Tandy Compooters

In 1990... something... it was the early 90's, that's as much a gray area in my mind as a hippie in the 70s.
Anyway, in 1990-something, my parents bought my family our first computer: a Tandy T-1000. I think.
No, not the terminator, try far less advanced. A computer that took a second to think of the answer to 1 + 1, flash the screen, and then display the answer.
I've mostly seen that it was sold in Radio Shack stores which is odd seeing as how my family got ours from Service Merchandise.

Does that logo do it for you? No? Well, I tried.

I've looked online for pictures of this computer and have come up short in all areas. I'm not even sure if it was a T-1000 model or beyond. We got it for $1000 and as we were paying for it, the dealer said it was already obsolete. Go figure.

My parents got the computer for my brother and I to learn things but there was nothing to learn. Come to think of it, I don't remember my parents ever using the Tandy to do anything besides my mom trying create a shopping list, and it even failed to do that!

It came with this giant laser printer that used a dot matrix instead of actual characters, it was loud, useless, and I'm pretty sure never worked to begin with. It had to be fed with a stack of paper that we kept under the desk it was on. The paper stayed there for years until we finally decided we didn't need any of it anymore.

My brother and I used it to play games whenever we weren't absorbed by the Sega Genesis or cartoons. We had Wheel of Fortune and an Indy racing game we had somehow come into possession of. There were pathetic paint and hangman programs but those are barely worth mentioning. I spent a lot of time racing the wrong way on the track of the Indy game, wrecking the other cars and not bothering to actually play it. I think my brother beat it once and the ending was just a few pictures and then it restarted.

The programs ran on, I kid you not, floppy diskettes. If you wanted to do some painting, you'd have to find the diskette and pop it in. Wanted to type something? There was a separate program on another diskette. Needed to look up a word in the dictionary? You had to go find the book. There wasn't even a dictionary in this thing!

We had an AOL floppy diskette and I, not knowing much about computers back then, tried to use it. Someone from the place my dad used to work at gave him an external Pentium modem. We never bothered to hook it up since my parents were thinking of buying a new computer.

After they had bought the "newer" computer (an underpowered Gateway for, again, $1000), we gave the old Tandy to a neighbor of ours. He cracked it open he was amazed at what he saw: the thing had no hard drive. The entire computer was running off of the DOS! And not MS-DOS, mind you.

The whole memories of the Tandy computer are just that: memories. It played no important role in my childhood or even life for that matter. I've simply written this blog to find out if anyone else had one of these atrocities, or something as equally as bad.

Leave a comment: what was your first POS computer?

Back-to-school Shopping? Not hardly.

The idea of this blog came from a Retrojunk.com article that anyone born in the 80s or early 90s should read.

<<REWIND Growing up, I remember when I would go back-to-school shopping. It usually involved getting new shoes, new clothes, a new backpack, a haircut, etc. The usual fare that goes with the times. It was exciting, not knowing what to expect and often being surprised by things.
>>FASTFORWARD My senior year of high school: I wore the same clothes, had the same notebooks, and didn't get my haircut the week before. I went into the year not knowing what to expect as everyone else does but it didn't intrigue me as it did when I was younger. I knew that most of the people were coming back to the same school, we even had Myspace to keep in touch over the summer.
<<REWIND Back then I didn't know who was going to be in my classes. I hardly ever used the phone since I was either too busy having fun or never got friend's phone numbers.
>>FASTFORWARD These days my cell phone never leaves my side. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned note writing during classes? My friends and would always play Messenger to one another and  we never got caught.
<<REWIND I was the awesome kid that smuggled toys in his Ninja Turtles bookbag.
>>FASTFORWARD I was the geeky guy that carried a Bible in my books. Still awesome, but not as awesome as that sweet GameBoy bookbag I once had.

This thing? Yeah, believe it or not it was awesome.

Well... it was awesome when people weren't pretending to play it while IT WAS ON MY BACK! Yeah, you jerks.
I suppose that's enough for now. A decent first entry I'd say. I've got more to come.