#tandy 600

USA 1986

The cover story for this issue opened asking you to "Forget the hard-to-read screen. Forget about the need to carry a pound-and-a-half battery charger, turning a 9.5-pound baby computer into an 11-pound butterball. Forget about the slower-than-molasses disk drive." Microsoft Word on the Tandy 600 made up for all of that, although it wasn't quite "the full-featured Microsoft Word that Macintosh owners have grown to love." Tandy's earlier portables received attention as well through a review of an improved "snap-in ROM" (which came with a new program to command their portable disk drive that's still in use today to command modern equivalents of the mass storage device) and programs to create bar charts and pie graphs (even though they didn't have a "CIRCLE" command in their BASIC).

Tandy CEO John Roach (working at establishing himself as the public face of the company seven years after the death of its founder, Charles Tandy) showed off two new computers on the cover of this issue. The Tandy 3000 was an IBM PC AT clone (running, in this case, the perhaps undemanding software sampler DeskMate) and the Tandy 600, although it only "doubled" the number of characters on its screen from the Tandy 200, sported a built-in 3.5" floppy disk drive even if it wasn't a full "MS-DOS" computer.

With its title expanded again, this issue took an in-depth look at Tandy's third portable computer, taking on how "for Tandy watchers and laptop-industry enthusiasts the Tandy 600 is immediately a disappointment" and "behind the times, obsolete upon introduction" for not running MS-DOS and IBM PC software. Counterarguments included that this was "the system users say they need," and commented that "the number of executives affluent enough to part with $6,000 for a complete IBM-compatible laptop system and gung-ho enough to recalculate Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets at 35,000 feet instead of relaxing over a cocktail with their compatriots is limited." So far as Tandy's previous portables went, the issue also reviewed the "6 ROM Bank" for making multiple ROM chip programs available to the Model 100 and covered a "standing desk" for workers in the field.