My First Computer: The Tandy 1000HX

Tandy 1000HX ComputerIt was my tenth birthday. I spent the afternoon in downtown St. Louis with my dad. When I came home, there was a computer in the living room, a Tandy 1000HX.

“Happy birthday,” my mom said.

“You got me a computer?”

“No,” said my dad. “It’s the family computer, not yours. It’s your birthday present, but not your computer. You have to share it with your sister.”

The computer was primitive by today’s standards, but even in 1990, it was far from top of the line. It had just 256 kilobytes of RAM, as well as a single floppy drive. However, it had MS-DOS burned into its ROM chips, so unlike the Apple IIs at my school, I didn’t need a special boot disk.

The Tandy 1000HX had more than just MS-DOS on its ROM chips. It also had GW-BASIC and an odd little shell called DeskMate. DeskMate looked like an odd knockoff of Microsoft Windows, but it didn’t require a mouse and didn’t have any third-party apps. Still, it was useful. It had a text editor, a primitive database, a drawing program and even a music composition app.

I had to share the computer with my parents and my sister, but i was still the system’s primary user. I had a lot of experience with MS-DOS and GW-BASIC, so I took to the computer like a fish to water. And though I’ve had many other computers over the years, I still have fond memories of my Tandy 1000HX.

Steve Lovelace

Steve Lovelace is a writer and graphic artist. After graduating Michigan State University in 2004, he taught Spanish in Samoa before moving to Dallas, Texas. He blogs regularly at http://steve-lovelace.com.

You may also like...

14 Responses

  1. tandy says:

    Hi.

    If you have Tandy 1000 HX, can you dump BIOS by DEBUG.EXE?

    C:\VERIFY ON

    C:\>DEBUG

    -N MYF000.BIN

    -R BX
    BX 0000
    :0000
    -R CX
    CX 0000
    :8000

    -M F000:0 8000 0100

    -W 0100
    Writing 8000 bytes

    -N MYF800.BIN

    -M F800:0 8000 0100

    -W 0100
    Writing 8000 bytes

    -Q

    C:\>copy /b myf000.bin+myf800.bin final1.bin

    C:\>DEBUG

    -N MYE000.BIN

    -R BX
    BX 0000
    :0000
    -R CX
    CX 0000
    :8000

    -M E000:0 8000 0100

    -W 0100

    Writing 8000 bytes

    -N MYE800.BIN

    -M E800:0 8000 0100

    -W 0100

    -Q

    C:\>copy /b mye000.bin+mye800.bin final2.bin

    C:\> DEBUG

    -N MYC000.BIN

    -R BX
    BX 0000
    :0000
    -R CX
    CX 0000
    :8000

    -M C000:0 8000 0100

    -W 0100
    Writing 8000 bytes

    -N MYC800.BIN

    -M C800:0 8000 0100

    -W 0100
    Writing 8000 bytes

    -Q

    C:\>copy /b myc000.bin+myc800.bin final3.bin

    I want the following files.

    myc000.bin myc800.bin mye000.bin mye800.bin myf000.bin myf800.bin
    final1.bin final2.bin final3.bin

    If you can dump these files, thanks.

    That is the reason I want to emulate Tandy 1000 on emulator. (PCE IBM-PC)

  2. Pat James says:

    This was my first as well, I was 4-5 and it was just before 1994. I remember using Mario paint, playing Out of this World, printing out pictures to color on the snarling dot-matrix. It was a beautiful first introduction into computing, and technology as a whole.

  3. ceyko says:

    Yeah, I remember lobbying for a whole year to earn/beg enough money to upgrade it from 256K of RAM to 512….pretty sure that was the worst money ever spent. 🙂

  1. April 19, 2013

    […] Mainly we used BASIC. I was pretty good at it, especially since my mom and dad bought a Tandy 1000HX for our living room. Though programming on an Apple was quite a bit different than programming on a […]

  2. April 19, 2013

    […] year or two later, I got my own computer, an IBM-compatible computer known as the Tandy 1000HX. I quickly got adept at dealing with both GW-BASIC and MS-DOS. But even though I was pretty good at […]

  3. April 26, 2013

    […] lights came back in an instant, with no flicker or warm-up. The computer screens shone as if nothing had happened, and streams of sunlight came through the windows once […]

  4. March 1, 2014

    […] was a pretty big nerd as a kid, to put it mildly. After getting a Tandy computer for my 10th birthday, I became a big computer geek throughout my teenage years. Some time around […]

  5. June 15, 2015

    […] taking a floppy or cassette tape from one computer and sticking it into another. My first computer had no modem, so this was the only way to exchange data. But my second computer had a modem, and it […]

  6. February 2, 2017

    […] been a computer nerd for most of my life, and while it’s easy to get nostalgic about vintage computers, it’s also good to remember just how far we’ve come. A few months ago, I talked about […]

  7. February 7, 2017

    […] This was my favorite birthday for many years. My dad and I spent the day running around downtown St. Louis. I don’t remember all the places we went, but I know we went to White Castle. Don’t laugh. At that age it was going to a gourmet restaurant. Afterward we went back to the farmhouse we rented in East Carondelet, Illinois, where my parents gave me my first computer. Our first computer. It was my present, but not my computer. I had to share it with my parents and my sister. Still, I was the main user, and to this day I still have fond memories of our Tandy 1000HX. […]

  8. February 9, 2017

    […] on an Apple II in my gifted and talented program. I also played around with it quite a bit when I got my own computer. But these early versions of BASIC were crude even by the standards of the time. So when I got my […]

  9. March 1, 2017

    […] family got our first computer back in 1990. It was a Tandy 1000HX that was already out of date when we got it. It worked well for what I wanted to do with it, but by […]

  10. April 26, 2017

    […] owned a number of computers over the years. Growing up we had an old Tandy 1000HX, a Frankenstein 386 and an Apple Performa 6200. All of these were family computers. Though I was […]

  11. November 21, 2017

    […] This is meant to be literal. You shouldn’t hoard all the Halloween candy. You should let your little sister use the computer sometimes, et cetera. That’s not the kind of sharing I’m talking about. I’m […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.