Other Leathercraft Supplies

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. more...

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The Tandy name was dropped in May of 2000, when RadioShack Corporation was made the official name, apart from in the United Kingdom where the RadioShack name was already in use.

History

Tandy began in 1919 when two friends, Norton Hinckley and Dave L. Tandy, decided to start the Hinckley-Tandy Leather Company, which sold leather shoe parts to shoe repair shops in the Fort Worth area. Tandy's son, Charles D. Tandy, turned it into a leathercraft company when shoe rationing in World War II almost killed the business, and later expanded into selling leather and tools to make such products as wallets. After a struggle over the company, which saw the Hinckley name dropped, Tandy made another change in 1963, when it bought the ailing RadioShack. It later sold off all non-electronic business.

Computers

Tandy was one of the companies (along with Commodore International 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 colors and 3 channels of sound, compared to CGA's 4 color capability. 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. Tandy also produced short lived Tandy 1100FD and Tandy 1100HD notebooks. Released in 1992 the "striking" 1100 Series was based on the popular NEC V20 processor clocked at 10 MHz. Tandy also produced software for its computers running DOS, in the form of Tandy Deskmate. Tandy even produced a line of floppy disks.

Tandy continued producing IBM PC compatibles until the end of the Intel 486 era.

Tandy produced an interactive, multimedia CD-ROM player called the Tandy Video Information System or VIS. Like the Tandy computers, it was based on the IBM PC architecture and used a version of Microsoft Windows.

Tandy acquired GRiD Systems in March, 1988. Grid Systems was a laptop manufacturer whose products included the GRiD Compass (1982), GridCase (1985), GridLite (1987), and GRiDPad (1990) tablet computer.

"Tandy" stores

From the 1970s Tandy operated a chain of RadioShack-style stores in Britain and Australia through its subsidiary InterTAN, under the Tandy name. In 1986, InterTAN became a separate entity though connections between them were still visible. For example, catalog number compatibility was maintained, so the same catalog number in both companies would refer to the same item.

Read more at Wikipedia.org