COCO-II, this is the acronym by which my first computer is now known. The Tandy Color Computer II from Radio Shack was my first experience with a non-mechanical keyboard (At the risk of sounding old, yes, I have seen and used a typewriter). I recently heard that my mother threw out my old Coco2 and this brought back memories of what got started on Jan 6th 1985 when I received the computer as a gift on Three Kings Day (Día de Reyes in Spanish). I asked for it for months and if I recall correctly I had seen it in the Radio Shack Catalog at some point during 1984 for $107.99. It is hard to remember why I wanted a computer when all my friends wanted Transformers.
During 1984 Bill Gates was on the cover of Time Magazine and my father, and avid reader was impressed by the wealth this “guy” had accumulated as a result of playing with computers at an early age. He showed me the article and we talked about computers being the future and how things we saw in movies could “probably” be done with computers. This was all purely theoretical because the computer did not seem much different than the Atari at the time. We visited Radio Shack in Ponce, PR and I was able to play with a floor model. At the time it had a game plugged in (cartridge on the side) and it seemed boring, but the manual was there and I was able to see how I could type things and it would draw on the screen (yes, this was amazing to me!). Maybe the fact that I could not draw anything worth seeing up to that point influenced my liking of the device.
The morning I received the computer, it seemed fun for about 2 hours, the time it took to hook it up to my 13” Black and White TV. After that I was faced with a blue screen, a blinking cursor, a book and a keyboard. The book was in English, of which I knew very little, the keyboard had the keys out of order (I can laugh at this now, but QWERTY was not the name for anything I knew at the time). I started reading the book and typing things that would generate errors. Every few hours I would turn off the computer to let it cool down because it felt hot. It took about 2 days for me to successfully execute a program. I still remember it was using the QBasic sound function and its pitch was very annoying and at the time, the sound of success!
After weeks playing with the device I asked my dad if he could buy me a “disk drive” to save my programs. My dad had a friend who aside from fixing elevators was a computer enthusiast. We went over to his house so he could tell my dad what I needed to save my “drawings” and “sounds”. His friend had a computer room, with TV’s and 3 computers, one of them was open and he explained to me how it worked, what each part was, and more importantly, he showed me how to save programs from the computer to a cassette using a regular cassette recorder (Pure magic or alien technology, either way now I had it too!). What a joy! All I needed was to get the balance and volume just right and it would save my programs. I could finally run my programs without having to retype them. Maybe I skipped an embarrassing part here, in the first months of ownership, I used to write my programs on a notebook, and then I would retype them on the computer to see them “run”. Next time I wanted to see them, I would have to retype them.
These were the early days of my computer programming a somewhat awkward period of my life where sitting in my room typing seemed far more entertaining than bike-riding, watching TV and sometimes better than eating. I loved programming from the beginning and I am very thankful to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the others that created the industry where now I get paid to do what I love. In addition, I get to help people do things in a faster, smarter and more productive way each day. I do not say we save them time, because now they just do more in the workday instead of “leaving early”.
Tandy Color Computer II
