Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer

Summary

The TRS-80 Color Computer (CoCo) is a home computer of the Tandy Corporation, founded in Fort Worth in collaboration with Motorola. Although the CoCo belongs to the TRS-80 series, Tandy turns away from the Z80 processor of the predecessor computer TRS-80 Model 1 and turns to Motorola. The colour representation is also new, because the original model only offers a monochrome TV signal. The aim was to bring a cheap home computer to the market. This was achieved only by keeping the cost of the components small, but surprisingly not with the main processor, which was a powerful Motorola 6809E CPU at the time, but with the audio/video properties. Thus, the CoCo could not compete with C64/VC20, Apple II or Atari 400/800 in the games, but the CPU enabled the multitasking OS-9 operating system. There are three generations of the Color Computer: The CoCo 1 from 1980 to 1983 was the beginning. He owns 4 KiB RAM. The Color Computer 2 followed in the years 1983–1986 with a smaller case and it came in the configurations with 16 or 64 KiB. 1986–1991 Tandy produced the Color Computer 3, which was equipped with 128 KiB and offered a resolution of 640 x 225 pixels in 64 colors. The 3rd generation of Coco came exactly into the 16-bit era, so that the model no longer played a major role.

Picture: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/TRS-80_Color_Computer_2.jpg