Color Computer

My first real computer was the Tandy Color Computer 3, or Coco 3 as a most people call it. July 30, 1986, Tandy announced the Color Computer 3 in New York City. It came with 128 KB of RAM, upgradable to 512 KB.

A 6809 CPU clocked at 0.895MHz normally, could be run at twice that, 1.79MHz by using the high-speed poke of POKE &HFFD9,0. You could slow it down again with POKE &HFFD8,0 which was needed for proper I/O like accessing the disk drive. The Hitachi 6309 (HD63B09E) is a high-performance CMOS replacement CPU, running roughly 30% faster, has more internal registers, and an enhanced instruction set.

A memory management unit (MMU) was used to break up the 6809's 64KB address space into 8KB chunks. You would tell the MMU what page to point to, and the CPU would then be able to see that memory, thinking it was still within it's 64KB of memory.

New graphics resolutions of 160, 256, 320 or 640 pixels wide by 192 or 225 lines high were introduced, and a maximum of 16 colors from a palette of 64 could be displayed.

At the time BASIC was still a popular language to teach students as their first computer language.

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