[Coco] [Color Computer] Older site.

[Dan Olson]

>> I'm not too familar with the inner workings of the 1000, I do have an
>> external SCSI controller for it (the same as used with the 500) and I
>> guess I assumed that the ROM had enough smarts to look for a hard drive
>> before booting off of floppy.... I mean, it's an old computer, but not
>> that old.
>
> Oh, I wouldn't say that.
>
> You should have seen AmigaDOS 1.0... it made WindowsMe look reliable
> <shudder>.  It would crash just sitting there with the first 1.0
> version I saw.

I don't have anything older than 1.2, but I'm thinking even more basic 
than that.  The IBM PC has enough smarts to scan adaptor ROMs, check for a 
floppy disk, and if neither have an OS, go to ROM BASIC.  I just figured 
the Amiga's simple boot code would check for an expansion board with an 
attached drive, if none is found, scan for a disk in DF0, if none is 
found, put that image in the screen showing a kickstart disk.  Guess it 
doesn't work that way :(

That is interesting to know about 1.0 though.

> The A1000 could actually be fitted with Kickstart ROMs, I believe it
> has the sockets for them.  You had to replace a couple PALs on the
> daughterboard to do it but it worked fine.

I knew there were special daughter boards, but didn't know that it was 
that simple.

> I started developing for the Amiga on a 2 drive A1000 system.
> Swapping disks for the compiler was a nightmare!

I know, the Amiga is the first system where I had to have 3 drive minimum 
to not loose my sanity.  I had workbench in one, a MS-DOS disk in another 
(because I started out downloading stuff from the net and transfering it) 
and my "destination" disk in the third.  I had to have the utility to 
decompress files somewhere too, with two disks I kept running into 
problems where my destination disk would be swapped out for something else 
while I was trying to write the decompressed files to it, it took quite a 
bit of juggling to work, 3 drives made life much easier!

 	Dan