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:
“Practically everyone now bemoans Western man’s sense of alienation, lack of community, and inability to find ways of organizing society for human ends. We have reached the end of the road that is built on the set of traits held out for male identity—advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, and kill them if necessary.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“Wild Bill was indulging in his favorite pastime of a friendly game of cards in the old No. 10 saloon. For the second time in his career, he was sitting with his back to an open door. Jack McCall walked in, shot him through the back of the head, and rushed from the place, only to be captured shortly afterward. Wild Bill’s dead hand held aces and eights, and from that time on this has been known in the West as “the dead man’s hand.””
—State of South Dakota, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Through the hollow globe, a ring
of frayed rusty scrapiron,
is it the sea that shines?
Is it a road at the world’s edge?”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)