neighorn@qiclab.UUCP (Steve Neighorn) (05/15/88)
A mailing list for Tandy 4000/5000 owners and people interested in the
Tandy 4000 or 5000 has been in existence for several months. The 5000 was
added recently in conjunction with Tandy's announcement. In the past two
weeks I have received mail from several people who had just heard of the
list. It was suggested that I repost the information on how to join the
mailing list, just in case other interested parties had not heard
about it.
The following is an excerpt from the issue #3:
Welcome to issue #3 of the Tandy 4000 mailing list. If any list-members
have questions, comments, or list submissions, I would love to hear from
you.
For automagic inclusion into the next mailing, send submissions to
tandy4k-submit@qiclab
For questions and comments that are not to be included, mail me at
neighorn@qiclab
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The Tandy 4000 SCSI adapter
Here are the CORE27 hard disk test results for Tandy's SCSI hard drive
adapter:
Capacity : 79.9 MB
Cylinders : 304
heads : 16
Sectors/Track : 32
block size : 2048kb
Data Xfer Rate : 500 kb/second
Avg Seek Rate : 31.7 ms
Track-Track seek : 13.8 ms
Performance Index : 4.706
Norton gives a Disk Index of 4.2 on the same drive. The controller works
quite well, and I encountered no incompatibilities, with the exception
of Microport Unix/386, which does not support SCSI adapters.
One further note : Don't give up on good old Western Digital ST506
style controllers yet. I have been testing a WD1006 controller in
an Everex 386/20 for the past week, and the same CORE27 test on that
machine with a CDC 70meg hard disk revealed a 480 kb/second transfer
rate. I told the local Tandy people about how well a 1:1 interleave
controller can perform, and they said "Hold tight, you may see
something from Tandy any day now..."
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They were right, because two days later, Tandy announced their
Tandy 5000 MC, a 20 Mhz 80386 IBM Micro Channel machine. The 5000
comes with:
- 2 MB of RAM, expandable to 16 MB via 2 dedicated 32-bit memory
slots.
- Intel 82385 Memory Cache Controller. 32k of static RAM cache.
- Built-in VGA graphics. Also supports MCGA, CGA, and EGA.
- 5 IBM Micro Channel expansion slots, plus two dedicated memory
slots. Two of the MCA slots are 32-bit, three are 16-bit.
- Built-in 1.44 3.5 inch disk plus three front panel device slots.
- 80387 socket. Math coprocessor runs at 20Mhz.
- Built-in serial/parallel/mouse ports.
- ST506 MFM controller provides 460kb/second. Supports two 3.5 inch
hard drives: an 84meg with 15msec access, and a 40meg with 19msec
access. Also available with ESDI controller for 1MB/sec xfer rate,
and a SCSI adapter for multiple SCSI devices.
The pricing information for this machine is as follows:
Cat No. Description Retail
------- ----------- ------
25-6000 Tandy 5000 base system $4999.00
25-6001 base with 40meg HD $6499.00
25-6002 base with 84meg HD $6999.00
25-4040 VGM-100 Mono analog monitor $ 199.95
25-4041 VGM-200 Color analog monitor (.42 dot pitch) $ 499.95
25-4042 VGM-300 Color analog monitor (.31 dot pitch) $ 629.00
More information will be included in the next issue of the
mailing list.
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The next issue will be going out in about two weeks.
--
Steven C. Neighorn !tektronix!{psu-cs,reed,ogcvax}!qiclab!neighorn
Portland Public Schools "Where we train young Star Fighters to defend the
(503) 249-2000 ext 337 frontier against Xur and the Ko-dan Armada"