Intel 8086 40 year anniversary edition and my first pc was the Tandy 1000sx

Tue Jun 05, 2018

Intel announces a 40 year anniversary edition of the 8086 processor

Intel is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its incorporation this year with plans to release a commemorative version of the 8086, the chip that marked Intel’s transition from a memory supplier to a microprocessor vendor. According to Bryant, Intel plans to give away 8,086 of them (natch) through giveaways and other methods.

Officially, the Core i7-8086K is an 8th-generation microprocessor, with 6 cores and 12 threads.

this bring back a lot of old memories from my childhood.

my first pc was bought at my local radio shack in my local mall, walking distance

the tandy 1000sx



i asked my parent to buy the more expensive cm-11 monitor. i had them upgrade the memory to 640k.

it had dual 5 1/4 floppy drive

it had a nonstandard keyboard

i didn't know it or appreciate it at the time but tandy enhanced the graphics with 16 color graphics and 3-voice sound which the standard ibm pc and clones did NOT have.

i told my parents this was an educational investment  

i had an education in tandy 16 color graphics and 3-voice music in such classics as

black couldron




king's quest



thexder


rampage, ninja shogun, space quest police quest gauntlet bard's tale and small games like alley cat and spacewar chess

I and one other kid i knew had a tandy 1000. the more advance tandy 1000tl. with 80286 processor

one guy had the original ibm pc

and another friend from school had the
leading edge model d



later, one classmate got the original ibm ps/2 model 50 with monitor. his family were laundrymats but they still paid for the ibm ps/2 and paid $4000+ (!) for monitor pc

and it didn't offer game graphics and sound like what my lowly tandy 1000sx with its 8088 7.16mhz processor did.

when it came to dos gaming the tandy 1000 series had a unique 16 color graphics and 3-voice sound, that when run on ibm pc, leading edge model d, ibm ps/2 model 50 gave just 4-color low res cga graphics and beeps, no sound.

my friend with the leading edge model d, had all these awesome sierra games, games like space quest and police quest and



but he had only regular cga graphics and his speaker was just beeps and boops. tandy 1000 can play actual music. in some ways it was like the commodore amiga but dos compatible

other kids had the commodore 64, the apple 2e and apple 2c, and even the apple 2 gs,

same age as Charle Brown and his friends

a few months after i bought the 1000sx tandy came out with the newer 1000tx with 80286 graphics, 3.5 diskett

i actually wanted a refund on the 1000sx to get the 1000tx with 286 speed.

playing games on a 8088 and 5 1/4 floppy, no hard drive took a lot of patience. it was slow. a 286 1000tx would have made it a bit faster.

at the time i knew dos and i knew basic dos commands like md and cd and dir and copy a: b: and diskcopy a: b:

but i still felt it was magical. that this thing called a computer can take a disk and turn into to a magical world you can explore.

tandy sold a hard drive on a hard card for $799 (!) and 20meg (!) which i didn't buy. too expensive.

i've visited youtube and watched kings quest and black couldron and thexder play through and wow so many memories



while i am envious of today's kids with ps4 and xbox one and COD and starwars battlefront, which i don't have the time to play anymore

as a kid the tandy 1000sx was the ps4 and xbox of its day. there was nothing else to compare it to, nothing else like it.

true the apple 2gs had better graphics, but few games and you had to buy those games which was pricey $80 a title, and apple 2gs was very slow, slower than even a tandy 1000sx 8088

there were software stores back in the day like babagges which had sections one for atari st another amiga another apple and yes a section for tandy 1000, dos and ibm pc jr compatible. those worked

i got a lot of games for it for free by trading with other kids.

when i watch these sierra tandy walk through i'm transported to the age i was a charlie brown.

i found a blog "nerdy pleasures" i don't know who that blogger is but he blogs on the tandy 1000 and what he knows blows me away. i had no idea of the things he talks about.

desk mate wasn't much of a program and didn't have spell check. i actually purchased from radio shack sierra's word processor with spell check HomeWord. it was agonizing but it worked.

and later i got a modem and dial in for email. it used pine

i eventually got a hard drive for it by removing one of the 2 floppies and installed wordperfect 5.1 for dos

it worked was slow.

the thing with tandy is it was software compatible, but when it came to hard ware, the case chassis was only 10.5 inches long but standard cards were 13 inches long. so i couldn't use something like Plus development hard card 40meg for $599, cheaper and twice the capacity because it was 13 inches long.

i also was restricted to tandy dos 3.2 it actually came with tandy dos 3.2. back in the day ibm and clones often sold dos as an extra.

in college there were boards and i found a buyer and i sold it. i actually sold a 8088 back in the day when 486 and pentiums with vga graphics were sold.

sometimes i look on ebay and i think about buying one for old time's sake the problem is that they are often dirty and in crappy condition. also finding software and getting it to work on these old pc is quite a challenge