I remember when the wood was burning with laughter.
Well, a little. But I remember when computers used iron chests, and I also remember getting my first personal computer, the Tandy Color Computer 2. CoCo 2, as it has been affectionately called by many fans, with a whopping 64kb of Random Access Memory (RAM).
Actually the Computer Color 2 was a gift from my brother-in-law. If he hadn’t bought it for me, it could have been many years before I bought a computer. I was a technophobe back then. When I attended college, I still used to look up the paper catalogs books in college of the library, which I was afraid of. using computers.
By the time I owned the CoCo 2, sometime in the 1980s, its price had dropped from $99 to $29. As a football player, I put that as my employee. Mauris was not a torturer. The programs were stored in the player, which had to be purchased separately. The computer only comes with an operating system and BASIC. Everything else had to be loaded from tape. The cassettes were often unreliable and would not load the program. Once that was done, I was able to fix the problem sometimes by holding the player upside down. However, 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 bought a CoCo 1 and upgraded it to the CoCo 2 level, you would have spent about $400 by the time you were done.
I had a lot of fun with CoCo 2. I learned to program in BASIC and wrote a few programs. Most importantly, I learned word processing, which freed me from reporter limitations. When I used to copy my notes, I often spent hours typing pages completely over again because I forgot a sentence or a paragraph. But CoCo’s ability to store documents on cassette has eliminated this problem, even if it sometimes kicks in.
Playing Games, adding Rainbow Writing and Daisy Wheel
My children have also spent hours playing computer, primitive by today’s standards, but still a lot of fun. Some games are bought on tapes in cassettes. Others use a cartridge called a ROM Pack, which can be operated by inserting it into the computer’s ROM port. Subscribe to Arcus magazine exclusively for Color Computer users. It has helped us to get the most out of our computer color through its many tips. It also contained reviews of products and short basic programs that the user could type in and save on the cassette for future use.
I added the Printer Wheel to my computer. It was a Tandy DWP230 with a wide carriage, and at the time it cost around $200. As Sherman Lake was built. Its bottom was metal, not plastic. It was still working when I stopped using it about ten years later. This was only printed in black and white and was not capable of graphic printing. It only had three fonts and two type sizes that were changed manually by changing the switches on the printer.
Graduation to Tandy Color Computer 3
After Tandy CoCo 2, I upgraded to Tandy CoCo 3 and added a floppy drive to it. The CoCo 3 had 128kb of memory which was expandable to 512kb. I thought I had died and gone to heaven, even though the CoCo 3 floppy drive only stores programs and documents on one side of the disk. Finally, I wrote a short basic account that allowed me to access the other side of the world. After using the CoCo 3 for a few years, I sold it and upgraded to a Tandy 1000EX, another computer I had fun with.
While I no longer own a Tandy Color Computer, many still do. There are still pages dedicated to CoCo and parts and toys from CoCo enthusiasts on eBay and other Internet sites (see locations below).
We have come a long way. Perhaps.
I have come a long way with Tandy Day Coloring Computer. The computer already has 4gb of memory, a 30gb hard drive and a CD and DVD drive. It makes the CoCo look like a Model T Ford. However, I have never had as much fun as I had in those early days of computing.
Back then, if you didn’t know bits, bytes and basic, a computer was pretty much useless. But any idiot can use it. You only have to see some of the stuff posted on the internet to know the truth of it.
