24 Apr
2002
24 Apr
'02
5:17 a.m.
On Wed, 24 Apr 2002, Christopher Smith wrote:
Yeah, I'm certain there was a serial port, but I
can't tell you
about it. It's been a while.
Yes, it had a serial port. with a 4 pin DIN? It was clearly described in
their literature as being "RS-232". Unfortunately, that stood for "RADIO
SHACK 232".
> expand it to do something useful?
No more or less so than any other computer.
Like any other computer, you can use it to keep track of notes,
receipts, appointments, etc. (all of which can usually be done as well,
or better, by a refrigerator door.) As a terminal or word processor, it
was badly limited by the screen configuration.
Actually, there are applications that do 80x24 in some
high-res
video mode, for word processing and the like. I ran at least one
on my CoCo1 with 64k of RAM.
There were numerous fixes, some good, some bad. (such as 3 x 6 character
matrix to get more characters on the screen)
> ... see what I mean? You have to do so much to
the thing
> that RS sells you
> that it takes up a whole tabletop just to get to what's in
> the PC's box, and
So?
Is your "Hi-Fi" ALSO all in one box? Or is it a group of separate
components?
You're not capable of reboxing a computer?
A friend, and business associate, used to repackage computers into
Halliburton attache cases. He made a portable Coco with drives, 5" screen
(and connection for external), as well as a number of other models.
His "BMC-80" one piece portable CP/M machine was introduced (at my
booth) at the West Coast Computer Faire a day before Osborne's
introduction. That did not stop Adam from calling his "first and
only" even though he had already spent half an hour admiring ours before
his was introduced. That's all right. His booth had ~$50K of chrome and
black plexiglass; WE had cold beer (which repeatedly got us free ink in
Jerry Pournelle's column).
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com