Two weeks with a Coco 2 in September

In the inside baseball realm of vintage computer enthusiasts, a few hashtags have emerged to support one’s favorite retro computers.

The main one in September is #SepTandy

While I’ve had this Tandy Color Computer 2 for many years, I’ve almost never used it. Out of all of my vintage systems, it’s the one I know the least about. I happened to have upgraded the video circuitry on it this year. It can now produce a composite signal. Now the horrible screen colors and marginal text are almost readable.

Since it was all nicely displaying and working in my video capture, it seemed a good time to try and spend an extended period of time with this machine. I set out to use it a few minutes a day for the whole month. I lasted two weeks.

I had fun exploring this strange and often overlooked part of computer history. It’s often drowned out by the likes of Commodore, Atari, Apple and the European computers.

But if I’m being honest, this thing just isn’t my cup of tea. I know there are many, many people who are doing very cool stuff with them, but it just never hooked me. At the end of the second week, I was ready to shift gears to something else.

Here’s a compilation of some of what I did and made during my time with the Coco (with a brief appearance by my Tandy PC-4 too).

2022

I WILL be giving this another shot during the next year. Who knows, maybe by #Septandy 2022, I’ll even be able to spend a whole month with it.

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