[Coco] The typical CoCo user is aged...?!?

[Mark McDougall]

Torsten Dittel wrote:

> I'd like to see kind of a demographic profile of today's CoCo-Nuts. Age?
>  Profession? etc.

I'm one of the "son" generation, now 39.

My father bought a 4K Level I TRS-80 Model I I guess around '88-89. After 
upgrading to Level II 16K, then finally 48K with disk drives, I guess it 
finally got to a point where he couldn't get me off 'his' computer and 
suggested I buy a CoCo 1.

We both used both computers, attending a local CoCo user group monthly (as 
well as SYDTRUG) here in southern Sydney, Australia. Not sure what years but 
I guess not long after the CoCo was released. I was using a hand-me-down 
colour TV as the monitor. Eventually I got a disk drive but IIRC it wasn't 
the standard RS controller?!?

Did a little bit of programming but must admit that I never really took to 
it like the Model I. Even booted OS/9 Level 1 once! Some of the games were 
pretty good - Donkey Kong and the Joust clones were particular favourites 
that I can recall.

The host of the CoCo group was an IBM engineer. His daughter was studying 
Computer Science at the "best" place to study at the time. I was always 
going to study computing, but I was convinced by them to change my uni 
preference to what is now UTS. Probably a smart move.

When I hit uni I needed a "serious" machine for study and my father bought 
me a Model 4P. That got run into the ground - though more play than work was 
done on the machine. I still have it and recently repaired the hires board, 
although it no longer has working disk drives.

Next machine was an Amiga 500, then an IBM XT. No surprise then that I'm 
typing this email on a PC, although grudgingly in Windoze rather than Linux.

Totally lost interest in the earlier machines until I discovered (arcade) 
emulation one day about 7 years ago. It's all snowballed from there and 
these days I'm keen on re-acquiring a CoCo (which is why I lurk on this 
maillist) - although I'll probably go for the CoCo3 - I really want to see 
Donut Dilemma and Pacman running on it! ;)

Went back to uni to study Electrical Engineering more recently and work as a 
software/hardware design engineer in a small contract R&D house. It's great 
with varied work (one job sort-of involved Microbee computers!) and given me 
some FPGA experience with which I've been tinkering with emulation too.

Just wish I had more *time*!!!

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
| <http://members.optushome.com.au/msmcdoug> |   with less resistance!"