New subject: OT -- luck charms (was Re: DG Aviion video)

2 Dec 1998

Once upon a midnight dreary, Tony Duell had spoken clearly:

...
   CoCo-ish
question... tho CoCoists (IMHO) aren't quite as rabid as some
 other platform gurus...) 
Speak for yourself. _I_ grew up hacking the coco and I was rabid enough 
to be one of the few people in the UK to have a CoCo3. Still have it. 
Still love OS-9. But I'm not on the CoCo mailing list (too many machines, 
too many mailing lists, my mail is bad enough as it is...) 
Oh, my CoCo3 is still set up in my office, next to "Goon" (my Clone -- hey,
I just thought of this: I know a lot of folks who call BMW cars
"bimmers"... would IBM clones rightly be called "bummers"??? ;-).

My CoCo2 is still set up back at my "hacker" workbench, with the EPROM
programmer (hopefully) eternally affixed to it's cartridge port -- the
keyboard felt like someone dumped Pepsi & sand in it... rebuilt it; now
it's one of the nicest CoCo keyboards I own.

My CoCo1 is set up in my bedroom set up to the Plug-n-Power, and controls
some of the lights in my house.

Oh, and kiddies, cover your eyes: "Gates be damned... all of my CoCos now
have Extended Basic... Couldn't buy it at RS, so what else am I gonna use
my EPROMS for??? ;-)

Besides, I do own more copies (I have 4 more CoCos) than I use at one
time... just not in the right boxes!

However, on the CoCo lists I've been on over the years, if a CoCoNut had an
Amiga, he wouldn't get receive a second port to his/her posterior... many
of the Amigans I've met, while generally wholesome individuals, were quite
"ahem... less than goodnatured" when the found out an Amiga was not your
sole platform.

Of course, this is only my experience, and nowadays it doesn't seem like
that anymore... so YMMV, and all that jazz. Just my obversations &
opinions... AAMAF, I'm looking to acquire an Amiga 1200 & lotsa stuff with
it, and have received a great deal of help from others lately on advice of
this new, uncharted universe (well, for me...)

...
   If it is a
Dallas 12887 (without the "A" suffix), I can tell you this:
 beware of the Dallas 12887. The 12887 has one shortcoming: the NVRAM
 *cannot* be reset via external means, which means if whatever machine has 
Do you mean the chip can get into a state where normal writes to the chip 
fail, or that there's no way of clearing the chip other than by writing 
to it. The latter could prevent a PC from booting, but if you remove the 
chip and zero it in a programmer, then it would probably be OK.  
I was speaking of the latter, but how many "bummer" owners have a
programmer that can successfully write to that chip?

Ahhh... wait... this is Tony. O.K. -- How many _beginner / novice / PC
only_ "bummer" owners.... etc.

Outside of this list, I don't know of anyone who could diagnose a problem
relating to this chip; and I'm not sure that any of the programmers _I_ own
could successfully zero this chip, either.

(Sorry to be down on this, but I deal day-in-and-out with folks who call me
with:
Them: "I couldn't get my Internet running..."
Me:   "Did you right click on [insert gizmo here]"
Them: "What's a right-click?"
Me:   "That's when you push the right button of the mouse"
Them: "What's a mouse?"

:-/   )

Most of the folks I deal with don't know PCB stands for "Printed Circuit
Board" let alone "Poly-Chlorinated Biphenyls" (toxic flame retardant).

Just my (pessimistic) opinion... ;-)

See ya,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger