Remembering the Tandy Color Computer

Well, not quite. But I do remember when computers used punch cards, and I also remember getting my first personal computer, the Tandy Color Computer 2. The CoCo 2, as it was affectionately called by its many fans, came with a whopping 64kb of Random Access Memory (RAM).

Actually the Color Computer 2 was a gift from my brother-in-law. If he hadn't bought if for me, it might have been several more years before I purchased a computer. I was a technophobe back then. When I attended college, I still used the card catalogs to look up books in the college library because I was fearful of using the computers.

By the time I got a CoCo 2, somewhere in the 1980s, its price had dropped from $99 to $29. In order to use the computer, I had to hook it up to my television set. It did not use a monitor. Programs were stored on a cassette player, which had to be purchased separately. The computer only came with an operating system and BASIC. Everything else had to be loaded in from a cassette tape. Cassettes were often unreliable, and the programs wouldn't load in. When that happened, I could sometimes fix the problem by holding the cassette player upside down. Nevertheless, the CoCo 2 was a big improvement over the CoCo 1, which only came with either 4kb, 16kb or 32kb of memory. If you had purchased a CoCo 1 and upgraded it to the level of a CoCo 2, you would have spent around $400 by the time you finished.

I had a lot of fun with the CoCo 2. I learned to program in BASIC and wrote a few programs. Most importantly, I learned word processing, which freed me from the limitations of a typewriter. When I used to type my papers, I often spent hours typing pages completely over again because I had forgotten a sentence or a paragraph. But the CoCo's ability to store documents on cassette did away with that problem, even if the cassette was recalcitrant at times.

Playing Games, Subscribing to The Rainbow and Adding a Daisy Wheel Printer

My children also spent hours playing computer games, primitive by today's standards, but nevertheless a lot of fun. Some of the games were purchased on cassette tapes. Others came on a cartridge called a ROM Pack which could be played by inserting it into the computer's ROM port. We subscribed to The Rainbow, a magazine exclusively for Color Computer users. It helped us get the most out of our color computer through its many tips. It also contained reviews of products and short BASIC programs that the user could type in and save on a cassette for future use.

I added a Daisy Wheel Printer to my computer. It was a Tandy DWP230 with a wide carriage, and it cost around $200 at the time. It was built like a Sherman tank. The bottom of it was metal, not plastic. It was still working when I stopped using it around ten years later. It only printed in black and white and was not capable of printing graphics. It only had three fonts and two type sizes which were changed manually by moving switches on the printer.

Graduating to the Tandy Color Computer 3

After the Tandy CoCo 2, I graduated to the Tandy CoCo 3 and added a floppy drive to it. The CoCo 3 had 128kb of memory which could be expanded to 512kb. I thought I had died and gone to heaven, even though the CoCo 3's floppy drive could only store programs and documents on one side of a disk. Eventually, I wrote a short BASIC program that allowed me to access the other side of the disk. After using the CoCo 3 for a few years, I sold it and graduated to the Tandy 1000EX, another computer that I had fun with.

While I no longer own a Tandy Color Computer, many people still do. There are still websites devoted to the CoCo and parts and games can still be purchased by CoCo enthusiasts on eBay and other internet sites (see sites below).

We've Come a Long Way. Maybe.

I have come a long way since the days of the Tandy Color Computer. The computer I have now has 4gb of memory, a 30gb hard drive and a CD and DVD drive. It makes the CoCo look like a Model T Ford. Nevertheless, I have never had as much fun as I had in those early days of personal computing.

Back then if you didn't know bits, bytes and BASIC, a computer was almost useless. Now any idiot can use one. You only have to see some of the stuff posted on the internet, to realize the truth of that.