💾 Archived View for uscoffings.net › retro-computing › collection › tandy-1000-tl2 captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:09:42. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-07-22)
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[date: 1989, 2004, 2023]
The Tandy Enhanced Keyboard is a strange beast. It is well constructed, hefty, with a steel backplate with screw construction. It looks like Tandy's answer to the IBM Model M. Yet this keyboard is a dome membrane, and the feel even when they were new in 1989 was terrible. Mushy yet stiff, and very slow to type on.
But fast-forward to present day, and the keys are starting to stick worse. I disassembled the keyboard and cleaned the sliding mechanism. The cleaning helped... mostly. But it still seems like a design flaw to have such a large friction area in the sliding mechanism. This keyboard can never feel great. But since it's a dome membrane, it's not possible to swap in reasonable switches. It would be an intesting project to gut and rebuild this keyboard.
This is actually the computer I used to learn to program in C. Young Sheldon had it right.
Installed an ATI VGA graphics card.
Early in 2023, I did a complete disassemble, clean, and reassemble of this machine. While disassembled, I replaced the noisy original power supply fan with a quieter Noctua NF-R8 1800.
Upgraded (perhaps just briefly) from the original Tandy Enhanced Keyboard to the Northgate OmniKey/102. The OmniKey has jumpers under the "OmniKey/102" badge which allow it to be compatible with various older machines (IBM, XT, AT, Tandy SX and TX, Amiga, and some AT&T). In several areas, the Tandy 1000 TL is more similar to an IBM XT than it is to the older Tandy 1000 models. Configuring the OmniKey DIP switches for the XT (_not_ the 1000 SX/TX) works wonderfully. I need to find more of these OminiKeys.
I installed the XT-IDE 8-bit ISA card, to support modern PATA drives. I plan to pair this with an older 256MB industrial PATA flash (if I can find it) but at the moment I am using a ST34323A 4.3GB spinning drive. This is the original revision 1 card, with the old 1.0.0-RC BIOS. I attempted to upgrade the BIOS in-situ, using the `XTIDECFG.COM` program to flash it, using the 286 image. Something went wrong, and the boot would get hung by this new BIOS. I pulled the 28C64B and reflashed it in my EMP-20 with the XT-class BIOS. This now works, but I still want to discover if there is some 286 instruction incompatibility (shouldn't be!) or something else going on.
ELKS boots from the floppy! But it does not yet recognize any networking card in this computer. This may just be an IRQ configuration issue (I have toyed briefly with both the 3C509 and a N2k card; don't have a card with the WD chipset the ELKS supports; my 8-bit-ISA-friendly Intel 82586 card is not yet supported). And ELKS will not succesfully boot from the XT-IDE. It seems to load the boot sector from the hard drive, then locks up and pounds the floppy drive. Getting ELKS working well on this machine is a long-term goal for me.
https://github.com/jbruchon/elks
https://github.com/ccoffing/elks
Upgraded to 768k RAM by adding (4) 41464 chips. One third party upgrade document from the time (TODO link) claims that 120ns RAM chips is sufficient speed for this upgrade. 120ns works out to 8.33 Mhz, and the processor in the TL/2 nominally is 8 Mhz, so probably true. Interesting, then, that the base RAM is 80ns. I managed to find like-new 80ns chips, so I matched the factory. ELKS does not yet recognize the memory, even with the VGA card removed.
