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A Deluxe Discovery?
For the Easter long weekend I got back home, and one of the things I did there was head down to the family basement to search for an old launch pad for flying model rockets. That pad didn’t turn up at once, and I got distracted on spotting boxes of material from the days when our family computers came from Radio Shack. One item I extracted from a box was a computer catalogue with the Tandy 2000 on the cover. With an ambiguous thought or two about that turning point between “doing things their own variety of ways” and “following Microsoft’s lead with ever-increasing devotion,” I turned to the pages for the less expensive machine we’d had at the time, the Color Computer.
There was something a little peculiar about the first picture I found there, though. The computer had the extra keys of the Color Computer 3, introduced a few years after the catalog’s machinery. As a smaller oddity, its name plate wasn’t the familiar strip much wider than it was high, but was a block higher than it was wide, similar to ones on other TRS-80s. I did know this wasn’t an “out-of-place artifact,” however. I’ve read about plans for a “Deluxe Color Computer” that had almost gone into production save for chip shortages, and along with a sound chip and some firmware upgrades it would have used the keyboard that later wound up on the “CoCo 3.” It was intriguing to suppose a mockup might have wound up in this catalog almost by accident, but I was a little puzzled by its case. The one prototype I’ve seen pictures of had been put in the white variant of the original Color Computer case; the case in this picture looked more like the smaller “CoCo 2’s.”
While I pondered whether the prototype circuit board would have been reduced in size for production, I looked up the Radio Shack catalogs online. This peculiar-looking machine, though, wasn’t in them. If the picture had snuck into a Canadian-prices catalog alone, I might have something worth sharing. I scanned its old pages in (even if I didn’t go to the lengths of taking out the staples first), and then I happened to recall one more oddity just a little less obscure. The original Color Computer had been repackaged to try and sell in non-Radio Shack Stores. Knowing that I tried to find pictures of the “TDP System 100.” When I did locate them, I saw its case did look like the “CoCo 2’s,” but with a block-shaped name plate. That seems to settle my curiosity. Of course, I don’t know if the mockup is any closer to the prototype than the plans for the Deluxe Color Computer had intended. For all I know, too, other “CoCo-nuts” know this already, and I just haven’t looked in the right directions to know that myself. Still, a new sense of what this modest upgrade (I understand it wouldn’t have had much in the way of graphical advances over the original “CoCo,” memorably limited compared to most other color-capable machines of its day) might have looked like does make it a bit more interesting.
(As a last note, the flying model rocket launch pad did turn up hidden inside a cabinet that had required moving a lot of things out of the way to get open. That, though, will have to wait.)
There was something a little peculiar about the first picture I found there, though. The computer had the extra keys of the Color Computer 3, introduced a few years after the catalog’s machinery. As a smaller oddity, its name plate wasn’t the familiar strip much wider than it was high, but was a block higher than it was wide, similar to ones on other TRS-80s. I did know this wasn’t an “out-of-place artifact,” however. I’ve read about plans for a “Deluxe Color Computer” that had almost gone into production save for chip shortages, and along with a sound chip and some firmware upgrades it would have used the keyboard that later wound up on the “CoCo 3.” It was intriguing to suppose a mockup might have wound up in this catalog almost by accident, but I was a little puzzled by its case. The one prototype I’ve seen pictures of had been put in the white variant of the original Color Computer case; the case in this picture looked more like the smaller “CoCo 2’s.”
While I pondered whether the prototype circuit board would have been reduced in size for production, I looked up the Radio Shack catalogs online. This peculiar-looking machine, though, wasn’t in them. If the picture had snuck into a Canadian-prices catalog alone, I might have something worth sharing. I scanned its old pages in (even if I didn’t go to the lengths of taking out the staples first), and then I happened to recall one more oddity just a little less obscure. The original Color Computer had been repackaged to try and sell in non-Radio Shack Stores. Knowing that I tried to find pictures of the “TDP System 100.” When I did locate them, I saw its case did look like the “CoCo 2’s,” but with a block-shaped name plate. That seems to settle my curiosity. Of course, I don’t know if the mockup is any closer to the prototype than the plans for the Deluxe Color Computer had intended. For all I know, too, other “CoCo-nuts” know this already, and I just haven’t looked in the right directions to know that myself. Still, a new sense of what this modest upgrade (I understand it wouldn’t have had much in the way of graphical advances over the original “CoCo,” memorably limited compared to most other color-capable machines of its day) might have looked like does make it a bit more interesting.
(As a last note, the flying model rocket launch pad did turn up hidden inside a cabinet that had required moving a lot of things out of the way to get open. That, though, will have to wait.)