japplega@csm9a.UUCP (Joe Applegate) (04/26/89)
The Continuing Saga of My Personal Experiances with Tandy Part 3 - Living with the 1000A Having discovered that the Tandy 1000 that was sold to me as a compatible was not all that compatible I went on to discover that it was not at ALL compatible... I bought a 20 meg. Miniscribe... Tandy sold their 10 meg drive for $699 and my 20 meg cost me $300... BUT IT WOULDN'T WORK... one of the hackers in our user group fixed it by cutting traces on the Western Digital card and burning a Tandy HD ROM for that card! Heaven help the poor suckers who had to buy Tandy cause they didn't know a hardware hacker! At least this was fixable.... But when I bought a Midi card there was no hope... it did not work and no one knew how to modify it... I stil have an MPU 401 setting in my closet for the day when I can finally afford a REAL IBM compatible to put it in!!! For now I still use my Coco for Midi and have even written a program to convert OPCODE patches and CAKEWALK sequences TO CasioLib patches and CocoMidi sequences.... oh well... but one does get tired of having you freinds make fun of you cause "you bought a Tandy"! Then I wanted a co-processor... I went down to Quest Electronics and bought an 8087-3, which is what we used in our IBM's ... but everything that used double precision reals came up with major errors... I went through 3 chips and was finally told by Quest that my machine must be broke... The local Radio Shack Computer Center told me that I had to use Tandy's 8087 because they were higher quality (???)... since I knew that the drives were the cheapest Teac makes I had my doubts about this BUT.. I finally ordered their co-processor FOR $239 (the IBM 8087 cost only $105!) and when it came the only difference was that it was CMOS... I tried to return it since I could get the same chip at Quest for $130 but no returns were allowed on "special orders"! Needless to say at this point I was incensed... when a user came to our user group with the same type of experiances that had bought several Tandy's for his business I encouraged him to write his experiances in a letter to PC magazine and warn others about Tandy computers! He did and it was published... When Christmas came I started going to Radio Shacks and talking customers out of buying 1000's... I used to go talk them into Coco's mind you! We started a BBS for Tandy users, unable to get support from Tandy... and our user group grew to over 200, mostly disgruntled Tandy customers! Several of the wierdest experiances with Tandy came as a result of my dealings with their personnel... once while in a Computer Center they tried to kick me out because I told a customer that the reason the Memory Plus board they sold him didn't work in his 1000 TX was that the 1000 TX already had a memory plus board in it! And all he needed was new chips and moved jumpers... the salesjerk who'd been with Tandy several years said I didn't know what I was talking about and refused to honor their 30 day return policy... Another time, we were adding an 80 station lab on campus and I went to several vendors to get quotes on 286 machines... I went to Tandy and talked to a salesmen I'd known for several years... when I asked for Hercules cards in a 3000 he did not know what a Hercules card was???? Then he said, "we're new at the PC business"... of course Tandy had been selling PC clones (or so they claimed they were) for 4 years!!! Tandy was UNABLE to match our hardware specs... 286 w/ coprocessor, Hercules Graphics, 20 meg HD, Ethernet cards... they gave us a quote for systems without Ethernet and with EGA... and their quote was higher than ALL other quotes! (by far more than the cost of EGA I might add!) My final dealing with Tandy occured when they asked us to evaluate the 4000... the machine had a drive cable that was so short it kept popping off everytime we opened the case and even when we moved it! It had 1 meg of memory that required a Tandy specific EMM... with or without that driver... Autocad and Personal Consultant both sensed the menory but were unable to access it... and both aborted! Typical Tandy engineering! I for one will never buy another Tandy computer.... and I will and do encourage anyone who comes to me to avoid Tandy computers like the plague... As our Tandy rep once told my boss, "You need to do something about Joe, he is anti-Tandy"... to which my boss replied "After his experiances he has a right to be" Joe Applegate Pres. Colorado Color Computer club Pres. Denver Metro MSDOS Users Group PC Coordinator - Colorado School of Mines Computing Center
pak@meccsd.MECC.MN.ORG (Patricia A. Korn) (04/27/89)
I have also owned and loved Cocos for years, but most of R.S.'s periferals are indeed junk, particulary the printers, as you point out. Except I rather liked their CGP-220 ink jet, which they, of course, discontinued seeing as how it was (and still is) the best supported color printer for the Coco. Anyway, I was just going to comment about their repair service. Sometimes they do O.K. and I have generally got stuff back from them that works in a reasonable amount of time. But sometimes, you wonder who they have working for them - my brother bought a Coco 3 which did not work properly and took it to Shack for repair. He thought they had fixed it, and not having used it much, sold it to a guy in our users group. The computer had severe overheating problems and after an hour or less would not work at all. He put a heat sink on the CPU which caused it to work somewhat, but it was still rather flaky. Then someone in our users group looked at it and discovered that Tandy had installed the Coco 2 version of the CPU! Wouldn't you think that the dealer could at least put the right brain into the thing? Pat