website/content/museum/tandy-radio-shack-2000.md

---
title: Tandy Radio Shack 2000
categories:
- Computers
types:
- Professional Computer
origins:
- U.S.A.
years:
- '1983'
cpus:
- Intel 80186
params:
  name: '2000'
  image: /media/museum/photos/tandy_2000_1s.jpg
  company: /companies/tandy-radio-shack
  company_name: Tandy Radio Shack
  specs:
  - label: NAME
    value: '2000'
  - label: MANUFACTURER
    value: Tandy Radio Shack
  - label: TYPE
    value: Professional Computer
  - label: ORIGIN
    value: U.S.A.
  - label: YEAR
    value: September 1983
  - label: END OF PRODUCTION
    value: '1988'
  - label: KEYBOARD
    value: full stroke keyboard, 90 keys
  - label: CPU
    value: Intel 80186
  - label: SPEED
    value: 8 MHz
  - label: CO-PROCESSOR
    value: optional Intel 8087 math. co-processor
  - label: RAM
    value: |-
      128 KB (up to 768 KB)\
      the BIOS checks for up to 896k of RAM, although it's not clear if add-on boards were ever made to support that much
  - label: VRAM
    value: Unknown
  - label: ROM
    value: 8 KB
  - label: TEXT MODES
    value: 40 x 25, 80 x 25
  - label: GRAPHIC MODES
    value: 640x400 with 16 colours
  - label: COLORS
    value: 16 colours
  - label: SOUND
    value: Beeper
  - label: SIZE / WEIGHT
    value: 19 x 16 x 6 / 26.5 lbs
  - label: I/O PORTS
    value: 4 internal expansion slots, monochrome video output (DIN8), Serial connector (DB25 F), Centronics/Parallel connector (34 pin header)
  - label: BUILT IN MEDIA
    value: one or two 5.25'' disk-drives (720 KB, DS 80 Track)
  - label: OS
    value: MS-DOS 2.0
  - label: POWER SUPPLY
    value: Built-in power supply
  - label: PERIPHERALS
    value: hard disk, RAM card, Graphics cards, 10 MB Disk Cartridge System
  - label: PRICE
    value: $2999 (USA, 1983)
  tabs:
  - photos
  - adverts
  - links
  photos:
  - title: BILL GATES
    subtitle: ''
    text: '...promoting how well his Windows product was running on a Tandy 2000 system.'
    image: /media/museum/photos/tandy_2000_bill-gates.jpg
  - title: TANDY 2000HD LABEL
    subtitle: ''
    text: ''
    image: /media/museum/photos/tandy_2000hd_label.jpg
  adverts:
  - title: GERMAN ADVERT
    subtitle: ''
    text: Thanks to chrism3667 for the picture
    image: /media/museum/pubs/tandy_2000_german-pub_1.jpg
  links:
  - title: Documentation at RadioShack official website
    url: http://support.radioshack.com/ProductInfo/CategoryResults2.asp?Name=Tandy_Computers&ID=001001
    text: A lot of info and documentation on the official RadioShack website
  - title: Tandy 2000 Yahoo! Group
    url: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Tandy2000/
    text: Yahoo! Group devoted to the Tandy 2000 and alikes
  comments:
  - author: Joe Duarte (United States)
    date: Wednesday 7th September 2022
    text: Your release date is off by two years. It was released in September, 1983, not in 1981. The 80186 didn''t exist in 1981, came out in 82. The PC/XT had just barely come out in 1983 as well, and the Tandy came several months later.
  - author: N. Fleschy (USA)
    date: Wednesday 21st August 2019
    text: |-
      I loved my Tandy 2000 with its 3 volumes of instructions, including one for Basic, one for MSDos and one for Multimate.\
      It also had an Edline program for making a simple data base.\
      A program on one disc allowed for converting Multimate files to simple ASCII which allowed me to convert to be usable on a later computer. It was a workhorse. I was not interested in games, but more important was the ease of typing and editing a document. The printer did a nice job. It certainly beat using a typewriter!
  - author: Jeff Joseph (Norfolk VA)
    date: Wednesday 22nd March 2017
    text: |-
      There are some incorrect data in this article.

      The drives are merely 5-1/4 double density 80 track, 720 KB capacity. These drives had been used for years earlier on the TRS-80 Models I and III. Nothing special, they DO NOT require the high-coercivity 1.2 MB floppy media as used on the IBM AT. In fact, the format is identical to that used by the later 720 KB 3.5 inch drives introduced with the IBM PS/2. The Tandy 2000''s 5-1/4 inch drives can in fact be replaced with the 720 KB 3.5 inch drives and freely exchange data on the very same disk format as used by any IBM compabibles using the 720 KB 3.5 inch drives. NOTE this DOES NOT include the later high capacity 1.44 MB disks!

      As for the "80186" having done in the Tandy 2000 as a viable product in the computer market, this is hogwash. This article fails to mention that ALL software programs that run on the IBM''s 8088 run with no problem on the 186. The 80186 is a fully-compatible superset of the 8088/8086.

      Probably what this author actually means is that the Tandy 2000''s hardware is not fully compatible with the IBM PC, and this was the reason it ultimately did not succeed. While probably true, the Tandy 2000 did survive in the market for 4-1/2 years, much longer than any of the other "workalikes" that were not fully compatible. Many of the bestselling software titles for the IBM like Lotus 1-2-3 and AutoCAD were published in versions customized for the Tandy 2000. For a full list see the Wikipedia article on the Tandy 2000, alot of which I wrote.
  - author: Ray MacDonald (Canada)
    date: Saturday 16th July 2016
    text: Tandy 2000 was impressive on its floor stand, in fact the Tandy/TRS-80 nameplate rotates 90degrees to be cosmetically correct when vertical on the floor stand. Unfortunately only the green screen monitor had a cool stand matching the floor stand cosmetics, I guess because the color monitor was bigger and heavier it didn''t have a raised stand available. Special version of Lotus 123 was superior on this computer than the competition for a year or 2 before they stopped supporting it.
  - author: Marcelo (Argentina)
    date: Monday 30th March 2015
    text: |-
      Please, correct the release data, was introduced december 1983, not 1981.\
      Note that a XT compatible the same year of the orginal IBM PC release is a nonsense.
  - author: Dennis Sunde (United States)
    date: Tuesday 9th August 2011
    text: This was my second computer. I had an elaborate setup of boot disks that allowed me to run a C compiler completely from ramdisk for amazing performace. I used that to learn C programming in college. But the compatibility of this thing was terrible. I think I paid about $3,000 for it back in 1984.
  - author: Chuck Coffing (US)
    date: Wednesday 8th June 2011
    text: |-
      I have restored one of these machines. For some reason I like this machine (perhaps precisely because it is the red-headed step child), but the physical organization of the case is a nightmare. Removing any drive (floppy or hard) is a major undertaking. You cannot remove the floppy drive cage without first removing the hard drive.

      It''s also interesting in that the bus connectors are the 96-pin euro-card style (same as the modern N8VEM project).

      The newest version of MS-DOS available for this machine is 2.11.03, not 2.0 as in the description.

      I am creating floppy images for this machine (DOS and applications) and BIOS snapshots, available at http://166.70.81.49/clc/tech/retro/tandy-2000/. This is a work in progress.
  - author: Robert H (usa)
    date: Tuesday 31st August 2010
    text: I don''t care what barriers were thought to be the problems with it I usted disliked the system in general. My dad and a friend of his bought out the RS computer store in our city and bought home something like 30 or so of these nightmares. I did just to be fair try to work with them, but I never could get the HD cards I had to work with these. I have to admit that I dod not know as much about networking as I do now but the Coxal cable never would work. Eventually I gave up trying and went back to my Tandy 1000, and the systems turned into Field Mouse Condo''s for the next 2 years till they managed to donate to some school in Mexico. Good riddens to a piece of junk.
  - author: Chrism3667(at)yahoo(dot)com (USA)
    date: Sunday 2nd May 2010
    text: the problem had little or nothing to do w/the 80186. The problem predominantly was the location of the video ram, not to mention the chipset it used (different set of registers). S/w written for a cga/6845 would choke due to the fact that nothing it would look for was there! There are other aspects of the h/w that made s/w go bonkers. There are fully compatible 80186 systems out there. They may have required a bit of tweaking, but the ''186 alone is not a barrier to compatibility.
  - author: Asqarin
    date: Saturday 12th April 2008
    text: The Tandy 2000 was equiped with 2 double sided Quad Density 720K floppy Drives, not single sided High Density as stated in your description.
  oc_id: 1219
  source:
    url: https://web.archive.org/web/20230605040856/http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=1219
    date: '2023-06-05'
---

The Tandy 2000 was launched in December 1981, a full year BEFORE the 1000, and proved to be a mistake on the part of Tandy, but to their credit they weren’t alone, many manufacturers who built systems based on the Intel 80186 CPU suffered the same fate.

On the surface the computer was quite the catch: The “T-2000” featured new instructions and new fault tolerance protection over the TRS-80 and COCO lines. Tandy built the 2000 with advanced color graphics, Intel 16bit processing at 8 Mhz and 2 720K 5.25” Floppy disks; and a CPU that was out performing even the 80286 computers of the time! It was a robust computer with excellent features but that 80186 CPU would come back to haunt it. The Tandy 2000 by many was considered the first AT style computer in North America, a bold and risky move by Tandy.

Despite all the advancements, the 80186 CPU was not popular with software developers, so few wrote software for the 80186. More to the point, however, the Tandy 2000, while touted as being compatible with the IBM XT, was different enough for most software beyond purely text oriented to not work properly. It differed by having a Tandy-specific video mode (640x400, not related to or forward-compatible with VGA), along with the new concept of keyboard scan codes, and the proprietary 720kb 5-1/4" floppy format: no other computer used this disk format, which was single-sided high-density, using standard 1.2Mb double-sided high-density disks; the drives could read and write 360kb floppies, but be careful when doing so if the disks were to be subsequently used in an IBM-compatible; there were hardware hacks to use 720kb 3.5" floppy drives, but it was unclear whether disks formatted in this way were compatible with standard PC-compatibles.

In addition: The Tandy 2000 was nominally BIOS-compatible with the IBM XT, which allowed extremely well-behaved DOS software to run on both platforms. However, most DOS software is not so well behaved and many PC programmers would bypass the PC-BIOS to achieve higher performance, rendering the software incompatible with the Tandy 2000. Microsoft provided a special version of MS-DOS that could combat these problems, but it was a proprietary programming venture. All other units, including the later Tandy 1000, operated on what was essentially the standard PC-DOS (IBMs version) or MS-DOS. The Tandy 2000 was further killed by the arrival of the 80286 CPU 2 months after its release.

In fairness, Tandy wasn't the only casualty of the 80186. Other computers that were built on that format, mostly from Europe, such as the Compis and the Dulmont Magnum were marketed with the CP/M operating system suffered the same fate. If you had a machine based on those systems the only thing that could realistically run on them was the CP/M operating system, but software was scarce, at least with MS-DOS you had some options with software.

In the end the computer was poorly supported by Radio Shack; eventually the remaining unsold computers were converted into the first Radio Shack Terminals (which, oddly enough, had been one of the original backup plans for the original TRS-80 Model 1). The Tandy 2000 computer was the only computer sold by Radio Shack that had both logos on the case "Tandy" and "TRS-80". The Tandy 2000 computer was the first to have the "Tandy" logo on it.

---

Contributors: Derek McDonald (aka “Skel”)\
Sources: Switchtec's Virtual PC Museum, Emperor Multimedia Electronic Archives, Wikipedia, 8-Bit Micro, Tandy 1000 PC Museum