Tandy Color Computer

Home computer sold through Radio Shack in the 80's. Sometimes referred to as TRS-80 Color Computer, which is a misnomer because it used the Motorola 6809 CPU instead of the Zilog Z-80 used in the monochrome TRS-80s. Tandy referred to it as "TRS-80 Color Computer". That was printed on the box. They used the "TRS-80" brand on many different computers, regardless of CPU.

Known as the CoCo (short for Color Computer) by users. It was a popular hobbyist machine, but lagged behind the like of the Atari (400 and 800) and Commodore 64 as a games machine. The Color Computer lacked dedicated sound hardware, sprite support, and, ironically, didn't support as many colors (until the Color Computer III was released in 1986).

There were three models Color Computer I, II, and III. There wasn't a significant difference between I and II as far as architecture and hardware were concerned. The Color Computer III represented a leap forward, supporting 16 colors from a palette of 64, and a memory manager unit that enabled swapping in and out memory "pages" to circumvent the addressing limit of 64K.

Coco I & II could run MicrowareOsNine. Color Computer III was capable of running MicrowareOsNine Level II.

How can you leave out it's infamous nickname, the TRaSh-80? Which makes even more sense, as TRS stands for Tandy/Radio Shack???

I beg to differ. The Trash-80 referred to the original TRS-80, which was a monochrome machine that looked suspiciously like a VT-100 terminal. The Color Computer was a completely different machine that didn't wear the same moniker.

[I had a Coco and all my friends called it a Trash-80. Anything with the TRS-80 logo on it was fair game. (The original Color Computer had a TRS-80 logo on the little plastic button on top of the case.) And who can blame them? RadioShack was not hip.]