A forgotten aspect of computer history is that the ST was actually the leading 16-bit platform in the UK (and probably several other European countries) until 1989.

Until David Pleasance’s Amiga sales packs launched, the ST was significantly cheaper with significantly more software. It was a no-brainer, especially for budget conscious buyers.

Not to mention the ST’s hi-res mono graphics mode, which was great for productivity, and of course the midi ports that established the ST as the musician’s computer of choice.

1989 was definitely a changing-of-the-guard though. “Shadow of the Beast” showed off the Amiga’s true potential. The Amiga Batman Pack was marketing genius. And Commodore cut its prices. Atari responded with the STE but it was too little too late. The final iteration of the ST, the Atari Falcon, was actually great but by late 92 the market was beginning to lose interest in wedge-shaped home computers.

But my brother bought an ST in 1989 (the shop owner showed him porn pictures to demonstrate the graphics quality) and it had a lot of great games.

A few years back, I got a working ST with a ton of software—not just games but everything, including MIDI support. At some point, I will unlock the computer’s full potential…not just play Colonial Conquest.

That’s a good question. I’m not aware of any Motorola reference design for the 68K but I haven’t ever looked for one either. Such reference designs aren’t usually public, they’re used as support materials in engineering level sales calls with companies who might make products using Motorola products.

Circa 1985 Radio Shack’s biggest computer revenue was selling their Tandy flavor of PC compatibles to small business. These machines were generally quite competitive on price and features and were where the vast majority of Tandy’s design effort and expertise went. Around that time any 68K computer would have to sell for around $1000 MSRP. The 1040ST was considered amazing for offering a 16-bit computer with a megabyte for only $1 per K of RAM. The original Mac was launched at $2500, so the 68000 CPU was expensive, flagship stuff then.

The problem is to Tandy the Coco products had always been their cheapest real computer and targeted strictly at home consumer users (not counting the Pocket Computers which were souped up programmable calculators private labeled from Sharp and Casio). The Coco marketing materials only had photos of kids playing games and mom in the kitchen looking at recipes loaded from cassette tape (seriously). The 128K Coco 3 launched in mid-86 at a price of $220. Matching a 68000 machine with less than 512K would be a weird mismatch (even Atari and Commodore bailed on 256K versions of the ST and Amiga). And it would be impossible to do even a bare bones 68000 with 512K for less than $700 or $800. Even the 520ST launched at $800 and Jack certainly cut every dollar he could (and, too often, more than he should). So a 68K Coco 3 would have been non-starter because over $500 it starts to compete with Tandy’s main line PC-compatible computers. Frankly, the vast majority of salespeople and execs in Tandy’s computer business mostly ignored the Coco. If you went into one of Radio Shack’s dedicated Computer Centers, which only sold computers and were considered computer flagships, you were lucky if you even found a Coco set up on demo in the back.

As for comparing the Coco3 with the C64, I don’t feel qualified to weigh in since I never used either one back in the day. Although I now have all of the various models of both lines in my retro collection, I didn’t acquire those until the late-90s.

very interesting. i saw the CoCo3 in Radio Shack back in the day. How does CoCo3 with 512k compare with C64?

I saw a book “CoCo: The Colorful History of Tandy’s Underdog Computer”

couldn’t Tandy use Motorola reference system for 68k for their
“Deluxe Color Computer” so it would have specs similar to the Atari ST, but running OS9

I had and used several Color Computers from 1981 to 1985 (when I moved on to the Amiga). Today I still own at least one of all the various versions of the Color Computer, including the Coco 3. Unfortunately, the Coco 3 was too little and shipped too late. Based on the then 8 year-old Motorola 6809 CPU, it was an 8-bit computer shipped when the world had already moved on to 16-bits in PCs (8086), Mac (68000), Amiga (68000) and Atari ST (68000).

Launched in only a 4K RAM version in 1980, the Coco line became quite successful for Radio Shack but to understand Radio Shack computers it’s important to know that the parent company Tandy wasn’t ever really a computer company, they were a retailer who mostly got manufacturers to make stuff under the Tandy brand that they’d then exclusively distribute in Radio Shack. Tandy never really built up an internal competency around computer design and they mostly outsourced computer manufacturing to third-parties (with a few notable exceptions for limited periods). Tandy didn’t even design the original Coco. It was almost exactly a reference design created by Motorola to show potential chip buyers an example of a computer that could be made entirely with Motorola’s new line of 68xx chips (primarily the 6809 CPU, 6883 memory controller, 6847 video controller and 6821 peripheral controller). Tandy didn’t write any software for the Coco either. Instead, they hired Microsoft to port their ROM BASIC to the Color Computer (which was the last ROM BASIC Bill Gates personal wrote some code for). There was literally nothing exclusive to Tandy in the Coco other than the plastic case and manuals. In fact, the unrelated UK company Dragon Computers used the same Motorola reference design and a very similar Microsoft-licensed ROM BASIC to make their own 6809 computer in the UK at about the same time. This wasn’t a Coco clone, it was two companies assembling a computer from available third-party designs and components. And the Dragon ended up being largely Coco compatible as a result (I have a couple of Dragons too).

So, at Tandy the Coco effort was quite unlike Commodore or Atari who staffed large permanent teams of computer and chip designers and rolled their own exclusive custom chips for graphics and sound. Unfortunately, this continued on as the Coco evolved into the Coco 2 which was the same hardware design in more modern plastic with a better keyboard and more RAM. Then they played around with various concepts for a somewhat upgraded “Deluxe Color Computer” but it was never green lit or announced because they couldn’t figure out a cheap, easy way to give it competitive custom graphics and sound hardware, since they had no internal chip design expertise of their own. Eventually, they killed that idea and started on the Coco 3 design. Unlike the Coco 1 and 2, the 3 does have some custom hardware but it’s minimal and far from state of the art for late 1985. They hired an external contractor to roll the graphics in a custom gate array but the design had none of the cleverness of the Amiga custom chip architecture like blitter, copper and HAM graphics mode. So, even at launch, the Coco 3 didn’t quite manage to even reach the level of the graphics and sound hardware in the then four year-old C64 or Atari 800. It did have a couple higher resolution text modes but there was nothing special or uniquely powerful about those modes either.

The Coco platform was great because it was inexpensive, available in 7,000 local stores, had a very good ROM BASIC, *great* beginner manuals and the fastest, best 8-bit processor ever made. The 6809 CPU was substantially better than the 6502 or Z80 and is, even today, widely considered the ultimate 8-bit CPU. Its addressing modes and orthogonal instruction set were more advanced than any other 8-bit CPU because it was an 8-bit/16-bit hybrid and was literally the “little brother” of the much-beloved 68000 CPU (a 16-bit/32-bit hybrid). Apple’s initial Macintosh designs were even based on the 6809 before they migrated to the 68000. Unfortunately, the Coco 1 and 2 had no custom graphics or sound hardware because Motorola never made anything other than the most basic bitmapped video controller chip (with no sprites and no cool mode tricks) and Radio Shack didn’t have the ability to design their own graphics chip or sound synthesis chip like the C64’s legendary SID chip.

No doubt Jack Tramiel was a nnotorious cheapskate and not unaccustomed to screwing over partners but, as someone who exhibited at Comdex many times over the years in increasingly larger booths, Atari almost certainly didn’t *make* money from that deal.For more than a decade, Comdex was the largest, most expensive trade show in the world. Some years my company’s Comdex booth cost over $300,000.

Also, it wasn’t unusual for companies to ask third-parties to help offset the costs of the booth in exchange for some space. $1,000 to get a spot big enough for a demo computer and monitor along with a small sign with your company name in a brand-name, high-traffic booth everyone could easily find would have been a pretty good deal. You could book meetings with potential partners, resellers, press people and key customers. During the peak years, Comdex exhibit space was completely sold out to regular, long-time exhibitors. New, smaller companies couldn’t get any space for love or money and were relegated to trying to convince important people to get in a taxi and travel to a distant hotel to visit you in your suite. That usually resulted in nearly 100% no-shows for meetings (even getting cab in Vegas during Comdex could be impossible).

Last, it was quite common for manufacturers to charge for developer kits. Very few devs got free dev kits, and the ones that did had serious leverage, best-selling IP and a huge international brand. I’ll certainly agree that most dev kits were really expensive, but from the manufacturer’s perspective I don’t doubt they still lost money on every one, even at those prices. Those dev kits were small volume, early units that were hand-assembled and tested – often by senior design engineers because there was no manufacturing line yet. I worked at by far the single most important third-party developer for a large computer company’s platform and when they made a new generation, they gave us ONE dev kit for free (because our products sold literally millions of dollars of their computers for them). We had to buy the other five dev kits we needed.

Back in the day, I owned a Tandy 1000, but I visited my local Radio Shack in a mall, where they also had the Color Computer 3, about the same price as Commodore 64 at Toys R Us.

iirc Color Computer 3 was also sold around 1985 at about $200 but expanding it would be close to the ST in price

Tandy/Radio shack back in the day, could have, instead of introducing the Tandy 1000 and MS-DOS, or even Color Computer 3, created a 68000 computer with Atari ST like specs and video and sound at ST price point iirc around $799.

re: Tandy would have had trouble cloning the ST’s video chip because it wasn’t an off the shelf part.

Couldn’t Tandy use an off the shelf part, similar to perhaps the Color Computer 3 video chip, it wouldn’t be software compatible with the Atari ST, but Tandy could license or create their own operating system for their system. Something like porting OS/9 from microwave to their hypothetical 68k with GEM desktop, ideally with a GPU for sprites and scrolling.

wasn’t OS/9 extremely advance for its time? better than Amiga OS, ST TOS, and even Mac OS and DOS.

it wouldn’t be exactly like the Atari ST, only similar specs like 68k cpu and 1mb of ram at a $799 price point, using only off the shelf components to cut costs and R&D. It could be somewhere between Amiga and Atari ST in features performance and price, but sold by Radio Shack. it would be another 68k machine alongside Apple Mac, Amiga and ST and even Nextstep.

Tandy Advance Computer 68k home computer, by not selling the Tandy 1000 or Color Computer, this 68k based Computer I think could have sold well if it had better graphics and sound.

Tandy also offered the Tandy 3000hl and 3000 series with real 286 and AT architecture for businesses.

The 2.1 million figure came from Jeremy Reimer’s Ars Technica article on computer sales figures, at https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/

I completely agree, the ST was a great system and very underrated.

The CoCo 3 and Atari ST aren’t really a fair comparison, the ST had a faster processor, much higher max memory capacity, better sound and more colors. You’re comparing across generations and the newer generation is going to win. Tandy would have had trouble cloning the ST’s video chip because it wasn’t an off the shelf part. Tandy was right to release the 1000, they just waited too long to switch to a more conventional PC. From about 1985 to 1988 or so, the Tandy 1000 outsold everyone else.

As for the 68K instruction set vs x86, I’ve done very little assembly programming on x86 (literally one very simple program) and none at all on 68K so I don’t think I can do a good compare/contrast.

Atari ST actually sold 3 to 4 million units according to ST Format magazine at the time 🙂 It was a great system which I used a lot to earn money by converting hand written notes from a local musician into printed sheet music with Notator 3 SL. Did also some DTP stuff with it. System had a very sharp high res monitor that was easy for eyes.