[Coco] COCO Video

[Steve Bjork]

On 6/24/2013 5:06 AM, billg999 at cs.uofs.edu wrote:
> I have seen this comment a few times recently. To be honest, I don't 
> think Tandy ever expected the COCO to be anything but a cartridge 
> based game console like the Atari 2600 (thus the reason they never did 
> a hard disk for it even though they did for every one of the Z80 based 
> systems). Given that, I can't see them investing that much effort. 
> bill -- 

Back in the days of early computers like the CoCo, hard drive were out 
the price range of the personal computer user.  ($10,000 and up)

Maybe you were thinking Floppy and not a hard drive?

They were always planning on having floppy drives on the CoCo.  When the 
CoCo hit the market back in 1980, they just had Color basic to keep the 
price down to $400.  16K of RAM and Extended BASIC would come later once 
the manufacture cost dropped.  The Floppy drive showed up once there was 
more price drops in hardware.

The TRS-80 Model ONE was the only Tandy Computer line not design with 
floppy drives in mind.  You needed the poorly design Expansion Unit to 
add a floppy drive to that model.  The TRS-80 Model 3 was design from 
the ground up for Floppies.  (The TRS-80 Model II came with one 8" 
floppy drive and started at $3450.)

Steve