Tandy Brings Out Powerful I.B.M. Challengers

Peripherals

By Peter H. Lewis
The New York Times

August 5, 1986

THE Tandy Corporation, which sells its machines in its nationwide Radio Shack chain, last week began an aggressive attack against I.B.M. and makers of PC-compatible computers by introducing several new Tandys that are faster, cheaper and come with more features than the I.B.M. PC's, XT's and AT's they emulate.

Into the Swamp

One of the new Tandys, the 3000 HL, is particularly interesting. The HL is billed as a challenger to I.B.M.'s best-selling XT model, with which it is fully compatible.

The PC market has become a swamp for giant I.B.M., with dozens of little clone companies wriggling around on the murky bottom, nibbling away at the company's ankles. Now that competition is rising into the XT market, and thus over I.B.M.'s back pockets, Tandy's HL could represent a rather nasty alligator.

And what big teeth it has. The HL uses the same microprocessor (the Intel 80286 chip) as I.B.M.'s top-of-the-line AT. At its fastest setting, the HL is as much as four times faster than the XT. It comes standard with 512K (about 512,000 characters) of internal memory, twice as much as the XT. The only area where it fell short of the XT was in price: $1,699, as against $2,145 for the XT.

In compatibility tests done last month by Future Computing Inc., the HL successfully ran a wide variety of popular XT software; it balked, however, at accepting dBASE III version 1.1 and Framework version 1.1 onto its optional hard disk drive.

AT-Compatible

Tandy showed an even higher-powered version of the 3000, the HD, that is aimed at the AT market. People who get excited by bottomless spreadsheets, giant data bases and complex engineering problems will tingle at the sight of the HD's 40-megabyte hard disk (10 megabytes more storage than the AT). Up to five remote display terminals can be hooked up to a single HD using a version of the Xenix operating system, allowing a small cluster of workers, each perhaps working on a different application such as word processing or filing data, to share the computer's great speed and brain power. With the high-performance drive, the HD costs $4,299.

Quicker Ticker

Tandy will replace its popular PC-compatible Model 1000 computer with two faster models, the 1000 SX and the 1000 EX. The older Tandy was dandy, but now its ticker is quicker.

The SX ($1,199 without a monitor) is aimed at the business market, although serious home users can appreciate its features, too. It runs virtually all the software written for the PC, but it does so 50 percent faster than the PC. It also comes with 384K internal memory (the PC has 256K) and a pair of disk drives (one is standard on the PC).

The SX also comes with a free software package, DeskMate II, which includes a word processor; a spreadsheet; a filing function that can store names and phone numbers, recipes or other simple lists; a notepad and appointment calendar, and, for people with modems, telecommunications and electronic mail programs.

The EX is a streamlined PC-compatible computer for home users and small businesses, and its price is streamlined as well: $799 for the 256K computer with a keyboard built in, one disk drive and built-in color and monochrome graphics, plus the free DeskMate software. The computer, which uses the same 8088 chip as the I.B.M. PC and runs the same software, can be attached to a color TV set or to a computer monitor ($130 for monochrome, $300 or $460 for color).

Tandy has thousands of stores and is banking on name recognition, as well as good performance and value, to muscle aside both the big outfits like I.B.M. and the smaller ''transient no name'' companies, as Tandy calls them, that have emerged as the bottom feeders in the PC swamp.