[Coco] Color Flex

[Frank Swygert]

Yes, he did in a way, but was justified in another. On a 64K system, which was the limit for the CoCo 1 and 2, Flex was indeed a "better" operating system. It took fewer processor resources and left a lot more room for programs to run in. When the 64K limit was breached, OS-9 came into its own. 

There's an interview with Frank Hogg in my book ("Tandy's Little Wonder"). Wish I still had the tape that I recorded the phone conversation on, that would be neat to hear now! His position never changed, but many get the idea that he had to "eat his words" over the issue. I remember him mentioning that it "was unfortunate that the 64K barrier was overcome (about the time or right after) Rainbow printed that article" (probably not an exact quote, but as close as memory will allow!). It did leave some egg on his face, but he stood by his words -- on a 64K system Flex was "better". 

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Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:42:06 -0400
From: Chuck Youse <cyouse at serialtechnologies.com>


On Thu, 2008-08-28 at 17:57 -0400, Frank Swygert wrote:

> > There are no patches to Color Flex that will allow it to be run on a CC3. It was gone way before the CC3 came out! It was sort of a competitor to OS-9 Level 1, and in some ways was better -- it made better use of a 32-64K environment. Frank Hogg got in a bit of hot water by saying Flex was better than OS-9! Then the CC3 and Level II came out. OS-9 was better than Flex given the extra memory to work with, and Flex fell to the wayside. There may have been later versions of Flex that exploited more memory, but none were developed for or ported to the CoCo3 that I know of. 
>   

I vaguely recall Frank Hogg eating his words after Level II came out.
Somewhere in Rainbow.

-- 
Frank Swygert
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