How the Tandy 2000 doomed Tandy computers

The Tandy 2000 was aptly named. It was twice as good as the Tandy 1000 in nearly every way. But it wasn’t even half as successful. In this blog post, I will explain how the Tandy 2000’s commercial failure and its reliance on Microsoft Windows set the tone for subsequent Tandy computers and perhaps even doomed the whole product line.

Tandy 2000: Clearly too good to be true

Introduced in September 1983 and released November 28, 1983, the Tandy 2000 was a halfway point between the IBM PC/XT and the not-yet-released IBM PC/AT. It featured the Intel 80186 CPU running at 8 MHz. It also included 720k quad density 5.25 inch floppy drives, and high resolution 640×400 color graphics with a choice of eight colors from a palette of 16.

The result was twice as fast as an IBM PC while preempting IBM’s improved PC/AT by nearly a year. When it hit the market in the fall of 1983, it was the fastest PC-like computer on the market. And when IBM did get around to releasing something faster, Tandy could position the 2000 as a sensible halfway choice. If the IBM PC or XT was too slow, and the AT was too expensive, Tandy was right there with something just right.

Not only that, Tandy was in a position to do the same thing to Apple. If the IBM PC was too old-fashioned, but the Apple Macintosh was too expensive, a Tandy 2000 running Microsoft Windows 1.0 might have been just what you were looking for.

If everything had gone right, the Tandy 2000 should have done to IBM what the Compaq Deskpro 386 did a few years later. But as you’ve probably guessed, everything did not in fact go right.

Let’s dig into what went wrong.

Limited compatibility

The first problem for the Tandy 2000 was its lackluster IBM PC compatibility. It ran MS-DOS, but it was a special version exclusive to the Tandy 2000. This wasn’t necessarily unusual at the time. IBM PC clones did exist, but it wasn’t clear in 1983 exactly what degree of IBM compatibility was going to be necessary to succeed. And with the Tandy 2000, Tandy got it wrong.

It’s easy to criticize Tandy’s design decisions, but it wasn’t all Tandy’s decision. The 186 CPU was key to the design, providing double performance at a bargain price. The secret was that Intel integrated several other chips onto the CPU, helping to simplify the design and reduce the component count. The problem was that Intel didn’t integrate those components in such a way as to accommodate a fully IBM PC-compatible design. The components were all present, but not necessarily at the addresses IBM had put them. That meant software that went around documented BIOS or DOS routines and addressed those components directly would fail.

Today we can get around such issues with device drivers, but not so much in the early days of DOS.

It’s tempting to blame Intel, but when Intel started designing the 186, the IBM PC wasn’t finalized yet. The target market for the 186 wasn’t IBM PC compatibles. The market didn’t exist yet.

And before we go and say this was a shortsighted move on Intel’s part, early reviews for the Tandy 2000 stated the machine was in short supply because Intel couldn’t keep up with demand for the 80186. The 186 remains an unheralded success for Intel, remaining in production 25 years, until 2007. It wasn’t a great PC clone chip, but it excelled in other applications.

Why Tandy thought they could get away with it

This situation was not completely unprecedented. The predecessor to MS-DOS, CP/M, had a similar situation. Dozens, if not hundreds, of CP/M machines existed, but their degree of compatibility with each other varied. Software publishers had to make a decision how they wanted to handle that situation. Sometimes that meant publishing special versions of the software for specific machines.

Publishers took that approach with the Tandy 2000, at least at first. Within a few months of release, Tandy had arranged for special versions of the most popular IBM PC applications to be produced for the Tandy 2000. You couldn’t necessarily walk into every Radio Shack store and expect to see all of the titles on the shelf to buy that day, but the store could order them for you.

Realistically, any productivity title you wanted circa 1984 had a Tandy 2000 version. But the fear of someday not being able to get that one title you really wanted must have lingered in the back of potential buyers’ minds.

But there was more trouble in paradise with this too-good-to-be-true wonder PC.

Hardware compatibility

The lack of compatibility didn’t stop with the software. The Tandy 2000 was not hardware compatible with the IBM PC either. Rather than implement what we today call ISA expansion slots, Tandy went with their own 96-pin bus. They produced a selection of expansion options for the 2000, but reviewers noted that the add-ons were not as aggressively priced as the machine itself.

Third parties who produced popular expansion options for the IBM PC took a wait-and-see attitude toward the 2000. They had no reason to tie up capital producing Tandy 2000 products until they’d had a chance to see if the machine was going to catch on. This left the 2000 in the lurch. Part of the reason the IBM PC was so successful was because it quickly fostered an ecosystem of third party add-ons.

While it’s hard to blame Tandy or Intel for the software compatibility issues, not using the same ISA bus seems like an oversight. Because it was a 16-bit CPU, implementing their own 16-bit bus is understandable. But including at least a small selection of standard 8-bit ISA slots would have been a smart move.

You may have also read or heard about problems with the disk drives. Contrary to what you may have seen or read elsewhere, the disk drives weren’t incompatible with PC 360K drives. According to the December 1984 issue of Byte, the Mitsubishi M4853 drives Tandy used could read and write 360K PC floppies, they just couldn’t format them at first. Tandy fixed this in 1984 with a software update.

What the critics said

Reviewers had mixed feelings about the 2000. They liked the higher performance, and they liked the price point Tandy reached. They were less happy about the compatibility, noting that Tandy didn’t always deliver updated software titles as quickly as they said they would.

In December 1984, Byte magazine published a comprehensive 8-page review by Mark S. Jennings that was fair. He noted several positive things about the system, while also noting the compatibility problems and the availability problems. Reading it 39 years later, I thought it was a positive review. But positive enough to convince me to buy one? No, if I’m honest.

Infoworld was less positive. Just short of a year after the machine’s release, they were down on the 2000 and didn’t hold back. An article in the August 20, 1984 issue straight up called the Tandy 2000 bad technology at a bad price.

Enter Microsoft Windows

But Tandy had one more thing up its sleeve: Microsoft Windows.

In 1984, the pitchman for the Tandy 2000 was none other than Bill Gates. The ad pictured Gates sitting in front of a Tandy 2000 running an early version of Microsoft Windows. In the very copy-heavy ad, Gates gushed about how the Tandy 2000’s graphics capabilities made Windows look better and how the 186 CPU ran it faster than anything else available at the time.

If everything had gone right, the Tandy 2000 running Microsoft Windows could have been a great combination. In 1984, everyone was talking about the Mac, but it was expensive, and it wasn’t IBM compatible. If a PC running Windows could give a similar experience at a lower price, along with the ability to run popular PC software, who wouldn’t be interested?

The problem was, Microsoft Windows 1.0 didn’t reach the market until November 20, 1985, more than 2 years after the Tandy 2000 reached the market. Furthermore, by November 1985, Intel 80286-based PCs with EGA were on the market. Those machines ran Windows better than Tandy 2000 did, and they were also compatible with off the shelf IBM PC software when running MS-DOS. Tandy’s window of opportunity closed before the Tandy 2000 ever had a chance to catch on.

So while getting Bill Gates to endorse so their computer was a coup, nothing he talked about in the ad was available for you to buy when the ad ran. It all arrived more than a year later.

If Windows 1.0 had been a little less late and a little less bad, maybe things would have been different. Instead, Tandy kept cutting the price to try to move the inventory. Ultimately, the unsold machines ended up acting as terminals, helping to run the store locations.

Some bitter vindication

A small bit of vindication came in the form of the HP 200LX, a palmtop computer introduced a decade later that could be described as a Tandy 2000 shrunken down to fit in the palm of your hand. With a enough built-in software to be useful, it didn’t need 100% compatibility, and was very successful. It proved the Tandy 2000 wasn’t an altogether bad idea. It’s just that Tandy’s timing wasn’t quite right and its execution could have been better.

How the Tandy 2000 doomed Tandy Computers

While the Tandy 2000 floundered, the Tandy 1000 went on to become the best selling computer in the United States for a few years, knocking the Commodore 64 off that pedestal. But I still argue Tandy’s 1983 mistake doomed the computer line.

That’s because from that time forward, Tandy played it safe. Tandy did produce other PCs. But it led with some iteration of the Tandy 1000, even as the design aged poorly.

In 1990, Microsoft finally got Windows right, or at least right enough that people were willing to buy it. Who was ready for Windows 3.0? Everyone but Tandy. It was the exact opposite of 1983, when Tandy was the only one in a position to sell a Windows PC. In 1990, everyone had an affordable 386SX-based PC on the market with VGA graphics. But while everyone else pushed those, Tandy was still pushing three different Tandy 1000 models. Its 386SX was an afterthought.

Even in 1991, Tandy was still pushing Tandy 1000s for home use. It had 386SX and 386DX PCs, but pushed them as business PCs while the growing consumer electronics chains pushed other brands of PCs, preloaded with Windows, at consumers.

When Windows 3.1 came out in 1992, Tandy responded with something called the Tandy Sensation, but it was only sensational compared to other Tandy PCs. A cynical take was it was the machine Tandy should have been producing all along. By then, Tandy was losing money on its computers and pulled the plug soon after.

I think Tandy missed the boat on Windows 3.x because Windows 1.0 burned them in 1983 and 84.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.