1 Oct
2007
1 Oct
'07
1:39 p.m.
Rumor has it that Roy J. Tellason may have mentioned these words:
My thoughts at that time were that to have something
useful you'd need at
least two floppy drives. I also thought that more memory than what came in
the basic unit wasn't a bad idea, either. The sales dude did some
figuring,
and when the expansion box, the memory, and the drives were all added in
the total came to something over $1,000 -- not as good a deal as it looked
like, at the time. :-)
You might have a slightly different concept of "useful" than I did - at
least with my CoCo (and with most other computers I'd used at the time) 1
floppy drive was all that was necessary to be "useful." I certainly didn't
"complain" after getting my second floppy drive (many years later) but I
did a *lot* of useful work on single-floppy systems.
Other than that, you're right - more memory was always good. ;-)
I also didn't consider that it had only a 40-column
screen, either. Having
done a bunch of work on C64s, and having gotten (eventually) an Osborne
Executive which came with a built-in monitor showing an 80-column screen, I
think I probably would've found that hard to live with as well.
Not me - having used a 32x16 screen (which was rather limiting) on the CoCo
and a 40x16 screen on my Tandy 200 (for which I was *very* glad I chose
that over the 40x8 of the Model 100) 40x24 would have been "ok". At least
at 40 columns, it's still easy to visually extrapolate what 80-char lines
look like - a very painful exercise on 32x16!
I never got one, never played around with one, but I
don't think I'm
missing much.
Well, if you were a Basic programmer (like I was at the time) then you
*really* weren't missing much! IIRC, it's Basic is not run on the primary
CPU, but on the graphics chip! As such, it's a pretty limited Basic, and
dog slow... at least 10x slower (for a simple For/Next loop) than a CoCo2,
so for a home platform, you'd need to learn assembly or purchase (read:
more $$$) a dev package for C/Fortran/Forth/whatever else might've been
available for that box.
It did seem to have some decent game cartridges, but other than that, for a
more "serious" work platform, you're right - it needed a *lot* more than
just the bare machine.
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
zmerch at 30below.com
What do you do when Life gives you lemons,
and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????