Program Pak

Program Pak was Tandy/Radio Shack's name for its format of software cartridges designed for the CoCo's expansion/cartridge slot.

Each Program Pak's contact pins had a distinctive spring-loaded protective hard plastic sleeve which was pushed back into the cartridge when the cartridge was inserted into the CoCo, and which sprang back to its protective covering position when the cartridge was removed. This went a long way to making Radio Shack cartridges more durable than most other cartridge formats, in particular less vulnerable from their contacts being damaged by scratches, dust/dirt, and corrosion from being directly touched.

At launch and during the early period of the CoCo's lifecycle, most Radio Shack-branded software titles were released on Program Paks. Tandy soon began offering programs on cassette, and then, later, on diskette as well.

Third party developers usually released their titles on disk and/or tape from the start since that was much cheaper, since tapes and floppy disks were an industry standard and commonly available medium. However, there were a few non-Radio Shack program cartridges (such as Ghost Gobbler, 8-Ball, and Whirlybird Run -- all of which were from Anteco Software.)

While (thanks to consoles such as the Atari 2600, as well as the Atari 800, TI-99/4A, Commodore VIC-20, and similar competitors) cartridges had long been associated with video games, and while most early Radio Shack CoCo video games were also on Program Paks, there were other, non-gaming programs also available in the cartridge format, such as the Color SCRIPSIT and Color SCRIPSIT II word processors and others.

The format was also used to expand the CoCo's capabilities, most notably to provide the CoCo with floppy disk capability. Both Tandy/Radio Shack disk drives, as well as third-party drives, used a cartridge to give the CoCo floppy driver firmware and a loader for a disk operating system (or at least a version of BASIC that could use the disk drive and had some core commands such as load, save, copy, list, delete, etc.).

Some other expansions from Radio Shack/Tandy included:

• Speech/Sound Cartridge
• Orchestra-90 CC
• Deluxe RS-232 Program Pak
• Direct Connect Modem Pak
• Hard Drive Controller
• Disto Super Controller
• XPad Controller
• WordPak RS 80 Column Adapter (for CoCo 2)[1]

The most notable third party non-disk controller cartridge was probably the
CoCo Max Joystick Driver.

One unusual cartridge-based peripheral was the Keyboard Beeper, reviewed by Peter Paplaskas in p. 28 of the May 1984 issue of HOT CoCo. It's a cartridge that made the computer beep each time a key on the keyboard was pressed. While that may seem pointlessly annoying, it was meant for people typing in text or programs who needed to make sure that each keystroke was properly registered by the computer without having to take their eyes off the source text to glance at the monitor. That this product was even imagined, let alone actually made and sold, seems a clear indicator that the CoCo keyboard was either unreliable, or at least created a problem from the lack of a tactile "click" telling the user when a key had been depressed far enough.