Comment by badc0ffee
10 hours ago
I never knew about this poem. It's a factual observation of that era of computing.
To this day, people getting into retro computing are disappointed by the Tandy 2000 and other non-PC compatible MS-DOS machines. (I get it, having passed up on an AT&T 6300. But if you wanted to give me a DEC Rainbow or Zenith Z-100 I wouldn't say no).
I still freakin' love the Tandy 2000 because it was an absolute beast compared to most of the competition at the time—a true workstation class machine at an affordable price for 1983. Yes, it was doomed to fail in the coming PC-clone onslaught. So were a lot of machines.
What did it use for expansion slots? I've seen pictures of the motherboard, but can't really identify what goes where. I don't see any 8-bit ISA slots (which makes sense, as it has a 16-bit bus), and I don't see 16-bit ISA slots (which makes sense because IBM didn't invent that standard until a year later! Also 16-bit ISA would have too many address lines for this thing.)
The Tandy 2000 had four custom slots that only accepted their own card format. Here again it was doomed to failure and it's kind if a shame because the cards were easy as balls to install: the cards were mounted on metal trays and slid in horizontally, guided by rails in the chassis, and did not require the cover of the machine to be removed for insertion or removal.
Only a few expansion options were available, all from Radio Shack: a color graphics option (640x400x8 colors in 1983!) for which you had to procure the matching monitor, a memory expansion (up to two could be installed for a total of 768k, by stacking RAM chips some aftermarket vendors got this to 896k), a bus mouse adapter/real-time clock combo board, and I believe an external hard disk controller. One expansion, the "TV/Joystick expansion" which would give the 2000 composite out and access to joysticks for gaming, was planned but (to my knowledge) never released. As far as I know only one graphical game saw commercial release for the 2000: a special build of Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Still is just a bit true to today with all the walled gardens.
It pops up every few months or so on here, and I have to upvote it every time.
I had a DEC Rainbow but I don't know who ended up with it. I also had a Sanyo MBC-555 which had quite good graphics considering but was very much one of the "almost-compatibles". Most things usually failed with the rather opaque "INTERRUPT TRAP HALT" message.