Radio Shack sold a 'network' for the Model 3/4
or the CoCo. It was
designed for use in schools and let one 'master' machine (to be operated
by the teacher) communicate with 16 student machines. You could load a
program from disk on the teacher's machine and then transfer it by
CSAVE/CLOAD to all the student machines. Students could transfer their
work (BASIC programms, SCRIPSIT word processor files, etc) back to the
teachers machine in much the same way and have it saved on disk or
printed out.
I only ever saw it in the catalogues, though.
I used one of these networks in 1982/83 with, just as you
said, a single master and 16 slave machines. It was built around a
Model III with 48k and dual disk drives as the master while the other
machines were all 16k cassette-based. We mainly used it just to load
programs from disk to the cassette-based machines. I don't recall
having a printer connected to it or using the master machine for
saving stuff from the slave machines. It worked pretty well though.
Anyone know just what additional stuff was needed to do it?
Jeff
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