EIA 232 vs. 422, Color Computers (was Re: Serial floppy drives)

I hope you didn't interpret that as a personal attack. I know you were just trying to be helpful, and had undoubtedly gotten the information astray. Connecting EIA-232 directly to EIA-422 could let the smoke out of something, and we certainly wouldn't want that. On the other hand, I'm plenty interested in CoCo stuff, so comment on them all you like. I got my first Color Computer 2 back in 1984 or so, with 64K of RAM, a pair of TEAC FD55-F floppy drives (80 track double sided), a PBJ Word-Pak 80-column card, and some sort of PBJ backplane that did basically the same thing as the Radio Shack Multipak but was cheaper (and also less expensive). I ran OS-9 on it. After a while I added an RS-232 pak and one of the first USR Courier 2400 modems, so I could dial into a VAX running BSD 4.2. I don't recall now where I got a floppy controller, or what brand it was. Did Radio Shack sell the controller separately? I definitely didn't buy any Radio Shack drives back then, although last year I did buy some on eBay. Eventually I got a Coco 3, and gave much of my Coco 2 stuff to a friend, who has within the last two years given most of it back. I was surprised to learn recently that there's a SourceForge project to reverse-engineer, document, and extend OS-9 for the Coco: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cocoos9/ Also a package of command line utilities for Linux and MacOS X to access OS-9 disk images, and a cross-assembler: http://sourceforge.net/projects/os9tools/