[Coco] New CoCo videos from Radio Shack

[Frank Swygert]

Boisy did a great job on the interview, I'm certainly glad he got to do it!

I'm going to take exception to the statement "one of the things the 
Color Computer hasn't had up to this point is a good book about the 
entire history ll the way from the inception of the Color Computer until 
now."  I'm sorry Boisy -- you never looked at or read "Tandy's Little 
Wonder", which I published back in 1990 as the CoCo was fading out, and 
reissued in 2006 with minor revisions. It was self-published because no 
big publisher wanted to touch it -- wouldn't sell thousands of copies. 
It was advertised in the last issue or two of Rainbow, and on Delphi at 
the time, and I sold around 300 copies over about an 18 month period. A 
few list members expressed an interest, so I revised it in 2006 (mainly 
took advertisers out) and put it up for sale. Only had maybe a 
half-dozen buy one. Around 2008 I put it up on the list archive as a 
free downloadable PDF file. Unfortunately most of the schematics didn't 
like being converted to PDF and are barely readable, and I no longer 
have originals to re-scan and put in the book, but those are generally 
available. Oh, and lest I forget, my work wasn't just "my work". Al 
Santos (I think I have the name right!) wrote the history part with just 
a little editing on my part. I did some interviews and put a lot of 
technical information together, as I wanted it to be as much a "survival 
guide" as a history -- a single source of as much CoCo information as 
possible/available at the time.

With today's "print on demand" technology and a bit of resurgence on 
"retro-computing" you might be able to get a small publisher interested. 
But I have some advice -- make it more of a "coffee table" book with 
lots of photos and captions, but not so much text. You will likely have 
better luck with that sort of "remembrance" book than anything else. 
That's what the smaller make car market has found to be more salable.

-- 
Frank Swygert
Editor - American Motors Cars Magazine
www.amc-mag.com