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Tandy 1000EX & 1000HX hard drives and peripherals
Will Baldwin
January 14, 1995
I have owned a Tandy 1000HX since about 1989. It
replaced the 1000EX in Tandy's lineup, and was similiar,
except it has a 3.5" 720k diskette drive, with space for
another, whereas the 1000EX had a 5.25" drive. Both are
considered 'XT-class' machines, primarily because they use
the 8088-2 mpu chip, rather than the 8088 found in the
original IBM PC. The 8088-2, with the Tandy memory
expansion (which includes a DMA chip), is significantly
faster than the original 8088. These 2 machines offered the
proprietary Tandy TCGA enhanced graphics, and 3-voice sound
circuitry.
Tandy never offered hard drive systems for these
machines, and even excluded any hard drive programs on the
system diskettes. Owners who looked for other sources found
that generic hard drive systems wouldn't work with these
machines because of 2 problems:
a) these machines, like all Tandy 1000's, use a
non-standard IRQ (5) to access the hard drive.
b) these machines have unique card slots, called 'Plus
style' connectors, so normal cards don't fit.
Fortunately, several after-market suppliers soon created
hard drive systems (and many other peripherals) for these
machines. They were advertised extensively in PCM magazine.
One TandyPro Forum user, A. B. Trevor, uploaded a text file,
'Hardex.rev', a few years ago, detailing his experience in
installing a hard drive in his 1000EX. Unfortunately, the
uniqueness of these hard drives meant that they were higher
priced than generic systems. Because of this, and the
limited selection, I, like most other HX and EX owners,
decided to forego the hard drive route. This is
unfortunate, because these machines are certainly powerful
enough to use a wide range of applications. But, for many
years in the PC world, hard drives have been almost a 'sine
qua non' for any but the most simplistic applications. With
the popularity of hard drives, came more and more software
which *required* a hard drive in order to operate. Having a
hard drive is also the easiest way to speed up processing,
because their access time is significantly faster than
diskette drives. Another benefit is that the hard drive
media, which is *never* touched by the read/write heads,
lasts much longer than diskettes, which are.
I primarily use my HX for maintaining a relatively small
customer database which is interfaced with Q&A Write for
Deskmate. With the HX, I also bought the extra diskette
drive B, which, when added to drive A, gave me a total of
1.44 megabytes of storage. Having 2 diskette drives gave me
a lot of flexibility in organizing my diskettes, and
minimized diskette swapping. But recently, my customer
database has become large enough that merging with Q&A Write
takes painfully long, so I decided to investigate the 1000HX
hard drive market again. I looked up the companies in a
1992 issue of PCM magazine and found that, surprisingly,
many of them still offer the special drives and controllers,
as well as many other EX/HX peripherals. I have listed some
of their names and phone #'s at the end of this article.
Most of their prices have been significantly lowered, but
after some research, the idea came to me that I could put
together a hard drive system for even less cost.
I found out that I didn't need a hard drive specially
made for my machine, just a specially made hard drive
controller, and just about any IDE hard drive made for (or
that could be used with) XT-class, 8-bit machines. It turns
out that Seagate, and maybe others, made hard drives which
would fit into my second diskette bay, and could be used
with XT-class, 8-bit machines. The Seagate ST351AX 42 meg
drive is an example. Seagate stopped producing this drive
around 1992, but I found it's easy to find used ones (and as
of this writing, Insight, listed below, still had some new
ones). I posted ads in local 'Buy/Sell' BBS networks, the
national Fidonet 'HDCONF' conference, Compuserve's PCHW
forum, this forum (TRS80PRO), and the Compuserve
'Classified' system (GO CLASSIFIED). In just a couple of
days I had several offers, ranging from $35 to $50 for this
drive. I bought one from a BBS sysop who had seen my ad in
the local 'Buy/Sell' BBS network. The only inconveniences
were that I no longer had a second diskette drive, and that
I had to drill a couple of holes in my diskette drive
chassis to make sure the new drive would fit solidly, though
a person could use other means, such as foam, or tape, to
accomplish this (actually, if a person didn't mind the
appearance, and the hard drive cable is long enough, the
hard drive could be placed outside the machine). All that
was left was to find the special controller. MegaHaus and
Micro Systems both sell the controller separately. I got
mine from Micro Systems. My total cost for this project,
including drive, controller, shipping, phone calls, and
Compuserve connect charges, was less than $125.
There are many peripherals available for the EX/HX,
including hard drives, hard drive controllers, 8 meg memory
cards, internal modem cards, VGA cards, sound cards, serial
ports, fax, etc. sold by these suppliers (this list is for
informational purposes only, and is *not* meant as an
endorsement of any of these companies):
PC Enterprises phone: 800-922-7257
DCS Industries 800-537-3539
Insight (formerly Hard Drives Int'l) 800-377-3000
MegaHaus 800-426-0560
Tulin Technology 408-432-9057
Micro Systems 717-528-8493
P.S. Micro Systems tells me that there is a magazine
available which supports the Tandy 1000 computers: Computer
News PC, PO Box 680, Casper, WY, 82602, phone: 307-265-6483.
EX/HX users: feel free to send me E-Mail.
(c) January 14, 1995 Will Baldwin CIS: 76200,275