[bikenaga]

The latch-things that were supposed to secure the cards in the slots apparently didn't seat the cards tightly enough. My dealer finally just replaced them with screws after I complained a few times about the graphics card coming loose, resulting in a poor signal.

Compatibility has been great in some ways. But with standards in flux back then, there was more variety (and maybe fun) than there is now. Besides experiments like the 2000, there were things like machines with 2 different CPUs (the Commodore SuperPet had a 6502 and a 6809, and I think the DEC Rainbow had a Z80 and and 8088). There were so many 5.25" floppy formats you needed utilities like Xenocopy to convert among them (I think it fiddled with the drive controller to manipulate the drive heads).

With machines being simpler, you could fiddle a lot more. Many magazines published assembly language code for little games and utilities; for that matter, the computer section of a typical bookstore carried lots of books on assembly language. There were books on microcomputer system design, stuff about how things worked at the chip level. All gone.

I remember Flight Simulator. I couldn't believe it the first time I played it. Crashed the plane over and over ... There was a graphical paint program, and other graphical stuff which worked with the very slow mouse - in fact, I have a copy of an ad featuring Bill Gates in which he describes using the 2000 in designing the early versions of Windows.

[bitwize]

I'm a bit surprised that in your list of dual-CPU systems you didn't mention Tandy's own Model 16 -- which was a TRS-80 Model II fitted with a 68000 daughtercard and up to 768KiB RAM for the secondary processor. It was the first Unix-capable desktop not to come out of Sun.