Our Old Panasonic Computer Was a Tandy

Warning: I did try to make sure CRT whine wasn't heard, for the benefit of younger viewers. I cannot hear it, and the 15khz frequency isn't showing up on my Spectroid app, so I'm hopeful it's not present here. But be advised it may show up around 35:20. Also - I bought that Grid 300 SX that was sitting on ebay. If anyone encounters a Panasonic Business Partner similar in design to my 2500 that's for sale, please let me know! Definitely still want one!

I fully relate to and remember those days of seeing a full, VGA, photographic image on a computer screen. It was truly mind-blowing. Like, you would actually trade disks of just image files with your friends. Pictures of cars and... other things...

The Panasonic Business Partner 1650 was actually a Tandy 1000SL/2 in a modified 1000TL/2 case. It has the Tandy 1000 sound chip but it's disabled, so you only get PC speaker sound. It has Tandy 1000 graphics but it doesn't work in all games. It's what Panasonic got in return for Tandy selling rebadged Panasonic laptops like the 1100FD. The Tandy 2500 was not based on anything by Panasonic, but rather on the Victor 300, made by Victor Technology -- best known for their Victor 9000, an early rival to the IBM PC. Tandy bought out Victor's computer division and used their design as the basis for the 2500 series.

33:21 - That's the most expressive PC speaker music I've ever heard. Whoever programmed that in deserves a medal.

This was a fun trip down memory lane! MS-DOS 3.30 is limited to a partition size of 32MiB, while 3.31 expands this to 512MiB. Normally, the 32MiB partition that you made and formatted should be bootable, so it seems like a drive/BIOS/FDISK compatibility issue may have misaligned the MBR and/or partition, preventing the BIOS booting from HD. OnTrack is definitely a helpful option when you can't address the BIOS limitation. When I can, I like to flash an XT-IDE image to an EPROM and install that in a network card's boot ROM socket. I can then set the HD parameters to disabled in the system BIOS, and let XT-IDE autodetect the drive once its option ROM is loaded. It's really handy if I need to pull the drive and copy files to it from another system, as the whole disk/partitions are accessible, unlike using the overlay.

FYI, the Tandy 1000RLX was still an XT-class machine with the sound chip at the original address. The 1000RSX was the only member of the Tandy 1000 family to be an AT-class machine with the relocated sound chip address -- and that's because it's really just a 2500SX motherboard stuffed into the 1000RL/RLX case.

I had one of those "paper white" monochrome VGA monitors for a short time. It was for a computer I built myself. But it was quickly traded off.

That LSI chip could possibly be a Gemini GC102. It is the companion southbridge to the GC101/HT101.

Man the ski or die gameplay brought back memories of playing skate or die with my friends on their 286.

We had that Tandy computer too! But it was the Tandy badged version. With EGA graphics though, it was a step up from our 8088 XT computer because it had that low density 3.5" floppy drive (not to mention the XT was slower and had CGA), and ours was also a 286, with DOS 3.3. Heck yeah!

Tandy often partnered with another manufacturer to make Tandy/Radio Shack branded machines. My Tandy 1100FD laptop is a Panasonic too.

That sure looked like the terminal I used to use in my job at an auto parts store back in the late 80s. It had a 5x7 plasma display with a small number of lines.

So funny thing about the paper white VGA monitor there is no shadow mask so you can get really crisp images from it. I remember having one on our 386sx -> Pentium133 days only when we upgraded to a Pentium MMX 166 did we get a colour display. Well anyway I remember I preferred the B/W monitor for reading as the letters were really well formed on it. also later on with early dual screen support I use to use both and I use to surf the net/program on the black and white one and play games on the colour side.

Thanks for making this video; it really helped getting the 2500 XL I had sitting in the closet up and running. In particular, the warning about Tandy using some of the ground lines on the cable for power (the original drive on mine was dead) and the bit about using a 720k floppy to run setupxl (the original RTC was also very dead) were quite helpful. So, yeah, great video!

Configuring memory is one of the things I DON'T miss about computers back then.

Very, very cool video! I always liked the high quality Tandy cases. This is giving me some serious nostalgia. I had my older sister drive me to the computer store 30 miles away to buy Test Drive 3. I loved that game.

This was fun , Thank you for doing the Video .

this video brought back memories in 1990-91 i had a Tandy 1000sl played mostly police quest and leisure suit larry but seeing this video reminded me i think i also had Ski or Die seeing the footage brought back memories that i played it alot.

Until LGR had a video come out a year or 2 ago about a quantex 486 like I had growing up I'd never seen anyone else talk about it and I couldn't even find a picture of one. So I know the pain.

I had the DecStation 320sx when I was a kid. Came with a 386sx 20MHz, 1MB of RAM and a 10MB HDD. I later upgraded it to 4MB of RAM and a larger HDD and got it to boot Win95. Definitely not usable, but possible :)) Omg, the memories.