[Coco] Owing the community

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 09:20 PM 7/20/05 -0500, Boisy G. Pitre wrote:
>I'll bet you have enough historical material in your head about the  
>CoCo community to write quite a book.  Surely you've thought about  
>doing something like that?

Nah, I don't have much to say, and my memories are clouded with
self-justification. :)

I gave a CoCoFest talk once, but nothing more than that. I was pretty
isolated up in my corner of Vermont. We went to the trade shows and did
quite a funny dog & pony act (the best for me was wearing a striped prison
outfit for my talk at the Princeton Rainbow Fest, where we almost also got
Brooke Shields to come to our booth), but I didn't know many folks well.

Bill Barden and Marty Goodman were among the really good folks in my eyes,
and Marty actually came to Vermont and took some pictures of me conducting
a choir. And I spent a month in California repairing the damage that a
coke-infused editor had done to my "Custom TRS-80" book. But beyond that, I
just wrote articles while the six of us soldered circuit boards and copied
documentation and software ... and now two of those employees, younger than
me by many years, are dead.

But it wasn't all bad. We had lots of fun blowing up capacitors by putting
them in parallel on an AC cord. And the little boy who visited our shop
every day and stood in the corner staring at what we did was given a CoCo
for Christmas. He eventually became my stepson, and is now a independent
network consultant specializing in Linux.

The company went under in 1986, and I went bankrupt, my marriage fell
apart, and I went to Europe to live for a while. When I came back, I wrote
tech articles in the so-called "automatic ID" world until the tech field
collapsed in 1991. Now I concentrate on various work for a living:
restoring old audio recordings, engraving music, writing music, writing
articles about music, editing books, part-time running a country stores
group, and doing our radio show (finally going off the air in September).

It would be fun to put down some of the stories, but I'm really stressed
for time, and there wouldn't be enough meaty stuff to read.

Full sig attached this time in case anybody wants to see what I've been up to.

Dennis


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========================================================
Restoring recordings, live recording, & engraving music:
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