Microsoft LAN Manager 3.0 on it at the time using NDIS2 drivers and the basic redirector to connect to my home LAN over TCP/IP.

Later On, about 2010 or so, I decided to pull one of the Floppy Drives to keep the other as a spare in case the one I had wore out. So instead, I used a 3.5" to 5.25" drive bay adaptor from a $2 ZIP Drive I got at Goodwill (which went in one of my 486 machines), I ripped the faceplate off, and replaced it with a duc-tape attached metal mesh overlay from the Antec 300 tower my Pentium D gaming computer had at that time as a form of ventilation for the HDD, and a future spot to friction-fit a HDD Activity LED into the front.

Later on the LED was added to the Tandy, which was a nice addition because I corrupted a few programs shutting it off just as it began a read-operation from the HDD as I had no way to tell if it was doing anything or not. Initially, this was mounted into that front "basket" of sorts.

From about 2011-2016, it was one of the sole survivors of my first great "retro-PC Purge" when I almost quit this hobby entirely. From that point on, it lived as a part of a retro-gaming setup on a Mitsubishi CS-1984R Color TV, running in Composite mode (which it looked pretty darned good on that TV. The TV died in 2013, and was later replaced by a silver Trinitron set. For awhile, it got the Advanced Information Concepts SCSI Controller and an 800MB Macintosh IDE HDD out of a Mac Performa for storage, after the 540MB Seagate bit the dust.

In 2016, the Tandy's 800MB Drive died, so the controller was sold, the drive recycled, and then the XT-IDE went back in it again, this time with a 8GB Seagate HDD installed (same one that's now used with Creeping Net 486, and may have a future in the FMA3500C). However, in 2017, the 15GB Maxtor in the 486 died, so I replaced it with the drive from this Tandy, and threw in yet another spare I had laying around at the time that I've completley forgotten what it was, I think it may have been a Quantum drive in 540MB or maybe yet another Seagate (probably the 540 from my GEM 286 I had at the time, which was upgraded to SCSI w/ a 2X CD-ROM at that point using an Adaptec SCSI/FDD controller).

Later in 2017, I got it's current primary monitor, a 1988 NEC MultiSync II JC-1402HWA 14" MultiScan CRT Monitor. It was found at "Computer Surplus" in Redmond WA down the street from Microsoft CORP - where I worked - in the recycle pile, on top. I saw it had a 15-pin to 9-pin adapter and thought this was weird, but when I took it home, it was cantankerous at best, it had a cracked planar board I bodge wired back together and put a new DB9/DE9 female connector on. This allowed me to use this monitor with ALL of my vintage PC's including the Tandy 1000A. This was the first CRT Device I ever truly (and successfully) repaired.

In 2018, development began with making a lightpen that summer, as I was curious about why the Tandy 1000 had a lightpen port (at least, why the early 8088 models did), so I got a pinout from service manuals at TV Dog's Archive and started bread-boarding and hacking-together various early attempts at a LightPen - with some results coming darn-near-close to working! Mind you, I'm pretty much a hack, maybe low-level-intermediate at best, with my electronics skills, so a lot of this was trial and error, but I came darn near close to getting a working result. I have since shelved it and am waiting for a better time to experiment. This included the purchase of an AMF barcode reader pen and experimenting with getting a signal off of that as well.

The second 540 drive started failing, so that was swapped out in 2019 with a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter, and a 124MB Seagate hard disk from a NEC UltraLite Versa I bought that wound up being for parts, ended up becoming the Tandy's primary hard disk from that period onward. The drive was put back in it's nice little place behind the floppy drives, and the second floppy drive was reinstalled. I believe this was done PRIOR to #SepTandy 2021 or 2022, when I finally upgraded the XT-IDE controller - still on it's circa 2009 firmware, to the modern firmware most people are using on their XT-IDE cards today (including an ability to reconfigure from the HDD being added).

Currently, the Tandy 1000A runs primarily as a DOS Gaming machine and internet connected Telnet Bulletin Board surfer aimed at games from the PC/XT era, and games that take advantage of the Tandy 3-voice sound chip. It's been used for the #SepTandy videos up to present, and in 2023 really went overtime making them prior to the move.