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Man, when I saw that code listings I was blown back to my childhood when my mom and grandmom, who are now both long gone, did me a favor and typed in a code for a pacman clone into our Atari 400. I guess it took hours and we didn’t even knew how to save it to a tape. They just wanted to cheer me up. It worked and I was so happy. We left the computer running for a few days to not loose the game but eventually we had to switch it off and it was gone. What a time. And what a sacrifice by them just to make me happy.
A collective YouTube celebration of all things Tandy through the month of September. And Radio Shack’s first Color Computer here was a cause for celebration indeed, costing just $399 upon hitting the North American market in July of 1980.
For the base model with four kilobytes of memory anyway. There was also an upgraded 16K model available, with or without Extended Color BASIC built-in. So a top-end CoCo went for $599 on launch day, not including a display, storage drives, or joysticks. By no means dirt cheap, but still!
A programmable color microcomputer sold for such a relatively low price was excellent. And it became even more impressive considering the price of Radio Shack’s previous TRS-80s, with Model 1s starting at $500 for a barebones machine and full systems pushing three or four thousand dollars, and the Model II starting at $3450 and even approaching 9000 bucks. And those didn’t even display color!
Consider the Apple II+ 48K and the Atari 400 8K, two of the closest color competitors in the summer of 1980, and were listed at around $1500 and $500, respectively. The Color Computer offered several comparable features and still undercut each of them on pricing. Oh, and my apologies to viewers outside the US who spell “color” differently. Radio Shack was based in Texas, so yeah.
Although my particular CoCo hails from Canada, so it does indeed say “Colour” on the box itself. But that’s it, everywhere else it’s spelled the same as on US machines. It’s worth noting too that slightly older units look different to mine, with more black plastic around the keyboard, the TRS-80 nameplate aligned to the left, and a memory size badge above and to the right.
This was also true of the TRS-80 Videotext, a dial-up information terminal that used the same external case design as the CoCo. And there was also a brief period in 1983 where Radio Shack sold a 64K model in the same case painted off-white instead of gray, complete with Extended Color BASIC built-in and a new keyboard known as the “melted keyboard” due to its lower-profile keycaps with smoothly rounded edges.
A special thanks to LGR viewer Alex for rescuing this particular CoCo from Canadian recycling and sending it over, by the way! I’ve always wanted one of these and have somehow never run across one here, at least not in person.
They’re not rare machines, but the later models seem to be more popular and those were all I had until now. I’d always been curious about how these were to use, so I think it’s high time to see what the original CoCo experience is like over four decades later!
Beyond the computer itself and required cables, inside the box is a registration card offering a 6-month subscription to Radio Shack’s Microcomputer News periodical, and a TRS-80 Color Computer Operation Manual with 31 pages printed in not-quite-color but not-quite-fully monochrome either.
It’s a rather pleasant set of instructions, covering the essential setup steps, common use case scenarios, and elementary troubleshooting. Along with introducing the owner to the very concept of personal computing at home. It even lists the pin outs for each of the inputs and outputs around back, and comes with a small assortment of test programs to type in.
And if this isn’t enough, it also came with Getting Started with Color BASIC, featuring 162 pages of friendly coding exercises and demonstrations. An excellent resource to have in the box, especially since BASIC programming was the primary method of interacting with the Color Computer by default.
The base model didn’t come with any internal or removable storage drives for saving user data, there’s no tape deck, no floppy drive, certainly no hard drive. Nothing of the sort unless you added it yourself. The CoCo was all about expansion, letting the user decide what peripherals they did or didn’t need. After all, in 1980 the average person had still never used a computer at all, much less knew what kind of add-ons to buy.
All you really needed was a television set and you were good to go! And while Radio Shack did sell their own “Color Receiver” TV with TRS-80 branding, there were no restrictions on what you could use. The Color Computer has an RF jack for plugging in a coaxial or aerial connection to your TV, and it’s tuned to VHF channel 3 or 4 to see the computer screen.
Honestly it doesn’t look half bad either on a compact bedroom CRT from back then. Especially this Panasonic with ColorPilot mode, which automatically adjusts the settings to make text sharp and colors vibrant. Upon receiving power, the CoCo boots straight into a Color BASIC prompt, with mine being Extended version 1.0, encompassed in bright green with a flashing color cursor ready for input.
From here you’re ready to type in commands and programs, all with an impressive degree of complexity and ample maturity level. Mm, liberating stuff. If you wanted anything deeper though, you had to code it yourself, or perhaps grab a book or a magazine that featured type-in program listings. Issues of the Color Computer magazine, Hot CoCo, usually had several BASIC games and programs for users to type in. Ahh how exciting! Easy to screw up, and sometimes there were typos in the listings, but still. Exciting!
And without any pre-written software, this right here was the standard Color Computer operating environment: MS BASIC running from the internal 8K ROM, or 16K on expanded models. One might also choose to run Microware OS-9 Level 1, and while that offered some impressive flexibility and multi-user stuff, that became more of a thing on later CoCos so we’re not gonna dwell on it here. Instead, let’s take a look at what we have around back, where we find the power and reset switches, and the aforementioned TV channel select and RF jack. This really is the only video output option, there’s no RGB, s-video, or even composite without modification.
There are also two Tandy joystick ports, an RS232 serial port, and a 1500 baud cassette interface. We’ll return to that last one, but for now let’s look around to the right hand side expansion slot. This is primarily for inserting ROM carts, which Radio Shack called “Program Paks.” These usually sold for between 25 and 40 dollars and could be games, educational programs, business applications, audio utilities, or whatever would fit on a cartridge. Radio Shack typically sold them packed inside a little cardboard box or a hanging plastic package, along with an instruction manual doubling as box art for each title. Simple stuff to use, too! Just insert a cart, power on the CoCo, and it loads straight away. Nice.
However, floppy disks were another option starting in 1981, and they too used the expansion slot. But instead of a game cartridge, you’d plug in a TRS-80 CoCo Controller cart. This connected to a Mini Disk Drive, providing access to 156K single-sided 5.25” floppy disks, each with an edge connector around back that allowed up to four drives to be daisy chained at once for a combined 624 kilobytes of storage. Amazing!
And if you needed to load any carts while keeping the floppy drives connected, starting in 1983 you could purchase the TRS-80 Multi-Pak Interface, a $180 sidecar add-on providing four switch-selectable expansion slots. Shootout to Shelby of Tech Tangents for sending over this footage by the way, he had several CoCo devices I had never come across and yeah.
What an awesome setup this would’ve been back in the early 80s. It wouldn’t have been cheap though, with a single controller and disk drive selling for $599, more than the entire computer. No surprise most folks stuck to using cartridges or tapes. Yeah that’s right, audio cassette tapes!
Cassette storage was standard on personal computers at the time, with both retail releases and homemade compilations being commonplace. This was largely due to the low price relative to floppies and carts, and the fact that you could use any old tape lying around to store data. Radio Shack naturally recommended that you use their cassette tapes and players, and in the documentation they advertised the CTR-80A first sold for the TRS-80 Model 1.
But I prefer the later CCR-81 model cuz I mean, yeah, just look at it. The silvery paint job fits perfectly. So while the cassette deck can be swapped out for anything, you still need a TRS-80 interface cable since there aren’t any audio jacks on the CoCo itself.
The cable also has “remote” connection that lets the computer control the tape deck, to a degree.
It’s optional but darned useful, making the tape-loading process as easy as inserting a tape, pressing play, and typing in the CLOAD command. And then it begins searching the tape for programs! Hopefully you’ve got it set to the right volume, since as with other personal computers of the time it’s pretty sensitive to volume levels. And if you’re passing the audio through any kind of speakers, well, best turn that down cuz the resulting sound is....computer. Now that we’ve got a program loaded it’s time to put that glorious keyboard to use!
And by “glorious” I mean “ah I can deal with it if I really have to.” The original Color Computer packs a 53-key Chiclet-style keyboard with itty bitty keys in a wonky layout. They are at least plastic instead of rubber, and its spaced apart keys means it works with overlays like the BASIC Aid, for example. But while typing works a bit better than I expected, eh, you just know it’s not gonna great simply by looking at it.
It’s gonna be a bad time if you’re a touch type, it’s much more suitable for single-finger hunting and pecking. And the keys tend to require pressing down somewhat hard to register, often resulting in chattering, and can even get physically stuck in place. I know some of this is due to age, but this was frustrating back in the day too, with third-party replacement keyboards showing up within a year or two of the CoCo hitting store shelves.
Unfortunately, the joystick situation isn’t much better, although it’s still preferable to the keyboard for gaming. These were a separate purchase from the computer itself, being sold in pairs for $24.95. For that you got two analog, single-button, non-centering sticks, with a 6-pin DIN connection used on the CoCo range and early Tandy PCs alike.
I don’t hate these, but I’m not impressed either. The fire button is in an awkward spot in the center around back, and there are no springs inside so the stick freely flops around. Fine for some games, maddening in others. And unless you bought a converter for Atari-style sticks or went third-party, the only other option was the Deluxe Joystick.
I highly recommend this instead since it’s a self-centering joystick with trim adjustments and better button placement, provided you like firing with your left hand. Sadly these are rather prone to breaking, maybe even more so than the original sticks, as those springs put stress on the aging plastic bits. The add-ons and peripherals only continued from here, too!
Things like serial dot matrix and electrostatic printers, external modems, speech modules, graphics tablets and so on, the Color Computer upgrade market was intense. It was also the first Tandy Radio Shack system to have a mouse available! Still a pretty fresh concept at the time, with few GUIs and mouse-optimized programs to choose from, but an appealing prospect nonetheless.
Let’s take a detour inside the machine while we’re at it, which is super easy to crack open despite voiding the warranty back in the day. Besides, I needed to fix up the keyboard anyway, you can see it was all yellowed when I first got it. And the cost-cutting measures are immediately apparent here, check out that slice of cardboard covering the power supply and the foil-covered RF shield. Anything to save a few pennies right?
And then, with this metal covering out of the way, we can take a closer look at the CPU. Which is a Motorola 6809E microprocessor running at 0.895 megahertz, incompatible with the Zilog Z80 used in previous TRS-80s. And seeing as the TRS-80 line was named after the Z80 CPU, the name here is rather meaningless. Other than coming out in 1980 I suppose, but that’s a stretch. In terms of RAM, there were multiple models with different memory options available.
Initially only 4K and 16K, but mine here is a 32 kilobyte machine, model number 26-3003. Amusingly, to upgrade machines Radio Shack sometimes used defective memory chips, often 64K chips that were half-bad and only showed 32K. They weren’t always bad though, sometimes the 64K chips were still good and artificially held back, so you could actually get the full 64K on some 32K CoCos, what a time to be alive.
Then there’s sound, which isn’t handled by a dedicated chipset like its contemporaries from TI, Commodore, and Atari. Instead, the CoCo features a 6-bit digital to analog converter outputting single voice sound that’s directly handled by the CPU, leading to sparse sound effects in games especially. As for the graphics side of things, the color of the Color Computer is quite colorful indeed.
It’s capable of displaying 9 distinct colors across multiple text and graphics modes, the former being uppercase-only displaying at 32 columns wide by 16 rows tall. Not even 40 columns, much less 80, meaning that working with spreadsheets and word processing software was not ideal.
At least it had color graphics though, with resolutions ranging between 64x32 and 256x192 with up to four simultaneous colors. Neat. Perhaps not quite neat enough to explode in popularity, but enough to gain a foothold in the early 80s top five. By 1983 it placed fourth in the sub-$500 segment in the US, with the TI-99/4A leading the pack with a 34% market share, the VIC-20 at 33%, Atari 400 about 20%, and the CoCo only around 13 percent of US sales. Radio Shack kept at it though, capitalizing on the existing user base with waves of upgrades and add-ons, as well as a new model in 1983: the Color Computer 2. Both the CoCo 1 and 2 are largely the same machine inside, minus some power supply differences, with the biggest change being the new case and full-travel keyboard.
There was even less of a change on earlier CoCo 2s, having a white plastic case very similar to the CoCo 1 redesign shown earlier with the same lower-profile “melted keyboard” installed. It wasn’t until the Color Computer 3 in 1986 where things really moved forward technically, with a faster 2MHz CPU, more RAM, better graphics, and RGB output, while remaining mostly compatible with older models. And of course, I’ve gotta mention the Dragon 32 and 64, sold in the US as the Tano Dragon. This delightful beige beast was released to the European market in 1982, and was more or less a Color Computer underneath, with claims of 98% CoCo compatibility.
As a result, each machine can run the other’s programs just fine, usually with minor tweaks to the code. So if you have a dire need to play Chuckie Egg here in the US, or Dungeons of Daggorath in the UK, then here go. And thanks to an active CoCo community, it’s easy to track down pre-converted software, or anything else for that matter.
With the Color Computer Archive in particular offering up a treasure trove of games, applications, and documentation. Much of it being in a form that’s easy to play with on modern machines using emulation, or on original hardware using something like the CoCo SDC. This has become the go-to data solution for all things Color Computer, providing an SD card interface that plugs into the expansion port.
It’s especially powerful when combined with SDC Explorer, so you can skip all the directory, loading, and execution commands and boot whatever you like straight from the main menu instead. And that’s the TRS-80 Color Computer 1!
And I quite like it. Over the years, I’ve seen the CoCo 1 written off by some as a forgettable, unimpressive toy, so people should just skip it and maybe go for the CoCo 3 since that’s the “only” one worth having. But I’ve gotta disagree on all counts, there’s nothing trashy about this TRS-80.
I enjoy its silvery paint job, I admire its colorful capabilities for a budget microcomputer from 1980, and it’s also one that remains quite affordable to collectors. It has its share of hardware limitations of course, but what doesn’t?
And sure, it’s not the most impressive 8-bit library of games and software I’ve ever seen, but what it does have is rather unique even among its peers. Like, I gotta wonder how many folks have grabbed one simply to play Dungeons of Daggorath over the years. I know it’s what attracted me to it more than anything, and then once I discovered what else it could do?
It was tough not to be charmed by the humble Color Computer, and form an appreciation for how awesome it would’ve been to have such a cool little machine for a reasonable price over 40 years ago. And hey, the TRS-80 fun doesn’t end here!
Check out the other channels doing SepTandy things if you want more, including but not limited to Mr. Lurchs Things, DaveJustDave, The Retro Channel, Adrians Digital Basement, Josh Malone, Jan Beta, MindFlareRetro, Tech Tangents, and Retro Spector.
Or if you enjoyed my video on the Color Computer in particular, well I’ve got plenty more where this came from regarding vintage computers large and small. Along with new videos being posted each week on a variety of topics involving retro technology, hardware, software, computer games and whatever else grabs my attention from week to week. And as always, thank you very much for watching!
