5 May
2001
5 May
'01
7:46 a.m.
That's one main difference between the CoCo and
the Dragon. The other is
rather more annoying. While the BASICs are compatible as the Ascii
source level, the tokens used for each keyword are different on the 2
machines (!). So you can't CSAVE a program on a CoCo and CLOAD it into a
dragon and expect it to work. I have no idea why it was done this way --
IMHO it's stupid.
A CoCo-nut (hah, that's actually pretty funny ;-) I used to know said it was
for legal reasons or something like that. I think Radio Shack got cold feet
about having a European competitor.
I was never fond of the CoCo 1/2 or the MC-10, but I really liked the CoCo 3.
I used to assist an elementary school teacher who had a network of CoCo 2s
that I wrote educational software for (he used my fractional division tutor
for years ;-). The CoCo 3 had the only disk drive in the class, so he got
one of the Radio Shack network-over-cassette-port rotary switches and we
loaded the program on all the CoCo 2s by turning the switch and typing CLOAD
on the appropriate machine.
I thought the CoCo 3 had a lot going for it. Its graphics were much, much
better than its ancestors and I liked CoCo BASIC. Perhaps I'll have to get
one of my own now. :-)
--
----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu
-- Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. -- W. von
Braun