[Coco] Another Radio Shack Article

[Al Hartman]

You guys are all looking at the PC from a 2013 perspective.

When the PC came out, the best selling computer was the TRS-80 Model I and 
III, closely followed by the Apple ][ Plus. I wanted a PC, because to me it 
seemed like a faster TRS-80. While not software compatible, PC-DOS looked 
like TRS-DOS, the character based screen was familiar (and even had 80 
columns for more text on the screen.) It could use the same Epson MX-80 
printers, it had similar software like WordStar, dBase II, Visicalc, and 
even could run a lot of the BASIC games I ran on my TRS-80 with minor mods 
to account for the different screen size and slightly different BASIC.

A 64k Cassette PC with a CGA card was about $999.00, which was similar to 
the price of a TRS-80 at the time.

I eventually bought a Taiwanese clone a few years later, but the PC wasn't 
all that different from what was available from other companies.

One could even mod the PC to add a power light, reset button, extra RAM (I 
recently modded my 256k 5150 logic board to take 640k on board), etc.

It wasn't that big a leap as an Atari 800 or later, a Commodore 64 was which 
were systems with a different philosophy of disk drive management, etc.

-[ Al ]-