[plowjockey]

Did the restrictions on third party software and such apply to franchise stores? I know that the local franchise stores in this rural area carried electronics from other manufacturers but don't recall anything about software or peripherals despite having a Coco 2 from late '83 through the summer of '89 as my only computer.

Despite there being an RS store in the county seat town of this county and in every adjoining county, most of my Coco support came from other amateur radio operators as that was my primary interest. I did buy a genuine RS disk drive and printer for the Coco along the way. While it came with 16k of RAM, a contact via amateur radio led me to purchase the chips to upgrade it 64k which worked!

There was a lot of chatter about the Model 4 but the price and an awareness from amateur radio publications of the rise of "IBM PC compatibles" kept me from going that route. Even if I had known of 80 Micro at the time, I doubt I would have subscribed.

Ironically, the first PC clone--a collection of disparate parts, really--I bought was from another amateur radio operator who worked at the local Radio Shack at the time in 1989.

[TMWNN]

> Did the restrictions on third party software and such apply to franchise stores?

No. They always could and did sell third-party computer products, while Tandy-owned stores only began doing so alongside the Tandy 1000, since it would be ridiculous to not sell the PC software that the computer exists to run.

[plowjockey]

That is kind of what I thought, that the local stores had various titles hanging on the wall but since none of it interested me at the time I ignored it and so it's not seared into my memory.

[RaftPeople]

> but don't recall anything about software or peripherals despite having a Coco 2

They did sell 3rd party software for the Coco (at minimum). The distributor I sold games through had a Tandy contact and sent one of my games to see if they wanted to sell it in stores like some other ones they were selling.

They did not, which was a bummer. One funny thing, the opening screen, prior to title and credits etc. was a matrix like display with the screen full of random characters (numbers and letters, not 1's and 0's) shifting characters and colors, etc., the Tandy guy said he thought the game was broken at first.