[Coco] My Radio Shack manager was right...

[Allen Huffman]

I'm completely out of the loop with stuff in the CoCo world, as has been the case for many years. I'm listening to the Floppy Days podcast with Boisy and Bill and hearing the discussion of the CoCo 4, and a reference to Radio Shack's Barry Thompson mentioning it in the the final issue of Rainbow. I had dropped my subscription by then, and never saw this reference until looking it up online today:

"As for the things I have not done, I have not seen the 
development of a CoCo 4, (although I did see a mockup 
once with a floppy 3 1 /2 built-in that looked remarkably 
similar to a Tandy 1000 EX) . . ,"

I worked for Radio Shack from 88-90 or maybe 91. My little town had two Radio Shacks, and there was one more in the next town over. The manager of our mall store was kind of on top of these three stores.

Every year, Radio Shack managers went to the home office in Ft. Worth for a big meeting (at least, I assume all did -- we were only a few hours away, so maybe it was just regional?).

I remember the manager, Michelle, telling me about the next CoCo she saw, saying it looked like a 1000HX with a floppy drive built in.

I have told this tale a number of times over the years at CoCoFESTs and maybe even on this list as the subject came up. I never knew this was mentioned anywhere else, but always believed it to be true simply because this wasn't a likely story for her to make up. We wondered if someone working at Radio Shack may have simply repacked a CoCo in one of those cases, but I remember when they discontinued the CoCo FD502 floppy drive (for awhile) and introduced another part which was going to let you hook up the external HX/EX drives to the CoCo (which would have given the first official 3.5" drive for the machine). This happened while I was working at Radio Shack... But then the FD502 returned (no longer sold out when gone or whatever the terminology for a dead product was).

Fascinating stuff. I gotta save up my pennies so I can buy the CoCo book.


-
Allen Huffman - PO Box 22031 - Clive IA 50325 - 515-999-0227 (vmail/TXT only)
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