Motivated by Rosenthal's famous l 1 -dichotomy in Banach spaces, Haydon's theorem, and additionally by recent works on tame dynamical systems, we introduce the class of tame locally convex spaces. This is a natural locally convex analog of Rosenthal Banach spaces (for which any bounded sequence contains a weak Cauchy subsequence). Our approach is based on a bornology of tame subsets which in turn is closely related to eventual fragmentability. This leads, among others, to the following results:• extending Haydon's characterization of Rosenthal Banach spaces, by showing that a lcs E is tame iff every weak-star compact, equicontinuous convex subset of E * is the strong closed convex hull of its extreme points iff co w * (K) = co (K) for every weak-star compact equicontinuous subset K of E * ; • E is tame iff there is no bounded sequence equivalent to the generalized l 1 -sequence;• strengthening some results of W.M. Ruess about Rosenthal's dichotomy;• applying the Davis-Figiel-Johnson-Pelczyński (DFJP) technique one may show that every tame operator T : E → F between lcs can be factored through a tame lcs.