here is the original brochure for the tandy 1000. it has a date on the back of october 1984.
i'm going to scan this in and upload it and i'll put the link in the description
if you want to read the whole thing and the centerpiece of the brochure
is the deskmate software it came with and this is the original text based
version of deskmate not the later graphical version which in many ways was far superior but
i've never really seen anybody do a video at least in depth about this original version of deskmate
and some of the very interesting and innovative features it had especially for 1984.
here describes the features it came with text which was word processing worksheet which
is a spreadsheet filer which is a simple database telecom which is a communication
software basically a dumb terminal type program calendar which is your typical
agenda organizer type of thing and finally mail that's right in 1984 the tandy 1000
came with e-mail software it says this special program lets you send and receive messages
to and from other deskmate users over the phone and i don't know if i've ever seen
any earlier computer than this that came with e-mail software so that's what i'm really going
to take a look at now and that is the e-mail software that the tandy 1000 came with in 1984.
here's the setup i'm using it's my tandy 1000sx computer which was the
successor to the original 1000 it has an internal 2400 baud modem connected
to one phone line then i have this tandy wp-2 portable word processor
this was actually designed and built by citizen for tandy and it can do more than just word
processing it has a built-in terminal emulator you can see some of the setup on the screen there
and that is connected to this modem here it's a US robotics courier v.34 it's actually a v.everything
it just doesn't say that on the front and that is connected to another phone line
and this was actually one of the intended use cases of the tandy providing e-mail software
was that you could take your model 100 which was an earlier version of this kind of laptop computer
you could take it on the road with you type up a document on this device and
then send it over to the tandy so you can have it on your desktop computer
and you could also send and receive messages so if somebody wants to leave you an e-mail
they could type it up on this machine and then you could dial in using this and read the e-mail
and reply back to it and that's really quite advanced for 1984.
so i booted up the tandy 1000 and i loaded onto it the original version of deskmate
well it's actually version 1.01 but you can see most of the files are still dated 1984.
so if i load it up now by typing desk there you can see the home screen so this is the original
version of deskmate which actually can only run on the tandy 1000 because it uses the f12 key
to save and exit at the time the tandy was released ibm's computers did not
have function keys above f10 and when ibm eventually added f11 and f12 they
used different scan codes for those keys than tandy used so that's why they're not compatible
so the next version of deskmate deskmate II was modified to make it compatible with generic PCs
because they changed the f12 key to f10 so that's just your little buyer
beware if you're using a generic pc the original version of deskmate will not run
completely on it you'll need to use deskmate II but it's mostly the same thing
so with that in mind i'll just briefly take a look at some of the other features
first is the word processor and you can do basic things like change the margins
you can see the lines got shorter there you can do find and replace you can do cut copy and paste
and that's really about it there's no spell checker there's no special formatting like
bold or italics or different font sizes although that was not really expected in 1984
even with a full featured word processor so very basic but functional word processor and to get out
of it without saving my changes i'll press shift f12 and it asks us cancel edit and i'll say yes
next is the worksheet
it comes with these sample files which is nice so we can go here we can change our car payment
to 199 dollars and we can do calc
and you can see that total change there to 1194 it doesn't do graphing or anything fancy like that
just basically entering numbers and totaling them up and things like that
and it comes with these make believe clients and i really wonder if these were real
addresses and phone numbers because they're all in the fort worth texas area and they
have a real area code and number it's not a 555 number and they appear to have real addresses
so i don't know are these real addresses of like tandy corporation employees in 1984
you see another legitimate looking phone number in arlington texas so
i don't know are these real people
nothing on the agenda for today so we can add something here today's date beginning at nine
o'clock p.m ending hopefully around ten o'clock p.m record
youtube video and now that's on our agenda for today
but anyway here's the e-mail function it already has some messages in it we can read these e-mails
for laura dated february 24th 1985 she got one e-mail from mom and another one from jeff i'm not
going to read these here i'm going to read them on that remote computer when i dial into this
and i'll go into telecom because i'll show you the settings i had to use to get this to work reliably
baud rate is 2400 if you have a faster modem you can probably bump it up to a
faster speed i chose seven bits even parity and one bit because i was getting some corruption
when i did no parity so i changed it to even parity and that seems to be more reliable
and i had to custom define the modem settings because back when this version
of deskmate was released tandy was selling modems that were not hayes compatible
that didn't come until later so what i did is go into f2 define modem for computer dialing
and you can see the settings i used delay 0 send ATDT and then the number
then send a control m you actually type a caret symbol to enter that so you do caret m
and receive is connect in all caps and that works and then i go to f3 to set up the answer settings
delay 0 and send is ats0=1 caret m and those are the settings for the answer mode
and what i'll do is i'll do f5 for host mode
it asks us if i want security but that's not a password or anything although this
can do passwords what security does is just not show any of the activity on this screen
so if you want to hide what people are dialing in and doing you enable security otherwise anybody
that dials in it'll show up on this screen so i'll do no security and you can already see the menu
and i'm going to dial into this from that other tandy computer and we'll see how it works
so here's the remote computer we're going to make believe we're in a
hotel room somewhere 500 miles away dialing in to our tandy 1000 at home
to send and receive e-mails to it so here's the settings i'm using
2400 baud word length of seven even parity one stop bit XON / XOFF is enabled it's full duplex
and those are the other settings there which are not really important for what we're doing today
now i'll do f2 and number nine to go into telecom mode it says rs232c is ready
and we're actually now connected to the modem if i type AT it says OK now i typed in ATDT
which is the command to dial a touch tone number and i typed in the number i'll be
dialing which i obviously don't want to show on youtube so i covered it up now just hit enter
and now it's dialing the number
and now the tandy is picking up the call
now it's connected we have to do is type control m
see if i can get this to work there it goes and you can see remote deskmate and it has a menu
we have directory read file from host send file to host read mail send mail
or log off i'm going to read my e-mail so type number four and i'll read the mail for laura
and there you can see those two messages that are for laura so i'll read the e-mail
from mom i'll type a there it is there's the message from mom "got the club room reserved on
march 5th at 7 pm for our 30th anniversary remember it's still planned as a surprise for
your father love mom" and i believe you type control c when you're done reading
i want to read that other e-mail so go back there read mail for laura oops typed it wrong laura
now read the e-mail from jeff
"we received the mechanicals for project 3100 and it's ready to go into blue line
tage" it says t-a-g-e i guess that's some kind of technical term "do you want to see it again"
okay now i'll send an e-mail to number five i'll do an e-mail to jeff
from kevin well kevn close enough i'll type "what is a tage"
because i didn't understand that word and i'll write "in your e-mail you used the word
the word tage with an e"
this is not very fast typing compatible at 2400 baud you got to really
take your time when typing otherwise it'll miss characters
"with an e on the end"
close enough "what does this mean
mean"
i'll sign off as kevin and ctrl c
let me see if jeff got the e-mail so i'll do mail for jeff and there hey from kevin that's my e-mail
so that's the basic function of how sending and receiving e-mail worked back in 1984 on
your tandy 1000 computer this came for free with the computer e-mail it's it's unbelievable but let
me go back to the directory there's more than just e-mail you can do you can do worksheets calendars
because this was designed to connect to another computer running deskmate so you could open up
documents on the remote computer work on them and then send them back it's it's really amazing
but that wouldn't be really compatible with this kind of
device here because it's not running a full screen so i won't go into any of this
i just want to really show you the e-mail function
so i'll just go back to e-mail and i'll log off remote log off and i'll type +++ ATH
to disconnect and it's disconnected now we're back at the tandy and i'll type f12 to exit host mode
and if we go into our e-mail for jeff
you see there's the one i sent from the remote computer and f3 to display and there you can
see exactly what i wrote spelling mistakes and all "in your email you use the word
tage with an e on the end what does this mean" and i think you can actually change the e-mails
you receive so i want to fix this mistake of not having the e on the i can go here and add it
and then i'll do f12 and i'll save it and that saved a new e-mail
it's funny that it doesn't display the year correctly it shows less than one instead of
21 or 2021 although if you go back to the home screen it shows the full year so it's kind of like
that part works with y2k and some other parts don't work with y2k
so this is the software that came for free with your new tandy 1000 computer in 1984 the original
version of deskmate which included e-mail in 1984. and unfortunately although the later graphical
versions of deskmate were a big improvement in ease of use and were actually quite competitive
with earlier versions of mac and windows they lost the e-mail and remote access features
so what i just showed in this video was only in the original text based versions of deskmate
"introducing a computer that can change the way you work
the new tandy 1000 complete with deskmate software for easy to use word processing filing worksheets
scheduling communications brought to you by tandy clearly superior for service support
and software the tandy 1000 available at radio shack computer centers and so
affordable tandy technology service and support are clearly superior"