I have been slowly working on bringing up my 386 machine. It is a Tandy 2500sx at 20mhz. The origin of this computer in my collection is pretty interesting (to me at least).

Rather than scouring the various classifieds sites for junk computers in my local area, which is how I acquire most of my old computers, I actually found this one abandoned in the attic of my first college house. It was during a bout of intense boredom on a rainy weekend night, that we decided to venture into the attic of our 1940’s college rental home…

Among the piles of garbage and Christmas decorations there laid a taped-up box, with the word “TANDY” on it. We pulled it down from the attic and beheld my disappointment when I discovered that there was not a TRS-80 inside. Though at least it wasn’t a Color Computer. We hooked up this 2500sx and wiped the dust off the screen of the original monitor. It came complete with a mouse and a keyboard, although both of them were covered in a thick scum that made their use impossible. We turned on the computer and we were greeted with the MS-DOS 6.22 boot screen. I happened to have an IBM Model M keyboard to use in the meantime, and we explored the filesystem on the 81MB hard drive.

There were a few games and program root directories. According to AUTOEXEC.bat we were outfitted with the well-reviewed Sound Blaster CT2230. We noticed a “Windows” directory, and thought nothing much of it, until I realized that this computer must have Windows installed on top of DOS, as was the old way. Running “win” on the command line, we were hit with a second wave of excitement as we were greeted by the Windows 3.1 desktop.

We were able to load up WordPerfect and look through the various essays of a college student during the mid 90s. There were also letters written by family, and angry love-letters written by a young man of the time period. I considered these historically interesting, and since then I have saved an image of the drive for future preservation.

I intend to write some articles detailing the work I have done on this computer. My goal is to future-proof it somewhat. One thing I have done, is replaced the proprietary Tandy floppy drive with an IBM standard one, which required a custom floppy cable to work. I have still yet to find a replacement for the original hard disk, which is still functional and surprisingly quiet for its age. I have tried a Compact Flash solution, but I believe the non-LBA addressing scheme of the motherboard’s firmware has prevented that from working. There is a maximum drive size of 512MB, and I am looking for an industrial IDE flash module in that size range with the hopes that it will work. I have in my possession an ISA XTIDE card which is supposedly capable of supporting a bootable Compact Flash drive. I have not attempted this yet but I am skeptical of the BIOS allowing me to boot from a non-primary disk.

Anyway, until then. This was the story of the Tandy 2500sx/20.