| Tandy Corporation | |
|---|---|
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| Founder(s) | Norton Hinckley, Dave L. Tandy |
| Founded | 1919 |
| Closed | 2000 |
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Tandy Corporation was a family-owned leather goods company based in Fort Worth, Texas, which is best known for purchasing and giving its name to the Fort Worth, Texas-based RadioShack Corporation. Tandy was founded in 1919 as a leather supply store, and acquired RadioShack in 1963. The Tandy name was dropped in May 2000, when RadioShack Corporation was made the official name, apart from in the United Kingdom where the RadioShack name was already in use.
Tandy was one of the companies (along with Commodore and Apple) that started the personal computer revolution, with their TRS-80 (1977) and TRS-80 Color Computer ("CoCo") (1980) line of home computers. Later Tandy adopted the IBM PC architecture. Tandy's IBM PC compatibles, the Tandy 1000 and Tandy 2000, were cheaper than the IBM PC and yet featured built-in, and better, sound and graphics. These machines could produce 16-color video; and operated two dynamic sine/square/sawtooth sound channels, one non-dynamic sound channel, and a dynamic white/pink/brown noise channel. It was only when VGA-standard graphics cards and Sound Blaster sound cards became common in the early 1990s that the Tandy's advanced features became noncompetitive and thus obsolete.