I stumbled upon this great vintage Radio Shack ad the other day for the Tandy 2000, which I wanted to share because it was the first computer my family ever owned and my introduction to the magic of microprocessing. The “simply incredible” part must be referring to its $2999 price tag.
The Tandy 2000 debuted in 1983, which means it was already several years outdated when my mom brought it home; I was about seven at the time. Luckily my Mom had a computer-related job and her employer supplied this “ultra-high performance” machine for her, otherwise we’d have never been able to afford it. In fact, we were one of the only families I knew with a home computer.
I remember being one of the only kids in class handing in typed-up papers and book reports (after neatly tearing away the perforated edges from the dot matrix printer paper, of course) which tended to impress the teachers, and good thing, too, because my papers were usually full of complete bullshit. To this day I still remember all those stupid Word Perfect 5.1 commands—who else pretended like they were Doogie Howser when they used that program?
I consider myself very lucky to have had access to a computer at an early age, however shitty it was at the time. But I didn’t realize how shitty until I read this product review over at 8-bit Micro, which essentially deems this machine “useless.”
