[rescue] rescue Digest, Vol 68, Issue 12

[wa2egp at att.net]

> For a while. after Radio Shack gave up on marketing their Tandy 2000[0] system 
> they took their remaining inventory and deployed one to each store for store 
> automation running Xenix, allowing them to avoid plowing unmarketable technology 
> into the (literal) ground.[1]
> 
> Lionel
> 
> [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_2000
> 
> [1] http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/1999/1/1999_1_64.shtml

The 2000 was built not PC compatible because Tandy feared being sued by IBM.  All its software had to be specially written to take care of different interrupts, memory configurations and video.  It was better than the XT of the day (80186, almost EGA video for example).  Ones I got from store dumpsters ran DOS not Xenix unless they were ordered to reinstall DOS which I doubt since most managers wouldn't even bother (I worked for them at the time).  Most people would pull them out of dumpsters because they also had cell phone programming software on them. :)  I ran AutoCad (2.5 IIRC) on mine, even designed a room I was building on it.  Never got a mouse nor an internal hard drive working on it (WOW, 10 megs!).  Did mod a memory board so I had 768K of memory.  Had to get a memory manager since the software of the day actually counted memory and when it hit 640K it would reset to zero so I never had enough memory. :)

Bob