mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (01/22/84)
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How about the disk drives? The ability to hold 720K (2 X IBM)
sounds neat, but how about the ability to read IBM disks? I was
looking at a Tandy 2000 one night when a guy walked in with some
disks from his IBM PC. We could do a "dir" on his disks and see
what was on them, but we couldn't figure out how to read in any
of the files... Really frustrating. Supposedly, the drives can
read IBM format files, but we never did figure out how to make
it happen. Does anybody know?
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I saw a demo of the Tandy 2000 at which some people came with discs
written by, compiled on and for an IBM-PC. They plugged them in and
ran the programs, which included cursor movements on the screen but
no graphics. They were impressed with the relative speed of reading/writing
floppies, and of some kind of repetitive computation. The dealer
didn't know a great deal about the machine. They had received it
that morning and had to pass it on to another dealer at lunchtime.
One thing the dealer DID know was that the IBM should not be expected
to read disks written in IBM-format by the 2000, unless a brand-new
disk was used. Apparently the writing heads are only half-width, and
half of the original data that should be overwritten would still be
there to confuse the wider heads on the IBM.
There is some IBM compatibility, obviously, but how far does it go?
The machine looks really nice, and if most programs for the PC will
run, it has a lot going for it. What it doesn't have is a public bus
structure. It seems as if you have to expand with Radio-Shack cards,
taking what they offer at their price. It could be a loss-leader.
Once you get the machine at $1000-$1500 cheaper than the "equivalent"
PC or XT, you then pay more for add-ons than you would for the IBM.
Anyone with further information on compatibility would be much thanked
for posting it to the net. Of particular interest would be C compiler
compatibility (esp. Computer Innovations).
--
Martin Taylor
{allegra,linus,ihnp4,uw-beaver,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!mmt