My first computer was a Color Computer 3 from Radio Shack about 1992. I saved up a whole year to buy that computer and catch it on sale. That was the longest time range for planning I had ever done. It was way better for the price than the competitors; Commodore 64, Atari, and Tandy PS2 clones.
It allowed tape drives using a standard cassette player and disk drives. Video was a TV or monitor. Microsoft/Microware BASIC was built in and was the default operating system. For significantly more you could by a Unix clone operating system on disk called OS-9. OS-9 has continued development to this day and is used in all sorts of embedded applications like video players.
You haven’t used a computer till you waited 5 minutes for it to boot up on a heavily fragmented OS floppy disk. Blick the light comes on. You hear it spinning in the sleave, and spinning, and spinning, and spinning. No progress bars or animations here. Every clock cycle is busy doing work. And then a grinding sound as the disk head parks itself. And boom there it is. Or boom the disk is bad insert another one.
I spent many, many hours programming either originally on a Apple 2g Star Trek clone or copying from a book. Saddly, little to none of it may exist. Since one little touch to the reset button could wipe out months of work and it was quite a while before I got a tape drive. I think there’s a folder with print outs. That would be the only copy and I would love to find that folder.
A 2-3 inch thick manual came with the computer. I used it so much it fell apart. My dad, to is credit, ordered a replacement. Though when it came in I got to hear the comment about how much it cost and if he knew he wouldn’t have gotten it. That’s the manual I still have, somewhere. I used it almost as much, but it was plastic spiral bound copy and much more durable, if colorless.
The CoCo3 is in a closet. I stopped using it when I went to college and formalized on a PC compatible. At that time I had an RGB monitor, pair of floppy drives, tape player, OS-9, Pascal, 512k memory upgrade, and several tapes and disks.
Every few years I do a search for it on the web. There’s still a community around it. Including an emulator like the NES emulators. You can use modern Visual Studio 2005 to write games and test them on the emulator. Then burn them to chips, make your own game cartidges and play it on the CoCo.
Over the years lots of upgrades have come put. Remember this is a 1980’s 8 bit processor. For comparison, ‘286 is 16 bit, ‘386 is 32 bit, and modern chips are 64 bit. It was an improved version, 6809, of the 6502 used in the Apple 2. You can now replace that with a very improved 6309, memory upgrades, hard drives, and keyboard adapter.
I can’t figure out anything to do with it besides; teaching and games. Mostly super low res games. 8 bits is very constraining. My network router probably has more power. 9600 baud is near top speed.
Still, I bet I could power it on right now and it would work if the tube monitor still did or I could find an analog TV, while they still make them. No fan or noise of any kind. Just a green screen with black lettering waiting for instructions.