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

[Arthur Flexser]

You realize there's a picture of the mockup in Boisy and Bill's book?

Art


On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:

> 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)
> Sent from my iPad.
>
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