Talk:DeskMate
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I worked on Tandy's Deskmate from 1985 through 1990.
The development team worked in "Tower Two" of Tandy's Fort Worth Texas headquarters. I recall that the team included a very good mix of women and men.
The challenge of DeskMate was to be able to run in a machine with a slow CPU, very little memory and a floppy disk. To accomplish this, the core of DeskMate was embedded in an EPROM on some models of the Tandy 1000.
I also recall an informal agreement between Tandy and Microsoft. The early Tandy 1000 did not have enough CPU speed or mamory to run Windows at that time, so Microsoft encouraged us to make DeskMate similar to Windows - and they did adopt some of our UI innovations.
The death of DeskMate came about primarily due to the introduction of Windows 3 - and the improved capabilities of the Tandy 1000. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Johnreynolds (talk • contribs) 15:23, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
I grew up with the DeskMate windowing system (the article is right to state it definitely isn't an OS). My first IBM-compatible computer was a Tandy 1000 HX -- one of the machines that had DeskMate burned into an EPROM. The Music application was like nothing else of its time. Well before I got my own Tandy, every time my family went to Radio Shack, I was at a display Tandy 1000 EX or SX experimenting with the Music application and seeing what I could get it to do. The modern post-MIDI world of Spotify and YouTube and even GarageBand on my phone (of all things!) makes it so easy to forget how revolutionary it was to have real multi-instrument sound on a computer! And Tandy (and Commodore's Amiga) were pretty much the only brands at the time that didn't just have a piezo buzzer for sound. The Music application was where I heard Pachelbel's _Canon in D_ for the first time. I couldn't read music (still can't, unfortunately), but that didn't stop me from attempting to come up with four-part compositions! Plus, I learned a lot about music notation that would be very useful later on during my high school years. Good memories of a windowing system that was just a tiny bit before its proper time. Mr Responsible (talk) 05:14, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
DeskMate for TRS-80/Tandy Color Computers 1/2 and DeskMate 3 for Tandy Color Computer 3
[edit]Deskmate was also available on the TRS-80/Tandy Color Computer and Color Computer 3, then a DeskMate 3 was released for the Tandy Color Computer 3. I came here looking for a timeline on those releases, and unless there is some other page not linked to this one about those, I will add a section. --~~ Allen Huffman (talk) 21:04, 5 May 2026 (UTC)