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Not Mine Tandy TRS-80 Model 2000

..link? I don't know if she still has any left but Cindy at electronics-plus in Kerrville, TX also had a few of the systems but not sure about keyboard or monitors.
 
I guess it was BIN? Just for the record it sold
Sold for:
US $275.00
Shipping:
$75.00 Economy Shipping | See details (this is calculated from Dallas, TX to me in Austin, TX lol).
 
Yes that's the one. It's an interesting piece of history but difficult to find any software for it. I have one, I've seen another person (well the person above) had 3 when I was there but again software isn't common. It's interesting to me just based on the fact that not many computers used the 186. I'm pretty sure I just have the desktop though not sure I even have the peripherals to work it (can't recall if they're common place or proprietary). I think the mit-a mentioned they had software for theirs and I was possibly going to copy it last time I was up there but that fell through for whatever reason.

I'm a little surprised at the end price but again since I haven't seen a complete system very often that could be the rarity issue. If it had software I'd understand the price though.
 
It may not but it implies supply and demand, at least supply and demand to the ebay market. However I don't remember the original auction so this also could have not been supply and demand but 1 persons demand at a BIN price due to lack of other options or finds.
 
Chuck(G) said:
This is the not-quite-compatible-80186-based 2000? Why would anyone want one?
Click to expand...
It's a bit like owning a Rainbow -- they were unique... VERY unique and brought to market in 1982 a few things mainstream PC's would take quite some time to catch up on...

They were GREAT for Autocad or Prodesign for example; both had native graphics drivers for the 2K; when most PC owners were stuck at 720x384 or 640x200 monochrome, the 2K delivered 640x400 16 color. You could take them up to 768k of RAM that DOS would see and use, and by some minor board and ROM changes (actually just relocating the ROM address) you could take it all the way up to 896k of usable DOS RAM; of course that they were a 8mhz system a good year or two before we had clones that even came close to it's speed... and in keeping with Tandy's business models of the time, there was a Xenix release for it.

Many programs that 'didn't work' usually the only problem was the different video offset for 80x25 mode, easily fixed with a disassembler, debug, and looking for anything that moves B000 or B800 into ES...

For Tandy collectors the 2000 ranks up there as one of the more desirable models; at the very LEAST comparable in my mind to the Coco 3. I've always regretted parting with mine back in the day as it was one of my first two x86 systems (alongside a HS-161 luggable).
 
The Tandy 2000's 640x400 graphics mode was actually only 8 colors. The catalog also listed a "TV/Joystick Adapter" option, but I've never seen or heard of anyone having one, and even the Tandy 2000 FAQ suggests that it might have been vaporware. I suppose that was intended to offer CGA emulation, because the 2000's finely-drawn 80x25 text mode font would not have been readable on any TV set or color composite monitor.

For a while Radio Shack had ads comparing the Tandy 2000 to the IBM AT, trying to make the 2000 look like the superior machine because it had a 7.16 MHz processor and 768K of RAM while the AT was only 6 MHz and 512K. But in the real world, the 2000 often feels even more sluggish than the 4.77 MHz IBM PC, because the limited amount of DOS software which would run on a 2000 (such as WordStar) would go through DOS to write text to the screen, which is the slowest way of doing it, compared to directly accessing the video hardware on the IBM PC.
 
Yer right on the color depth to an extent, but you could trick 16 colors out of it -- check the manuals it talks about "8 out of 15" colors on the high res colour board, you could coax all 15 on screen at once, though it wasn't always useful -- kind of like showing all 64 colors at once on a EGA.

... but the clock speed you're way off. It was actually 8mhz, and for 'real' computing (actual number crunching/data processing) it did give the AT a run for it's money -- though to be fair a PS/2 Model 25 could give the original AT a run for it's money on those tasks.

Are you thinking the later 1000's? EX/HX/SX -- THOSE ran at 7.16, but were also 8088's compared to the 80186 in the 2000.

... and as to the video, again a LOT of software could be patched to run just as efficiently, and if you had anything that supported the graphics modes native it pwned every other option until the EGA came along. Pretty much every CAD software of the time had drivers for it; that's what I was using it for at the time... Prodesign II on a 2k connected to an 11" roland plotter.
 
OK, I stand corrected, it was 8 MHz... but Tandy did definitely try to directly compare the 2000 to the IBM AT. Maybe with software specifically written for the 2000's hardware it could keep up with an AT, but when running generic MS-DOS software that "played nice" enough to work, it was quite slow.
 
There were several other "also rans", including one that I worked on using both an 80186 and an 80286. Both chips were available pre-production at almost the same time--and both were rather buggy. One bug that I recall shed some light into the inner workings of the 186. It manifested itself in things suddenly and unexplainedly crashing when running normal OS tasks, but CPU diagnostic software would run for days without issue. The crashes were seemingly random and widely-spaced. It turned out that in early steppings, DMA activity would clobber the SI and DI registers.
 
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