Why was the Tandy 600 Discontinued?
The number one reason has to be poor sales; Tandy is in the business of making money after all and not building a fandom. And you cant fault them for dropping a poor performer! But there are several reasons postulated by many critics, pundits, and owners as to why the Tandy 600 was such a poor performer; and some of them clearly exist directly because of decisions made at One Tandy Center: • Scant Third Party support. • User manual was contained errors and not generally user-friendly. • The rise of MS-DOS laptops. • The tariff on 16-bit computer imports. (The Tandy 600 was made in Japan.) • A difficult to read screen with the bizarre layout of 80 columns by 16 lines. • Lack of BASIC. • Released with a scant 32K of memory out of the box. • No carrying handle. To their credit, Radio Shack did stock replacement parts for the 600 for several years after it’s demise. Batteries and BASIC ROM chips might still be available. Contact your local Radio Shack and have them call National Parts for
