[Coco] philosphical ... discussions

[Paul T. Barton]

John,

--- "John R. Hogerhuis" <jhoger at pobox.com> wrote:

> 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.
> 

I'd like to see I2C bus. The Philips pcf8584
chip ( I have some) looks really good.

A lot of the cell phones have graphic
displays using the I2C bus. Could it be
that there's another "attachment" to create?

PTBarton



		
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