[Coco] philosphical ... discussions

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 19:07, Roger Taylor wrote:

> Today, we're seeing a lot of new gadgets to add on, but hardly any software 
> to use that hardware.  This is why I think CoCo authors should try Portal-9 
> to see how easy it can be to develop for the CoCo from a more modern 
> computer just like the hardware designers are using modern tools to develop 
> all these neat CoCo gadgets.  After all, hardware is nothing without software.

A good point. This has always been the case with coco... many more
utilities than applications. Since OS-9 came along there has always been
a great foundation there but not a overload of applications. There have
been some great ones... Coco Max, and Max10 stand out in my memory as a
good graphics and wordprocessor. I used Simply Better for a while, and
liked that. Once in OS-9 I remember something that acted like vi, and
had a text formatter, and that was perfect for me. Was that on a Coco 1
hi res screen?

The thing with software development is that it is expensive and
developers need to see a market to know that they can make some profit
from the time they've invested. A software engineer like myself can make
$80 -> $100 per hour on a contract easily. If I add a another big
project with no clear revenue stream I will have to explain it to the
budget committee (her name is Angela).

Has anyone tried to quantify the size of the coco 3 market these days?

OR such software could be developed in an open source model by the
enthusiast community. Even so it usually takes one programmer to write a
lot of the code and build momentum before others jump in and start
building the bells and whistles.


I guess the important questions are:

a) What is needed... there's a lot of old stuff that's perfectly usable.
What's missing?
b) Who is ready to volunteer?

-- John.