[Coco] Another Radio Shack Article

[Boisy Pitre]

Art,

The former Radio Shack/Tandy higher-ups that I interviewed for the book pretty much conceded that fact. . John Roach’s quote in the book says it all, in my opinion.

The fact that people were using the original CoCo for things other than games initially surprised them. Dr. John Patterson makes that obvious in his quote in the book too.

The CoCo was always intended to be sold as a low entry computer. Then when OS-9 came, along with the programming languages that Radio Shack sold for it, a strange mixture of professionalism was added to the mix. I think it gave the appearance that Radio Shack and Tandy were sending mixed signals about the machine.

I dare say that in most Radio Shack stores, the CoCo (even the CoCo 3) didn’t stand a chance to be competitive as a serious computer compared to the Tandy 1000 offerings. The model of buying a computer then adding a disk drive and operating system as additional priced add-ons paled in comparison to the neatly packaged MS-DOS/DeskMate package offered right alongside the CoCo. Irrespective of how powerful OS-9 was vis a vis MS-DOS, that alone doomed the CoCo 3, IMO.

Tandy had its CoCo advocates, Mark Siegel and Barry Thompson, but I think they would admit that they were fighting a growing tide of PC encroachment which eventually felled the CoCo 3.

Best regards.
-----------------
Boisy G. Pitre | Founder
Phone 337.781.3570



On Jan 4, 2014, at 4:59 PM, Arthur Flexser <flexser at fiu.edu> wrote:

> Elaborating on my earlier comments, I think Tandy's key error with the
> CoCo in the early days was that they didn't seem to have any
> conception that there was a strong HOBBYIST market tied to personal
> computers.  To their way of thinking, or so it seems from their
> marketing strategies, a personal computer could be either something
> you used in business, or an educational and game-playing device for
> children, and they chose to design and market the CoCo to fill the
> latter niche.  This is a really strange sort of myopia for a
> corporation that was renowned for catering to the electronics hobbyist
> market in the amateur radio sphere.  If there was an awareness of the
> hobbyist market at Tandy in those early days, those who possessed the
> awareness seem to have lost out to marketing types who seemed to live
> in rabid fear that somewhere, somebody who had a serious use for a
> computer might buy a CoCo instead of a more expensive Tandy model.
> 
> Art
> 
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