Some were icon-based, so launching an app was as easy as clicking an icon with a mouse. How you used DeskMate varied between platforms and versions. It also included a simple calculator and the ability to set alarms. By version 3.0, that included a calendar, a word processor, a spreadsheet application, a simple database, a vector drawing program, a telecommunications program, and a Hangman game. ToastyTechĮvery version of DeskMate included a suite of applications. Not Quite Solitaire: Hangman shipped with Tandy DeskMate 3.x. Other components had to be loaded from disk, but it made the machines friendlier with DeskMate instantly available. Later, you could install it onto an internal hard disk.īut in some cases, using DeskMate was as easy as switching on your PC: Both the Tandy 1100FD laptop and the Tandy 1000 SL desktop included portions of DeskMate built into internal ROM chips so they would load instantly on boot. To load it, you’d insert a DeskMate floppy in the drive and turn on your machine. Usually, DeskMate shipped with Tandy computers on several 5.25″ or 3.5″ floppy disks. According to a 1984 review in Creative Computing magazine, with DeskMate, “you might never need another software package for your computer.” Using DeskMate Tandy advertised DeskMate as a major selling point of its consumer PCs, and it impressed several reviewers shortly after its debut. On the TRS-80 Model 4, it ran atop TRSDOS, on the Color Computer 3, it served as a shell for OS-9, and on IBM PC compatibles, it required MS-DOS to work.

Instead, it made existing text-based operating systems easier to use. It began as a text-mode-only suite of productivity applications but evolved over time into a mouse-driven graphical interface.Īs a user interface shell, DeskMate wasn’t an operating system itself. To make its home computers easier to use, Tandy developed a menu-based operating environment called DeskMate in 1984.

Sure, there were business machines too, but Radio Shack sold huge numbers of its home PCs like the Color Computer series and the Tandy 1000. Since the debut of the TRS-80 Model I in 1977, Tandy marketed most of its PCs toward a mainstream consumer audience-one that might stop by a neighborhood Radio Shack retail store. Meanwhile, computers like the Apple Macintosh made computing as easy as point-and-click with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and a mouse. To use MS-DOS, you needed to memorize typed commands that didn’t immediately make sense if you weren’t already used to them. In the early 1980s, IBM PC compatible computers were not very user-friendly. It made its PCs easier to use and competed with Windows. released a graphical user interface called DeskMate that shipped with its TRS-80 and Tandy personal computers. In the 1980s, Radio Shack parent Tandy Corp.

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