Kind of lucked out on a Tandy today.

Posted by theshok@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 12 comments

I had a junk guy come over to get a few things and noticed in the bed of his truck were dirty old computers, in on the top of the pile was a Tandy Model 4. I'm a Commodore guy and never had a Tandy, but I have a thing for Radio Shack and told the guy I want that, he said help myself to any of them.

Grabbed the dirty thing and 15 mins later saw it was alive, yeah I know I should have checked it over more before power up. I will educate myself on the model and take more precautions before the next power up.

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LayliaNgarath@reddit

You can fit it with a board that emulates a disk drive and takes SD cards and it has a really good version of CP/M available.

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theshok@reddit (OP)

Thanks! That’s exactly what I’m interested in doing, I was hoping since I found stuff to use a SD card and WiFi with my Commodore 64 that I could do the same with this. Just don’t know if the aftermarket is as deep yet.

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LayliaNgarath@reddit

So what I did with mine was get a cheap GoTek and update it to use Flashfloppy firmware. That will give you the ability to boot TRS-80 disk images from a USB stick. Then you can get something called a FreHD that lets you emulate a HD using an SD card. Even the smallest SD card is huge, so you can emulate multiple drives. Depending on the age of your machine you may be able to boot from the FreHD on startup, if not you can easily add that by updating the boot ROM. There's a guy in Australia will sell you the whole FreHD kit.

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theshok@reddit (OP)

Thank you, I’m screenshotting this for later! Hopefully I can work on it some this week.

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crookdmouth@reddit

Good on you for saving it! Once it's cleaned, looks like it will be in pretty good shape. We had those in our computer lab up until like 1986.

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marhaus1@reddit

Wow! What a find! And now I'm sad thinking about its siblings that weren't as lucky 😞

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Maleficent_Fix_5305@reddit

In addition to a Model 4 (rescued from family member looking to get rid of it) I’ve now - Rescued a Coco 2 & 3 (different relative) with disks & cassettes plus at least a few basic joysticks - Purchased both a Model 200 & a Model 600 (both in unknown functional state) To my shame & frustration I have them basically gathering dust in storage, other than planning their refurbishment.

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theshok@reddit (OP)

Rescued is a good word, I feel like I did rescue it. Once I fix it up a bit I‘ll make a half hearted attempt to re-home it since I have a lot of stuff. I won’t worry so much about the money, just that the next person won’t trash it. Otherwise it will live in a collection until I kick the bucket.

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