Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer

In the summer of 1981 when I was 14 years old, the home computers of the time were not nearly as powerful as the ones we have today. My dad scraped up the $399 dollars because he was also interested in having a computer. $399 may not seem like much, but $399 in 1981 dollars is the same as $965 in 2008 dollars.

The Radio Shack Color Computer AKA CoCo, had some features that were ahead of the competitors of that time. For one, it had a Motorola 6809 processor. This computer chip was more powerful than many of the other processors available at the time. The Color Computer also offered color and sound. Up to 9 colors could be displayed at once. The monitor for this machine was your television. To save your programs, there was a cassette tape recorder, and I always made 3 saves, because sometimes they would not load correctly. The keyboard was like a calculator, not like the average keyboards today. You could get a floppy disk drive for it but that was out of my price range.

My Color Computer did come with 2 joysticks for gaming. My dad and I eventually upgraded the memory to 32kb, and we bought a dot-matrix printer. The printer was extremely slow and very loud. When I was ready to print, I would go take a break and have some coffee waiting for it to finish. (Yes, I did drink coffee when I was 14!) I used the computer and printer to do some reports for school. There was no spell-checker, so I had to really watch out for misspellings and typos.

There was also a slot for game cartridges. We had a dozen or so, but there were over a hundred produced. The cartridges had their own on board memory, so they could do a bit more than the computer could alone.

I also had a modem for my Color Computer. It was a whopping 300-baud. The Internet existed, but the World Wide Web had yet to be created. There were some services I could log into, CompuServe was one. The nearest local number was long distance, so I did not log on often. The Toledo Blade had a free service with a local number, it allowed you do download up to 32 pages of news, weather and sports at a time. The graphics were pretty crude by today's standards, and it was only as updated at the paper was.

I ended up giving the thing to my sister in 1991,and in 1992 I acquired a Packard Bell 386 computer. (It was advertised as being far better than the 286). I still have many fond memories of using that first computer for homework and fun.