The End of The Road
On October 26, 1990, Ed Juge of Tandy announced that the CoCo 3 would be dropped from its computer line. With no apparent successor mentioned, the announcement was disheartening to many loyal CoCo fans.
Even today, current and former CoCo owners agree that Tandy did not take the CoCo very seriously, despite it having been their best-selling computer for several years. Tandy failed to market the CoCo as the powerful and useful machine that it was, and offered customers no hint about the large number of third party software and hardware products available for it.
The release of the CoCo 3 was particularly lackluster despite its greatly enhanced graphic capabilities and RGB monitor support. Radio Shack fliers and stores typically depicted the CoCo 3 running CoCo 2 games, and offered a very limited selection of CoCo 3 specific software. There was an official Radio Shack store demo, but few stores bothered to run it.
Additionally, DRAM prices skyrocketed at the time the CoCo 3 was released, making the 512K memory upgrade considerably more expensive than the 128K CoCo 3 itself. Very few stores displayed a 512K machine or a CoCo 3 running such games as King's Quest or Leisure Suit Larry.
Lonnie Falk, of The Rainbow, announced at the 1991 CoCo Fest convention that the reason Tandy decided to drop the Color Computer line was that a third party vendor sold a simple adaptor cable that let the Color Computer play Nintendo game cartridges, and that Nintendo had threatened to sue Tandy.
Read more about this topic: TRS-80 Color Computer
Famous quotes containing the words the end, the and/or road:
““Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. Bribery and corruption are common. Children no longer obey their parents. . . . The end of the world is evidently approaching.” Sound familiar? It is, in fact, the lament of a scribe in one of the earliest inscriptions to be unearthed in Mesopotamia, where Western civilization was born.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Where did you come from, Baby dear?
Out of the everywhere into the here.
Where did you get your eyes so blue?
Out of the sky as I came through.”
—George MacDonald (1824–1905)
“As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new,—and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
‘Neath every one a friend.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)