From: uhclemLOSE.oct07@nemesis.lonestar.org   
      
   Herb Oxley  wrote:   
   : Thanks for posting that, Frank - the TRS-80 4P was my first 'desktop'   
   : computer which I bought back around 1985 when T/RS was trying to get rid   
   : of them (my experience with its less than robust display coupled by   
   : RS marketing practices really soured me on Tandy hardware).   
   : It was worth while though as a learning experience :)   
      
   Starting at about the time of the 4P and the 2000, Tandy began to see   
   improvements in quality.  This started slowly, first perhaps thanks   
   to old-boy vendor relationships being junked because these vendors   
   were producing items that started failing to even meet basic functionality   
   criteria.  The biggest and worst of these was Tandon, and that   
   Roach-Tandon connection kept the Tandy computer quality low until Tandon   
   simply couldn't make eight drives in a row work, or even arrive without   
   bits hanging off of them.  First we got rid of Tandon floppy drives.   
   Losing the hard disks took a few more painful years, but finally Tandon   
   did themselves in with their shoddy products and inconsistent quality   
   and lost the Tandy hard drive business as well.   
      
   Meanwhile, thanks to CAD circuit board design, gate array chips and   
   machine insertion/assembly, by 1988 or so the equipment quality was on   
   par or better than anything anybody else in the PC business was producing   
   and from 1988 thru the end the quality of in-house systems remained pretty   
   high.   
      
   Oh, there were stupid things that raised failure rates and would make   
   the machines look bad after a period of ownership, and those could   
   usually be traced back to the people who demanded and those that designed   
   the shape and style of a given thing, usually plastic bezels and controls.   
   The result was when you tinkered like this, you usually wasted a year   
   before you got the quality on whatever it was back to what it was   
   previously.   
      
   Tandy had a hard time with plastics all the way back to the   
   Model I days, but refused to learn and felt this urge to have something   
   plastic be different and so it was different.  And so, we ended up   
   with Tandy computers having little oval shaped power and diskette eject   
   buttons that would always stick or break off, while nobody else made these   
   controls in any shape other than square or rectangular (and didn't try   
   to embed lights in them) and those other companies didn't have those   
   problems.  In fact, the diskette drives in some cases would come with   
   one button and bezel, and someone at the factory would take those   
   off and throw them away, and put on the oval shaped one and the matching   
   bezel that didn't fit as well.  Tandy also seemed to manage to find   
   those plastic vendors that didn't put UV stabilizers in their resins.   
      
   Circuit board design generally became highly reliable, even if Tandy   
   still insisted on using lousy connectors or going their own way on power   
   supplies at a point when the rest of the industry had pretty much   
   standardized the power supply and power harness assembly.  Eventually even   
   that was the same as you would find in a PC made by some other maker,   
   leaving Compaq as the king of proprietary everything in their PC hardware   
   designs.   
      
      
   : I really wish Logical Systems/MISOSYS had offered an LS-DOS/86 for the   
   : IBM-PC platform (with enhancements to take advantage of the additional RAM   
   : and address space ); anyone hazard a guess why that never happened?   
      
   A discussion - possibly at this big party Logical Systems held that I   
   went to in the early/mid 1980s - pondered over this subject.  The answer   
   was pretty much "Why bother?".   By this point, the Model 2000 was out,   
   and it dashed completely the false hopes that Intel and to some   
   extent Microsoft had put out about how to compete against the IBM-PC   
   platform, which was that the hardware didn't have to be the same (or   
   so said Intel and Microsoft), because applications only wanted   
   software compatibility (what Intel/Microsoft kept saying).   
      
   The 2000 demonstrated (thanks to Lotus 1-2-3 and one or two other key   
   applications of the day) that you couldn't have *anything* different and   
   sell it as an IBM PC-compatible, so what was the point of a LS-DOS type   
   operating system that might provide its spin what a Disk Operating System   
   environment would do, when you knew you also had to provide total   
   compatibility with what genuine MS-DOS/PC-DOS was doing including to   
   filesystem structure and block allocation strategy, as well as interact   
   with the IBM BIOS calls which the clone makers now knew they had to   
   replicate in extreme detail.   
      
   Radically different operating systems such as the various UNIX knock-offs   
   or licensed ports, and the remaining CP/M loyalists demonstrated how small   
   the market was for anything not the same as PC-DOS/MS-DOS.   
      
   What might have been nice was to have a LS-DOS environment with a   
   Z80 machine language translator that would spit out an 8086 executable   
   that would then run under MS-DOS.  You could actually do something   
   like this under MS-DOS since you could push it pretty much out of the   
   way and with segmented addressing you could have more room to work   
   with, but that market for people who want to run a TRSDOS Z80 executable   
   on a machine with far more RAM and very similar native applications   
   available is going to be really small, and so nothing happened.   
      
      
   : So which entity would care at this late date about the code in the TRS   
   : ROMS (MODELA/III)?   
   : Microsoft? Whoever wound up with the bankrupt corpse of AST?   
   :   
   : Was the BASIC in the TRS-80 I/III ROMS a work-for-hire where Tandy had all   
   : the rights;   
   : or did Microsoft retain rights ?   
      
   It depends on what precise item you are speaking of, and in some cases,   
   whom or what you believe.   
      
   The original Model I Level 1 ROMs are absolutely something Tandy   
   paid people to write for and Tandy did have full ownership prior to   
   July 1, 1993.  Whether a valid copyright exists on this is not clear.   
   To date evidence strongly suggests that there is no valid copyright   
   on these ROMs.   
      
   The Level II version of the Model I ROMs contains some Tandy-written   
   elements, but also contains Microsofts interpreter BASIC, and Tandy   
   supposedly paid per-unit royalties to Microsoft on that, so that strongly   
   indicates that at least the BASIC portion of the ROM never belonged to   
   Tandy.   
      
   Tandy in general wasn't big on doing one-time payments on software   
   licenses, even though it would be cheaper in the long run if the product   
   was a success.  So for LDOS and LS-DOS, Logical Systems got per-copy   
   royalties, in addition to some up-front development payments.   
      
   Now, the Color Computer III ROMs or Model III ROMs (and subsequently the   
   Model 4/4D ROMs and the Model 4P MODEL*/III files) are a different   
   beast.  My personal opinion is that any copyright that exists on a given   
   piece of software that was sold by Tandy (in software or firmware form)   
   in general would fall to wherever those assets ended up, which is Samsung   
   Electronics Korea, or if they never fully absorbed AST Computer despite   
   what their SEC filings said, then who knows.  Further, it is possible that   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)