Tandy 1000EX & 1000HX hard drives and peripherals Will Baldwin January 14, 1995 I have owned a Tandy 1000HX since about 1989. It replaced the 1000EX in Tandy's lineup, and was similiar, except it has a 3.5" 720k diskette drive, with space for another, whereas the 1000EX had a 5.25" drive. Both are considered 'XT-class' machines, primarily because they use the 8088-2 mpu chip, rather than the 8088 found in the original IBM PC. The 8088-2, with the Tandy memory expansion (which includes a DMA chip), is significantly faster than the original 8088. These 2 machines offered the proprietary Tandy TCGA enhanced graphics, and 3-voice sound circuitry. Tandy never offered hard drive systems for these machines, and even excluded any hard drive programs on the system diskettes. Owners who looked for other sources found that generic hard drive systems wouldn't work with these machines because of 2 problems: a) these machines, like all Tandy 1000's, use a non-standard IRQ (5) to access the hard drive. b) these machines have unique card slots, called 'Plus style' connectors, so normal cards don't fit. Fortunately, several after-market suppliers soon created hard drive systems (and many other peripherals) for these machines. They were advertised extensively in PCM magazine. One TandyPro Forum user, A. B. Trevor, uploaded a text file, 'Hardex.rev', a few years ago, detailing his experience in installing a hard drive in his 1000EX. Unfortunately, the uniqueness of these hard drives meant that they were higher priced than generic systems. Because of this, and the limited selection, I, like most other HX and EX owners, decided to forego the hard drive route. This is unfortunate, because these machines are certainly powerful enough to use a wide range of applications. But, for many years in the PC world, hard drives have been almost a 'sine qua non' for any but the most simplistic applications. With the popularity of hard drives, came more and more software which *required* a hard drive in order to operate. Having a hard drive is also the easiest way to speed up processing, because their access time is significantly faster than diskette drives. Another benefit is that the hard drive media, which is *never* touched by the read/write heads, lasts much longer than diskettes, which are. I primarily use my HX for maintaining a relatively small customer database which is interfaced with Q&A Write for Deskmate. With the HX, I also bought the extra diskette drive B, which, when added to drive A, gave me a total of 1.44 megabytes of storage. Having 2 diskette drives gave me a lot of flexibility in organizing my diskettes, and minimized diskette swapping. But recently, my customer database has become large enough that merging with Q&A Write takes painfully long, so I decided to investigate the 1000HX hard drive market again. I looked up the companies in a 1992 issue of PCM magazine and found that, surprisingly, many of them still offer the special drives and controllers, as well as many other EX/HX peripherals. I have listed some of their names and phone #'s at the end of this article. Most of their prices have been significantly lowered, but after some research, the idea came to me that I could put together a hard drive system for even less cost. I found out that I didn't need a hard drive specially made for my machine, just a specially made hard drive controller, and just about any IDE hard drive made for (or that could be used with) XT-class, 8-bit machines. It turns out that Seagate, and maybe others, made hard drives which would fit into my second diskette bay, and could be used with XT-class, 8-bit machines. The Seagate ST351AX 42 meg drive is an example. Seagate stopped producing this drive around 1992, but I found it's easy to find used ones (and as of this writing, Insight, listed below, still had some new ones). I posted ads in local 'Buy/Sell' BBS networks, the national Fidonet 'HDCONF' conference, Compuserve's PCHW forum, this forum (TRS80PRO), and the Compuserve 'Classified' system (GO CLASSIFIED). In just a couple of days I had several offers, ranging from $35 to $50 for this drive. I bought one from a BBS sysop who had seen my ad in the local 'Buy/Sell' BBS network. The only inconveniences were that I no longer had a second diskette drive, and that I had to drill a couple of holes in my diskette drive chassis to make sure the new drive would fit solidly, though a person could use other means, such as foam, or tape, to accomplish this (actually, if a person didn't mind the appearance, and the hard drive cable is long enough, the hard drive could be placed outside the machine). All that was left was to find the special controller. MegaHaus and Micro Systems both sell the controller separately. I got mine from Micro Systems. My total cost for this project, including drive, controller, shipping, phone calls, and Compuserve connect charges, was less than $125. There are many peripherals available for the EX/HX, including hard drives, hard drive controllers, 8 meg memory cards, internal modem cards, VGA cards, sound cards, serial ports, fax, etc. sold by these suppliers (this list is for informational purposes only, and is *not* meant as an endorsement of any of these companies): PC Enterprises phone: 800-922-7257 DCS Industries 800-537-3539 Insight (formerly Hard Drives Int'l) 800-377-3000 MegaHaus 800-426-0560 Tulin Technology 408-432-9057 Micro Systems 717-528-8493 P.S. Micro Systems tells me that there is a magazine available which supports the Tandy 1000 computers: Computer News PC, PO Box 680, Casper, WY, 82602, phone: 307-265-6483. EX/HX users: feel free to send me E-Mail. (c) January 14, 1995 Will Baldwin CIS: 76200,275