Restoration of a Tandy 1000 SL: Part 1 Introduction

The Tandy 1000 SL

//Introducing The Computer

    Hello and welcome to Simply//Vintage! My name is Ian, and my plans for this site is to share my hobbies with the world. As of this post I am 22 Years old, finished a degree in Networking, and really enjoy fixing old computers. To the point where I wake up everyday looking at at least Fourteen different computers dating back to the Late 70s. I collect Vintage Apple computers, IBM compatibles, and old 8-bits. As well as cameras, and a bunch of other things, but enough about me lets get working!

    Yesterday, I bought my father's old Tandy 1000 SL off of my brother and what a sorry shape it was in! It had been sitting for years in the basement of our family's home, kept far from the harmful rays of the sun. I remember using this computer briefly as a kid. I mostly used a Pentium MMX machine my father built back in the late 1990s. But I always looked at this sitting on a self in his Ham Radio shack, untouched, longing to be used. 

Over the years it sat there in the corner of our basement collecting dust. When my father moved out in 2005 and my brother took our father's Ham Shack as his bedroom. The Tandy stayed sitting in the same spot, until we moved out ourselves in January of 2017. Where it then sat in the attic of our new home until I asked if he was willing to sell it. One hundred dollars later I was pulling it out of the attic and sat it on my floor.

    

    What a sorry sight... Before getting to the cleaning, let's go over the history and the specifications of this beautiful computer!

The Tandy 1000 was initially released in Fall of 1984 produced as a competitor to and based on the IBM PCjr with nearly identical features. Tandy enhanced the design. The 1000 was an XT class machine, which held at its heart the Intel 8088 processor and 128k of ram, the same as IBM's PCjr. However with 3 ISA slots and more standard I/O it ended up being a better PCjr than the PCjr was with options to easily upgrade the system. The Tandy was also compatible with both PCjr and IBM PC software, a feat the jr could not achieve on it's own. Surprisingly after the commercial failure of the PCjr and IBM discontinuing the product in only a year, the Tandy was able to stay in the spotlight. 

    Tandy changed their marketing from any mention of the PCjr to Tandy Graphics and Sound to avoid the stigma of the PCjr even though they were nearly identical. Speaking of sound, the Tandy shipped with a 3 voice sound card, a noise channel and the ability to also play PC speaker sounds, giving a total of 5 distinct voices.  Much better than the PCjr's sound, just the stock beeper of many PC clones of the time, and a whole 3 years before AdLib would release their first add in sound card. The computer also came with the TGA/CGA compatible 16 color Graphics and an RGB monitor.  Tandy would update the 1000 line through the next 9 years until finally selling their computer division to AST in May of 1993.

        Onto my system here, the Tandy 1000 SL, released in 1989 was already outdated upon it's release. The 286 PC AT was already 3 years old, and the 486 was in development about to be released. However it is its dated 8086 processor that allowed this IBM Compatible to be produced at such a low cost. Shipping with only 384K of memory and upgradable to a max of 640K. This system somehow managed to stay relevant thanks to its strictly for-the-home design. The SL had MS-DOS 3.3 installed in an onboard ROM, alongside Tandy's DeskMate Graphical Shell. This gave the 1000 SL a lightning fast boot time and is ready to work from the second the power is turned on. This made for quite the selling point and probably helped attract my father into purchasing this as his first useful computer.

I have already gone through the System, thoroughly cleaned, and lubricated the drives, and have got it to a fully functional condition. There are still some loose ends to tie up on it though. Over the next couple of days I will be going through the restoration of this wonderful computer that I am so very grateful to finally own after all this time! So check back for Part 2 where we go over cleaning the system and seeing it boot for the first time!

~Ian L.