What if the Model II had won?

[Keatah]

10 hours ago, Hwlngmad said:

I believe that Tandy's biggest issue was not opening up software as much as what they could have done considering they were using Z-80 processors in the TRS-80 line.  They could have gotten a lot more developers on board such as Digital Research with CP/M. 

Agree. Any misstep by non-IBM compatibles was enough to resign them to also-ran status. And anything "Z-80" in the mid-80's was long in the tooth. With the exception of Apple. Apple's products were very well polished and functional.

 

10 hours ago, Hwlngmad said:

However, they didn't and instead the open architecture of the IBM PC plus its much easier reproducibility path made the PC standard a massive steamroller to all other rivals. 

Yes. Standards made the PC standard.

 

And to fulfill the promise of interconnectivity (in its infancy with BBSes) standards had to be developed or allowed to evolve. This was painfully evident when transitioning from say a Vic-20 to C64 to Amiga. Or migrating 8-bit anything to 16-bit anything. Well, you couldn't. You had to manually redo everything. Re-write everything.

 

By not pushing state-of-the-art performance limits, the PC afforded stability. A necessary quality for those standards to emerge and stabilize. Another thing is that the few custom chips Intel made, like the DMA & memory map controllers or keyboard/interrupt controllers were so numerous and omnipresent they were treated like generic off-the-shelf TTL logic.

[rietveld]

Here is my Old Skool Model II with a new skool Gotek storeage soluition

 

 

[Keatah]

..and a sweet machine it is!

[Hwlngmad]

4 hours ago, rietveld said:

Here is my Old Skool Model II with a new skool Gotek storeage soluition

 

 

Very nice!

[InternetJunkie]

Geezus! just found my post here, and indeed my account while duckduckgo'ing Tandy 1000. Damn, I can write a good essay sometimes! I've since been researching Compaq, how they forced IBM into sticking to standards they created. A "Gang of Nine" companies with Compaq created the EIDE standard, and re-labelled IBM's old AT bus standard as "IDE" in reaction to IBM's (superior) Micro Architecture. It died, because 16-bit ISA and EISA in clones were "good enough" and much cheaper. So IBM re-calibrated their strategy and embraced "Open Architecture", although it was really Compaq's proposed "Open Standards", which was a distorted mirror-image of what became "Open Source" (which also had to be re-labelled FOSS for Free and Open Source) whose success is symbolized by IBM's purchase of Red Hat for $43 BILLION.

Compaq got $111 million first year in profits, mainly from Compaq Portable alone (also re-named Portable 1 -see a pattern here?)  Also Compaq got Microsoft to nod and wink with getting nearly 100% compatibility with PC-DOS. Other versions of MS-DOS weren't compatible, I think many in the industry still hoped people would trade home made apps in BASIC (also dominated by Microsoft) to be recompiled, instead of buying application software (didn't happen, but also a premonition of FOSS) This is a neglected story behind "rise of the PC (and internet)", even FOSS devlopers and supporters often don't appreciate. The PC not only provided standards, the industry re-made the "Standard of standards", through "Wintel". We'll see if Apple can bring smartphone "ARM standards" to "PCs", but that would just be reversal of the process back to PCs, from smartphones. Interesting times!

PS, yeah TurboTech, 8-inch floppies are pretty cool. I'm jealous, and I've forgotten when I last saw those disks or drives. My college was just starting to offer 3.5" floppies (Oh my such shiny new tech!) when I entered. I was given a school Vax account then, too. Good times. Do any Tandy's run OS/2. Neat obsolete hardware should be paired with obsolete software! 

Edited July 29, 2021 by InternetJunkie

[InternetJunkie]

7 hours ago, InternetJunkie said:

PSS, yeah TurboTech, 8-inch floppies are pretty cool. 

Ooops, Sorry Turbo-torch!  The tech was moving fast, too. I remember cutting notches in a lot of 5.5" HD SS floppies to make them double-sided. It was probably risky, but certainly in school where most people just had text files on floppies, maybe games, (often pirated games). But getting twice the memory was just too good to not chance. Seems Britain with "Zed"-X80s and ZX81s had a thriving "underground" games on tape scene. It was a lot easier distributing games if you didn't need to invest in floppies, and duplicate the games. The present-day inflation in prices for vintage ZX80s and ZX81s and even single purpose Spectrum emulators is pretty high.  I also remember seeing 2.88 MB 3.5" capability in a lot of PCs, but never saw anyone use them. I don't think I ever saw a 2.88 capacity disk. 

[KG7PFS]

On 3/5/2021 at 12:00 AM, InternetJunkie said:

Could Microsoft have done Windows on Zilog CPUs?

It's called MSX Turbo-R.

 

Also, look up OS-9 and Multi-Vue on the CC3.

 

Regarding 8" floppy drives, why hasn't anyone mentioned the speed? I had a Model II for a short time, and I couldn't believe how fast it was.

[pski]

I had to reply to this old thread because it just popped up on the list.

 

Regarding the Model II bashing I've read on some of these posts.  The Model II line was far, far from a failure.  

 

The Model II family ran for 10 years.  Of course it did not sell as many units as the smaller TRS-80s or Apples or Commodores.  This was a workstation class machine meant for medium sized businesses and serious technical environments. In one year,  the Model 16B was the most popular Unix based workstation by sales across the industry!

The 8" floppy drives offered multiple times the storage capacity of comparable 5.25 drives for most of the lifetime of the series.  This was a critical feature for data intensive workloads for which the machine was intended. 

Of course, by 1988 it was hopelessly outdated.  This was a time of rapid progress in the microcomputer industry.

 

The Model II line was a success by any measure.

 

[InternetJunkie]

On 9/24/2021 at 6:38 AM, pski said:

I had to reply to this old thread because it just popped up on the list.

Regarding the Model II bashing I've read on some of these posts.  The Model II line was far, far from a failure.  

 

I don't know why you consider these posts to be "bashing". 

 

It turned out that both the business and home markets wanted to support a single standard for both CPUs and operating systems, and it ended up being the IBM PC and PC DOS (well, Windows really, but considering Windows 1 to 3.11 were GUIs on top of DOS...) I, in fact, hate this fact of history. The Intel 8088 was a ridiculously crippled chip, and Microsoft should have continued Xenix (originally for the 286).  I think, and this is mostly just my opinion, but the success of the Apple Mac caused M$ to rethink and concentrate on putting a GUI on top of DOS instead of a creating Unix-based system the way God intended! Also, something might have blossomed from Digital Research's CP/M, but Bill Gates hustle turned out to be the greatest coup in business history, maybe even beyond business: rivaling the coup d’état of Napolean! (also just my humble opinion).

 

Personally, I also come to this from a very different perspective, because I was somewhat involved during the death throes of Symbolics Inc., who created Lisp Machines, and together with Lisp Machines International and Xerox may have led a LISP computing revolution!  Now, that turned out to be a great failure. It inspired Richard Gabriel's essay "The Rise of Worse is Better" which was part of a longer article "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big" [html] Somewhat ironically, this article exactly describes how the "Wintel" standard won out over Unix/BSD/Linux, while it was actually bemoaning how Unix and the C language was going to win out over LISP and Lisp Machines.  So that history was basically a failure squared. I suppose one could bemoan Java's success in that history too, but, let's take our past disappointments in small doses.

 

It's very arguable that Un*x was ultimately victorious everywhere other than the desktop. Android, or at least the kernel, was derived from Gentoo Linux, and even on the desktop, MacOS was from NextStep, which was from BSD. And I think it's important for business history, and computer history, and internet history, that it was the clone-makers led by COMPAQ, and NOT IBM, who made x86 and Windows the juggernauts they became. I've been listening to  Open: How Compaq Ended IBM's PC Domination and Helped Invent Modern Computing by Rod Canion, and I think he's right about Compaq being an unsung hero in creating Open Standards within the electronics industry.

On 3/8/2021 at 9:14 PM, Keatah said:

Yes. Standards made the PC standard.

I'm not sure how much Keatah said that with tongue in cheek, but Yes. Not just any standards, Industry Standards, which IBM itself started calling Open Architecture, which was sort of Open Source, but exclusively for major companies and manufacturers. I've probably repeating myself, here, but, I definitely don't want to leave the impression that the Tandy TRS-80 Model II wasn't a contender.

 

Imagine if instead of the IBM PC, or Tandy Model II,  Ma Bell was allowed to create a computer monopoly to run alongside it's telephone monopoly! Maybe personal computing and the introduction of the internet into homes would have started on Unix on a Motorola 68000.  I'm not just turned on by the idea of one of Tandy's TRS-80s taking the role of x86 PC clones, but the idea of lots of possibilities for alternative histories! Commodore 128s and/or Amiga. What if Apple continued with Woz's vision instead of Steve Job's?  Or my beloved Symbolics Lisp Machines, some of which had the greatest keyboard ever, the "Space Cadet".   Personally I think by now we'd be living with cheap fusion nuclear power, have a permanent base on the moon, we'd have zeppelins on Venus, and peace on Earth. But that's just my humble opinion.   

 

 

 

Edited October 10, 2021 by InternetJunkie