[Coco] Tandy Tape Recorder

[Perry M Dueck]

My experience was that the CCR-81 (mine was the later Tandy branded one,
and of course white) was a better cassette deck than any other decks that I
tried to use with the CoCo. Sure, it's not an expensive high fidelity tape
recorder, and playback of music on it isn't necessarily that great through
it's mono speaker, but it sure worked superb when loading and saving data
to it from my CoCo 3.

Back in 1987, when I purchased my CoCo 3, the Radio Shack I made my
purchase from had no CCR-81 nor CCR-82 cassette recorders for sale. They
told me that they were no longer being sold in Canada and that they were
discontinued. I don't know if this was true or not, but I took them at
their word, especially after witnessing them placing calls to a number of
other Radio Shack stores in my city regarding getting a CCR-81 for
me.....none of the stores had any for sale.

So I purchased a new dark grey Realistic branded cassette deck from them
(can't remember the model number, but it looked somewhat similar to the
CCR-81 in both shape and size), took it home and hooked it up to my CoCo 3.
I quickly found out that I could only load stuff in properly without
getting errors about 25% of the time. After some experimentation, I found I
could increase my odds of getting data/programs loaded in if I cleverly
turned on the built in tone control knob as things were being retrieved
from the deck. Even then, I had to sit there turning the tone control at
just the right times,  constantly back and forth if I wanted any luck at
all in loading in programs/data. It was an exercise in complete frustration.

After about two weeks of that, I finally gave up, exchanged the deck for a
different Realistic deck, this new one being smaller and silver, looking
very similar to the CCR-82 in shape and size. No matter what I did with
this deck, I couldn't get anything to load in at all. I took it back for a
full refund. I was beginning to get perturbed, but being a teenager at the
time, I could not afford a disk system for my CoCo. I was either going to
have to learn to live without data storage and retrieval - obviously not an
option, or else find a Tandy branded computer cassette recorder.

I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong, but I was sure it wasn't me,
it was the cassette decks I was using. I borrowed my friends CCR-81 (white,
TRS-80 labeled one), and had instant success in loading and saving stuff,
100%. This convinced me to order a pair of CCR-81 decks from a Radio Shack
affiliate who advertised in the RAINBOW and who was located in the U.S.A.
Remember, my local Radio Shack told me that I could no longer get the
CCR-81 nor CCR-82 in Canada.

After shipping off payment, a couple of weeks later the two decks showed up
in my mailbox, I tried one out, it worked perfect, then tried the other
out, and it worked perfect as well.  I was set.  :)

Just as an experiment, I later borrowed someone else's old Lloyd cassette
tape deck, hooked it up to the CoCo, and couldn't get anything to load in
off that deck.

In all the above examples where I had trouble loading stuff in off non
CCR-81 decks, I spent a lot of time trying all different volume levels,
changing tone control levels (if the deck had tone control), cleaning the
heads, standing on foot while chanting "I love Radio Shack" backwards in
low german.....well, you get the picture.

So from my experience, the CCR-81 was a great cassette deck for inputting
and outputting CoCo data to/from cassette.   :)  Which is probably why I
kept one of my CCR-81 decks to this day.  It also works perfectly great on
my Apple ][, ][ Plus, and IIe machines and their cassette input/output
hookups.

By the way, if anyone has a working battleship grey CCR-81 and would like
to sell it, I'd be interested in buying it for my battleship grey CoCo 1.
:)

regards, Perry


>From: Frank Swygert <farna at att.net>
>Subject: [Coco] Tandy Tape Recorder
>The only CoCo hardware relic I have handy is my battleship grey TRS-80
>CCR-81 "computer cassette recorder" because I thought it had to be a
>decent recorder to work with the relatively sensitive computer data!
>I've used it a couple times with a good external mic for speech
>practices, but nothing that required any real high fidelity. Guess I was
>wrong with thinking it must be better than other run of the mill
>recorders.... but it still serves a (rare) purpose!