[Coco] CoCo Hard Drive History

[Greg Law]

From: Mark J. Blair

> I recently got an OS-9 Level 2 package for the CoCo 3. This is my first
> time experimenting with OS-9. I may upgrade to NitrOS-9 someday, but
> I'm going to get familiar with this original OS-9 with its matching
> manual first.
>
> The manual makes several mentions of hard drives. Were there any
> commercially supported hard drive packages for the CoCo back when
> it was in production, or are these mentions of hard drive support
> leakage from other OS-9 distributions, or referring to something
> that folks were expected to home-brew, etc.? I do not recall ever
> seeing a hard drive package for the CoCo back then, but I quit
> paying much attention to anything CoCo-related around 1985 or so.

Radio Shack sold a (terribly overpriced) hard drive package for the Color 
Computer 3 and other TRS-80 systems, but it wasn't very popular because it 
was priced out of the CoCo hobby market. The adapter by itself (the 
cartridge that goes into the Multi-Pak Interface) cost as much as (or more 
than) some third-party floppy drive packages, even though it didn't have 
more than $5.00 of off-the-shelf TTL logic in it.

There were several popular hard-drive packages available from third-parties, 
although these primarily started becoming available around 1985 or so after 
OS-9 Level 2 came out for the CoCo 3. The early models were exclusively for 
OS-9 Level 2. At some point, HDB-DOS was introduced that allowed using a 
hard drive with Disk Extended Color BASIC by "splitting" the hard drive into 
255 virtual floppy disks.