Congratulations on your project. In the late '80s and early '90s I managed a Radio Shack franchise (Delmar Co., Middletown DE). The 1000s were an interesting series with a lot a varieties. The original was a desktop with a separate keyboard (basically a slightly improved PCjr clone), one later model was a console (rather amiga 1200 like) with MS-DOS in ROM.
I remember a later pizza box style 1000 as having the first 386SX processor that finally allowed the 1000s to run Windows.
BTW - I held on to some 1000 keyboards for the longest time because those keyboard had excellent feel and feedback (similar to IBMs excellent keyboards).
And of course most Tandy computers were made in the US at a Tandy owned plant that tested the motherboards for 24hrs in a elevated heat environment before assembly.
Our company also did a lot with the Color Computer. Motorola's basic design relied on the processor to perform a lot of duties that other machines (from Commodore and Atari) had dedicated chips for. But the processor in the Color Computer (a 6809) was more powerful than competing 8 bit machines. We actually had a three terminal point of sales system running on one Color Computer. The Color Computer 3 was a little too much of an upgrade, too late. It's a shame Tandy didn't take that machine more seriously. At the end of its lifecycle, running under OS9 Level II with third party disk controllers (both floppy and hard drive) and memory expansions up to 2 meg it was a fun machine to work with.
When Tandy EOL'd the Coco, we brought out a 68000 based OS-9 computer that we sold for a few years (we even ported a GUI to it).
That project, the System IV, led to the 68030 powered System V.
If the owner of the company hadn't passed on, we were planning on releasing an accesory card the used two components from the Coco3 (the 6809 CPU and the GIME graphic and memory controller chip). This would have given us backward compatibility with Color Computer software.
I keep track of Tandy related retro projects as well as Amiga related projects. Although there is one difference. While Amiga users may consider themselves hobbyists, they have updated machines that can run modern software. Tandy hobbyists are restricted by the limited power of their machines and a lack of upgrade paths. Plus they haven't got the kind of useful software you see in the Amiga market.
