if you wanted a new laptop computer in 1989 one of the simplest easiest to use and least expensive
options was available at your local radio shack store the tandy 1100FD
featuring ms-dos the deskmate graphical user interface a word processor and a 90,000 word
spelling checker dictionary in rom so it's ready to use within seconds after turning it on
it features a non-backlit supertwist monochrome lcd with cga graphics which works well under
most lighting conditions the keyboard is low profile and has slightly smaller than
standard sized keys but it still has a positive tactile feel to the typing
on the right side it has a three and a half inch double density 720k floppy disk drive
on the rear is a trap door for the parallel printer port serial port and a space for an
optional internal 2400 baud modem on the right side is a cooling vent a 9.5 volt dc
power input and the power button under this door on the top is the removable battery pack
it's a 6 volt 1800 milliamp hour sealed lead acid battery good for up to five hours of run time
and here is the door to give you access to install that optional
internal modem there's also an optional and very rare one megabyte expanded memory board
it was officially introduced by tandy on september 28th, 1989 at a price of $999
in march 1990 infoworld magazine compared with seven other notebook computers and even
though it was tied with the toshiba T1000 as the lowest cost machine in the comparison they said
it had a perfectly adequate set of features at an affordable price and they gave it a better overall
score than the texas instruments travelmate 286 which sold for over four thousand dollars
and the difference in size between it and tandy's first pc laptop
the 1400LT which i also did a video about is quite striking
it has 640k of ram which ought to be enough for anybody and you can
optionally configure it to boot directly into ms-dos which it does in a whopping 2.3 seconds
the rom drive is configured as drive c and it has some basic dos utilities including format
and diskcopy if you now want to get into deskmate from the dos prompt it's as simple as pressing f12
and within seconds you're at the deskmate interface which does support an optional
serial mouse and like i said it has a built-in word processor
i now can click and drag to select text
just like a modern word processor and tell it to make that word bold and make this word underlined
which does show up on the screen accurately now i can run the spelling checker
and it found that i misspelled rudimentary
and it suggests the correct spelling with an a instead of an e
and there it fixed my spelling mistake and this is all built into rom
no disks or hard drive required but not all of deskmate is in rom
so to run most of the other applications they will ask you to insert one of the two disks it came on
deskmate is generally intuitive to operate with either the keyboard or mouse except that to
select an item from one of the pull down menus you double click on it instead of single click on it
it also came with a disk with the full suite of
dos utilities on it including the ones not built into the rom
the tandy 1100 was custom manufactured in japan for radio shack and according to the date code
here this one was made in january 1990 and if you're wondering who manufactured it in
japan for tandy it was panasonic because this is a slightly modified version of
the panasonic business partner cf-150b laptop which is identical to the 1100fd
except it has a backlight while the tandy version does not the panasonic version also only came
with dos in rom instead of also deskmate it cost 150 dollars more than the tandy version
and in pc magazine's test of it they found that due to the backlight the battery life was only
about half as much as the tandy version so buyers really had to consider whether the
benefit of having the backlit lcd was really worth the trade-off in cost and battery life
so because this computer was actually made by panasonic
i like to call it a pandy rather than a tandy
the cpu is an nec v20 running at eight megahertz which is almost twice as fast
as the standard ibm pc or xt it can be switched down to four megahertz and yes
that's 4.0 megahertz not 4.77 so in this mode it's actually slightly slower than the original
ibm pc or xt and even though it has dos built into rom you can still boot from a floppy disk
just stick in your disk press f11 and then press f1 to start up from the floppy drive
you can see how much longer it takes to boot from a floppy disk instead of the built-in rom
but this does allow you to run a newer version of dos than the ms-dos 3.3 that's built in
in this case it's running pc 2000 but if you do boot a newer version of dos
you cannot access the rom drive or run the built-in deskmate
the screen will automatically blank after eight minutes of non-use or you
can blank it immediately by pressing function f7
it supports cga graphics with four shades of gray or in this case dark
blue visible on the lcd and it has a tiny and not very loud piezo beeper for the pc speaker
so far so good or at least not so bad but did you notice one thing missing from the
ports on this machine? that's right there is no external monitor output so the only way to use
this machine is with the built-in monochrome lcd which definitely does not make it ideal for gaming
the lag and ghosting even makes a game like arkanoid difficult to play
a game which runs at a more moderate pace like
tetris is better suited to the machine's capabilities
i've noticed that in some games like flight simulator it will activate the screen blanker
even before the eight minutes of inactivity but pressing any key will bring it back
and maybe you should take that as a reminder to stop playing around with
games and get back to work such as with lotus 1-2-3 which it runs perfectly well
and if you're wondering if this officially counts as a member of the tandy 1000 family
because 1100 is so close to 1000 i'll let a tandy 1000 boot disk be the judge of that
when i tried to boot from it it thinks about it for a little bit but then it says disk is bootable
only on the tandy 1000 so no this is not a member of the tandy 1000 family
about a year after it was introduced the 1100fd's price was reduced to 799 dollars and then in late
1991 it was joined by the 1110hd which increased the cpu speed to 10 megahertz and added a 20
megabyte hard drive including newer versions of dos and deskmate on it however that model
used a very early two and a half inch ide-xt hard drive made by conner which is very failure prone
the material that is used to hold this drive together down the sides there has liquefied
you can definitely see it right there and you can actually see inside the drive
so if you get one today chances are the hard drive will no longer be working and
no other drives exist to replace it and unfortunately the 1110hd does not include
dos in rom so if you get one and the hard drives not working you will have
to use a boot disk to use it so these days you're better off sticking with the 1100fd
because with dos and deskmate and rom it's a more usable machine even without a hard drive
another problem you'll likely encounter of these old laptops is that the floppy drive is no longer
working because the rubber belt that runs it has perished requiring you to disassemble the machine
remove the floppy drive clean out the remnants of the old belt and install a new one
and that should get your floppy drive working again
you will also likely encounter that the old lead acid battery no longer takes a charge and in fact
this one looks like it was already a replacement from when the computer was only a couple years old
because it has a 1993 date code and it's an aftermarket battery
instead of the original tandy battery and i haven't been able to find any replacements
that are both the correct voltage six volts and will fit in this compartment
another battery that will likely have gone dead is this lithium coin cell
it's a cr2477 it keeps the date and time for the real time clock the rest of the computer
settings are stored in eprom so all this does is keep the date and time so it's not that important
and so far it has not leaked so i haven't bothered to replace it yet and i actually
kind of like how every time i turn on the computer it shows a different date and time
for example right now it thinks it's december 26th, 2012 at 9:13 am i've seen it show up with
dates all the way from 1980 to 2074. so at least that proves it's y2k compliant
and maybe it's just a fluke but the original tandy ac adapter for my machine
died the first time i plugged it in i heard a snap noise come from it and now it puts out zero volts
so it's totally dead it's supposed to put out 9.5 volts dc at 2.1 amps center negative
i discovered that this sony tape recorder power supply which puts out 9 volts center negative at
600 milliamps works fine even though it's a much lower current rating and i also noticed that the
panasonic version which has the backlight also came with a 2.1 amp power supply so i think this
is just a lot of extra current capacity to run the backlight that these tandy machines don't have
so that's why a much lower rated 600 milliamp power supply works fine
there is one form of mass storage which you can add to the 1100fd
and that is a parallel port zip drive
all you need is a boot disk for a newer version of dos because the dos 3.3 that's in rom doesn't
support partitions larger than 32 megabytes with a copy of the iomega guest driver on it
and then you can use a usb zip drive to easily exchange data with a newer pc or a mac
it's not as fast or reliable as a compact flash card or sd card but it certainly gets the job
done and 100 megabytes is certainly enough for a vintage computer like the tandy 1100fd
and it also works with the tandy external parallel port five and
a quarter inch floppy drive that i did a video about a while ago
i can see why this machine wouldn't be very popular with vintage computer collectors in
this day and age because it's not very expandable it doesn't have the advanced sound and graphics
capabilities that the tandy 1000s were famous for and even if you're fine with standard cga
graphics and pc speaker sound it's not very fun using it on what is essentially an oversized
nintendo game boy screen but i do like the bare bones simplicity of its design and how
lightning quick it boots up and that built-in deskmate interface with the word processor and
the way that it's completely silent in operation because it doesn't have any fans or hard drive
i know there's a certain charm of the noises that old computers make
but it's also nice to use one where the only sound you hear is the crickets outside your window