On Thu, 02 Oct 2014, Dave Drum wrote to Sean Dennis:

 ml> hunh? was this for the coco or something else?

 SD> More than likely for the CoCo.  I don't think any of the
 SD> other systems had an external dual floppy setup.

 DD> I think the Tandy 1000 used a dual floppy set-up.

it could, yes... the original Tandy 1000 came with one 5.25 inch floppy
drives and could be upgraded to have two of them... later ones came with a
hard drive and a single or dual 5.25 inch floppy configuration...

it also came with a flaw in the book on what to do when initially starting
to use the machine... they explained how to boot the machine with which
floppy diskette that came with the machine. then they said that the user
should create a backup of the DOS boot diskette(s)... ok... remember, on a
single floppy system, the single drive can be seen as both A: and B:... the
instructions said to format the disk but they never said to put a new blank
disk in the drive(!) and they didn't say to use "format /s b:" so
that the machine would tell them to change diskettes... i found this the
one year i was at my dad's store and we had a bunch of complaints about the
systems not booting after they had followed the book's instructions... we
had them bring their disks down, we copied the orignal DOS to them and then
write-protected them so this couldn't happen again... from then on, all
original boot disks that left the store were opened and had write-protect
tabs put on them... dad contacted the main office, explained the problem
and a few weeks later there were new manuals sent out which corrected the
oversight...

 DD> Family Video (an actual healthy video rental chain) based in 
 DD> Springfield, IL used a T-1000 running Unix to operate their whole 
 DD> shop back in the day.

are you sure it was the 1000? IIRC, the 2000 came with a *nix on it but i
don't know what *nix it was... dad's store had one in the back room for
their operations and reports... they did all their inventory control
through it as well as putting in their daily reports and transmitting them
via modem to the main office... i don't recall if they had started with the
1000 before the 2000 came out or not, though...

 DD> People, especially Burroughs/Sperry/IBM geeks were gob-smacked by
 DD> this.

i'm sure... there was also a *nix or similar for the coco... my brain keeps
wanting me to say OS9... we had some customers with some really tricked out
cocos...

NOTE: i never worked for Radio Shack... my father did and was the manager
of numerous stores... the year i came back from the mid-west, it was too
late in the season to go job hunting as all the high-school kids already
had them so i went with my dad to his store every day to help there...
that's when i first met the Tandy 1000 and that christmas season, i
basically sold all of the computers that were sold by that store... i was
playing on them typing in programs and when i finished coding in the thing
i was coding and started it running, i'd look around and realize that there
were 30 or 40+ people behind me watching what i was doing with that
machine... the programs were pretty simple BASIC things drawing random
rectangles and later with some color in them... they looked like a city
skyline being built as new skyscrapers went up and the blocks looked like
lit windows... when i added color, they looked like they had christmas
lights in them... anyway, folks loved it and asked questions which i
answered... when it came time for the sale, i took the customer and their
plastic to my dad for the paperwork and i went to the back room to get
their brand new boxed machine, put it on the hand truck and take it to
their car when everything was ready to go ;)

not having a job at that time wasn't so bad because dad got the commissions
for those computer sales that he wrote up... he didn't mind that at all :)

)\/(ark