Spouting words (that might make sentences) on the Internet since 19XX.
My First Computer: The Tandy RLX 1000
It was the early 1990’s. My grandma on my dad’s side had recently passed away. After my dad’s family found new homes for grandma’s possessions, we came into a little bit of money. Dad believed it was time to purchase the family’s first computer: Radio Shack’s Tandy 1000 RLX.
The Tandy RLX 1000 wasn’t exactly your top-of-the-line machine. In fact, the version we bought didn’t even have Windows on it (Windows 3.1 was becoming widely available at this time). It did come with a 10 MHz 286 processor, 1MB of RAM, and a whopping 40 MB hard drive, and MS-DOS 5.0. The accompany DeskMate software also gave us a basic word processor and, a MIDI music composer, … I honestly don’t remember what else.
A little more details via Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000):
The RLX was the ‘mid-range’ offering of the RL line. It had a 10 MHz 286, and unlike other 286-based Tandy 1000s, it supported up to 384k of extended memory. However, it was not a full AT-class machine, as it still had an 8-bit ISA bus and only 8 IRQs. While the 3-voice sound chip and DAC were still present, Tandy video was dropped. The RLX had VGA instead, but it only had 256k of video memory and was limited to 640x480x16 graphics. Also, the RLX featured a high-density, 1.44 MB 3.5" disk drive. The RLX offered 512KB of memory preinstalled, which could be expanded to 1 MB. (The hard disk version came with 1 MB preinstalled.)
Even though the Tandy 1000 RLX is nearly 20 years old, you can actually still find the manual to it on Radio Shack’s web site! Unfortunately, it’s not the original printed manual but just a Text-Only/HTML version. Still amazing it’s even there. You can even find the original product announcement.
We got plenty of use out of this using the word processor, the dot-matrix printer we got with it, and playing games like KidPix and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. The Tandy did its job until about 1996 when it blew a fuse or something. All we know is that smoke started coming out of it. I thought not having Windows on it would put a damper on things when Dad brought it home, but it did what it did. I have no complaints at all.