[Coco]: Tandy's biggest mistakes thread

[Kevin Diggs]

Hi,

Arthur Flexser wrote:
> I believe all of that falls under the heading of misguided marketing strategy.  
> It seems to me that Tandy very deliberately set out to prevent the CoCo from
> being taken as a "serious" machine, despite being well aware that this would cut
> into CoCo sales and make it a less able competitor for Commodore, Atari, etc.  
> Tandy's marketing folks wanted to sell more of their more pricey models, on
> which profit margins were higher, and god forbid that any customers might buy a
> CoCo if there was potential to sell them a more expensive machine.  They always
> thought of the CoCo as filling the "Christmas toy for the kiddies" niche in
> their computer line.  You can see that in their advertising.  That's why the
> CoCo was given a lame 32-column text display, etc.  I think they calculatedly
> sacrificed CoCo sales in the hopes of selling more of their higher-end (i.e.,
> more expensive) models.
> 
> Art
> 
	I agree with all of the statements about RS marketing strategies. If I 
ever find a job I will, one way or another, make the quattro happen. I 
STRONGLY believe that an updated hacking/hobby computer will be worth 
whoever I try to convince to build it's trouble. I think RS cold make a 
small pile of money on subscription interface/experiment kits (monthly? 
quaterly?). Too bad I don't still work at CDN. Some of those tools would 
come in handy now. With the possible exception of Mr. Diffendaffer, I 
think there are PLENTY of XYs (probably a few XXs too ... that Harvard 
guy is probably wrong) that will shell out cash to play with a modern 
"hobby" computer. I suspect that such a computer would be useful for a 
both EE and CS college students. What do you think, Boisy?

	Problem with unemployment is it largely consists of boredom. There is 
nothing on TV worth watching ... I'm on my third quattro concept:  an 
updated tre, the tre 'B', running NitrOS-9 (or L4) for slow IO 
(essentially an IO processor) and a cpu pak with a PPC (with an FPU ... 
not one of those crappy embedded cpus) running linux. The cpu pak thing 
would have a pass thru enhanced coco-bus for hooking to an improved 
multi-pak (one that is not annoying). And no backwards compatibility. At 
least no sacrifices for backwards compatibility. You wanna run rom pak 
games, dig out your tre.

JDag,

	How fast could we get a 6809-like core to run? Think we could get in 
the 66 MHz range?

					kevin

P.S.:  Anyone know anything about SCSI? What is SCA-2? I bought some SCA 
LVD disks on EBay that I can't get to work with an Adaptec OEM 2940U2. 
Is SCA different from SCA-2?