Tandy 1000HX The Tandy 1000HX was the first PC I ever bought, shortly after it was introduced in 1987. I paid roughly $1400 for a 1000HX, external 5-1/4" floppy drive, and a CM-11 color monitor. Shortly after purchasing it, I upgraded the RAM to the full 640k and eventually added an internal PLUS 1200 bps modem and DB-25 serial port. I even used this machine to work-out and test the setup of the BBS I ran at the time prior to actually putting it online. QuickBBS happily ran off of it's dual floppy configuration, and I still have the disks for one of my test configurations. I was living outside of Washington D.C. at the time and the BBS was actually run from a friends 'turbo-XT' machine.

The HX came standard with a 720k 3-1/2" floppy drive, with additional space available for a second one. This particular HX I have in my collection has the PLUS memory and PLUS RS232 expansion boards as well as the external 5-1/4" floppy drive. It can boot from either it's internal MS-DOS 2.11 in ROM, the internal 3-1/2" floppy or from the external 5-1/4" drive. At the time of it's introduction, PCM Magazine, which catered to the Tandy 1000 series, asked the question of whether the 1000HX was the best 1000 series machine up to that time. Well, if it wasn't the best one, it was certainly one of the niftiest. Too bad they didn't use the 80286, such as in the 1000TX, and onboard VGA. Some companies did manage to cram a hard disk controller and small hard drive into the case of the 1000HX though, as well as such things as VGA cards and other upgrades. The HX uses an 8088 cpu running at 7.16mhz and shares the same enhanced PCjr graphics modes as most of the rest of the Tandy 1000 line.

As an aside, Tandy has often been critisized for the incompatibilities of it's machines with the rest of the PC-market. What should be remembered though is that upon it's introduction in September 1984, the 1000 series was meant to be compatible with the IBM PCjr, not the IBM PC. Tandy's XT-clone, the Tandy 1200, debuted in November 1984, while the incompatibe but superior Model 2000 was released in November 1983. In this light, since the PCjr was even more incompatible with the PC, the 1000 series had quite a lot going for it, and outlasted the PCjr by roughly 10 years. During the 1980's, the 1000 series had excellent name recognition. With the advent of the SL/TL seriesmachines, the 1000 series became more compatible, eventually gaining the 80386SX cpu at 25mhz and SVGA graphics with the introduction of the 1000RSX. Production stopped when Tandy sold their computer manufacturing facilities to AST Research in May 1993.

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