The CoCo supports a number of ways to load and run software.

The easiest is to power the machine off, plug in a cartridge ROM pak with a program on it, and power on.

The ROM pak program usually starts immediately, or the manual may include a specific command such as an EXEC needed to kick off the program.

The second method is to use a cassette audio cable and load a program from tape drive or external sound playback (like a WAV file on a phone or iPod) using the CLOAD (for basic programs) or CLOADM (for machine language) and then RUN or EXEC.

If you have a Disk Drive, Hard Drive, or SD card controller plugged into the cartridge slot or slot 4 of a multipak interface, you can use RSDOS commands to load and start programs.

There are many different kinds of floppy and hard drive controllers so its best to consult their manuals.

But, generally, DIR, LOAD“filename”:RUN or LOADM“filename”:EXEC should help get you going.

If you have an SD card controller, then you can also use an SDC explorer utility to pick software from a menu.

Hard drive users might use a Sidekick utility.

If you have a serial cable, you can load an HDBDOS or DWDOS ROM from cassette or cartridge, and use those DOS ability to access a DriveWire server running on a second computer such as a PC or Raspberry Pi as if it was a locallly connected disk.

Finally, if nothing else, you can load programs in through the keyboard by typing in the listings from books, magazines, etc and running them.

This is how I spent my initial months with my original CoCo until I could get a cassette cable and drive.

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