[Coco]: Tandy's biggest mistakes thread

[jdaggett at gate.net]

John

First off when a product is concieved the best design may not 
always win out. In consumer electronics cost drives many business 
decisions. Features are included or excluded simply by cost basis 
and design time needed. 

There is an imporrtance of time to market to also consider. 

I have an understanding of what Tandy may have gone through in 
the 80's with the color computer line having worked in design and 
manufacturing for 23 yrs. It is easy now after 25 y rs or so and play 
retired armchair quarterback and second guess the decisions made 
then. 

Overall cost drove many of the high level decisoins on the Color 
Computer. You also have to realize that this product was to reach  
market their Model 1, 2 and 3 were not reaching. It was a niche 
market product. The Coco 3 actuallly became more than a game or 
entertainment computer. Yet it was burdened by not to take market 
share from the Tabdy 1000 line of computers. It  had to fit between 
the low cost game computer and the higher end 286/386 machines. 

It did and did well despite the now obvious weaknesses. I did many 
a report for my college work on a Coco 3 with OS9. In fact learning 
Basic09 made learning Fortran77 almost a breeze. In fact those are 
my two favorite languages. 

Even the RSBASIC has power that makes it more than that of a 
game computer. Almost all the math is done is floating point math. 
It has 10 digit accuracy. The expansion port makes a nice but large 
clumsy embedded machine to do far more than just sprites and 
graphics. I have seen Cocos used in test setups to test and 
determine battery life and capacity. Off the expansion slot there are 
lots of things that can be done. 

Yes the key board is limited. The joysticks I felt could be better. But 
for what the Cocos do they do well. The one thing that makes it 
what it is simply it is a hackable, modifiable machine that can do a 
lot despite its original limitations. 

There I have vented my opinions.

james

On 19 Apr 2005 at 15:01, John Guin wrote:

From:           	"John Guin" <johnguin at hotmail.com>
To:             	"'CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts'" 
<coco at maltedmedia.com>
Subject:        	[Coco]:  Tandy's biggest mistakes thread
Date sent:      	Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:01:25 -0700
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> 
> Hello all,
> 
> I simply wanted to spin off the thread for Tandy's biggest mistakes
> from the email thread about the Coco 4, and create a whole new thread
> for armchair quarterbacking (25-15 years after the fact, no less).
> 
> Anyhow, had I been running the Radio Shack show, here's what I would
> have done differently:
> 
> 1.  Third party software, books and magazines in Radio Shack.  This
> easily helped Commodore sell 10 million+ machines, and limited the
> color computer to <<<about 1.3 million, best estimate?  Anyone know? 
> I think I've asked this before...>>> This first point is easily #1 in
> my book, and these other items are FAR less important.
> 
> 2.  Support for lower case letters and more than 32 characters per
> line. This really limited the word processing capability, and made the
> machine compare poorly to the C64 and others (except the VIC, of
> course).  On the flip side, setting the default to 32 was a great idea
> so the early adopters who wanted to hook this thing up to an older TV
> could get a decent picture.
> 
> 3.  The weird 32K limit for BASIC.  I consider this the equivalent of
> the 640K limit on DOS, and there was really no reason for it.  You
> could "re-org" the ROMs around and get about 40K available for BASIC
> anyhow, so this should have been the default.  Again, the C64 powered
> up with ~39K free, and the COCO should have done the same.
> 
> 4.  Better keyboard from day one.  They finally fixed this with the
> Coco 2, but I don't understand why they didn't re-use the Model 1
> keyboard or something similar.  
> 
> 5.  Over-reliance on the 6809 to do everything.  Fortunately, it could
> do a whole lot, but having it bogged down with sound, graphics (no
> sprites) and everything else seemed to "waste" that power on tasks
> that could have been done with a different chip.
> 
> 
> Anyway, thanks for letting me vent!
> 
> John
> 
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