[Coco] The CoCo outside of the U.S.

[Fedor Steeman]

Hi Boisy,

I can confirm what Torsten and Thierry wrote. For me, I was growing up in
the Netherlands (Holland) and Radio Shack was represented here by the
"Tandy" stores by which it was known. I reckon the name "Tandy" worked
better than "Radio Shack" for people in this part of the world.

The franchise was doing moderately well and in my native town of Haarlem,
which is a medium-sized town by Dutch standards, there was at least one
Tandy store. I still kept one of their commercial brochures of which I can
scan the computer pages if you are interested.

There was also an active CoCo community called
"CoCoNut<http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/CoCoNut>"
of which I was member in my early teens, and which had a monthly magazine
and meetings in Amsterdam or Utrecht. They also had a semi-legitimate
software library where I borrowed a lot of games. In retrospect, this was
perhaps one of the things that was detrimental, because Tandy's software
sales were probably not that good. Back then I was just a kid not knowing
any better. :-(

But Commodore 64 was much more popular. At one time I used to be bullied by
a guy who had a C64. We both went to some electronics course  in the
evenings at school. He kept calling me "Tandy boy" and tried to be
intimidating, intercepting me as I was trying to bike home. Those were the
days...

I nowadays live in Scandinavia were I don't think there ever was a Tandy /
Radio Shack presence. People from my generation and older, who are into IT,
at least never heard of it. They may, however, have heard of the famous
early TRS-80 models, but I don't think they were ever sold here.

If you have more specific questions, just let me know!

Cheers,
Fedor






On 15 April 2013 21:40, Torsten Dittel <OS-9 at trs-80.cc> wrote:

> Boisy,
>
> your post reminds me that I promised some pictures long time ago, but my
> collection is still boxed (family and job keep me busy...).
>
> However, let me summarize some things I remember:
>
> In Europe, we had "Tandy Computer Stores" (selling TRS-80 items, but not
> everything found in the US-Catalogs) and Tandy stores (selling the "toys",
> Realistic stuff etc.), at least in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands
> (don't know for sure about France and the UK, but I assume as well).
>
> Any CoCo version has been sold as 240V 50Hz PAL version beside the CoCo3
> (that was only available in Australia), that means silver CoCo1 (all
> boards), CoCo1B (the big white case), CoCo2 and CoCo2B (TANDY logo,
> lowercase VDG - however the latter were hard to find because Tandy closed
> the Computer shops at the time they came out). All types of Multipak
> Interfaces were available with 240V 50Hz and most CoCo1/2 ROM Paks,
> joysticks, mice etc. as well as all types of disk controllers, floppy
> drives and printers.
>
> I have seen all the manuals (Color BASIC, Extendend Color BASIC, Disk BASIC
> etc.) in German, English, Dutch and French.
>
> PAL versions were different between the countries (see a previous post of
> mine regarding that topic, I guess it's available at CoCopedia too).
>
> The PAL CoCos I've seen were made in the US (early models) and Korea (CoCo2
> & 2B). Would have to look at the French models to see were they come from
> (they were possibly made in France - they had a special RGB board and an
> AZERTY keyboard. That's what happened with the RGB MC-10 as well because
> foreign computers were banned from import as far as I know - at least they
> couldn't be bought by public schools during an IT educational program run
> by the French government in these times)
>
> Another Tandy licensed CoCo2 clone was called "Misedo 85" and made by
> Montex Ivangrad (Berane) in Montenegro (former Yugoslavia):
>
> http://pc.pcpress.rs/pcmuzej/images/galerija/misedo85_big.jpg
>
> If you need proves for some of the information above, I might be able to
> provide more internet findings and some pictures I already made (will not
> promise again I can take new pictures in time...).
>
> Regards,
> Torsten
>
>
>
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