[Coco] Back, in the days ...

[wdg3rd at comcast.net]

From: "George Ramsower" <georgeramsower at gmail.com>
>   Reminiscing the old days, I remember when IBM came out with the PC with 
> 640K RAM. They said this was more memory than anyone would ever need.
>  A five meg hard drive was big enough for anything you could ever use.
>  A computer running a clock speed of sixteen megahertz was fast!.... Really 
> FAST!

It was Bill Gates who said that 640k was as much as anybody would ever need.  And the earliest stock hard drives for the PC/XT were ten meg.

>  I'm sure some of you remember the Turbo mode. Wow!
>  The first hard drive for the coco was a five meg unit. It wasn't a standard 
> SCSI interface, it was something a little different. Somewhere in my arsenal 
> of my old documents, I have the schematic of that old controller. I remember 
> it had  very few chips.
>   I contacted Tandy (way back when) and they faxed me a copy of the 
> schematic. It was had drawn and not very pretty.

No drive released or supported for the Color Computer by Tandy Corporation was anything remotely related to SCSI.  They were all ST-506 using an adapter that made the CoCo end look like a Model 3/4 edge connector, with the actual hard disk controller in the first drive enclosure.  The adapter connected to all of the same drives that attached to the Models 1/3/4 and 2/12/16/6000 (except for the early 8.4 Mb drives for the 2/16 which were crap 8" Shugart SASI devices) which ranged in capacity from five to seventy megabytes per drive (and four drives were supported, mix and match 5, 10, 12, 15, 35 or 70 MB drives -- only the first had the controller, a WD-1010 that supported up to four heads and 1024 cylinders per unit).

The first drives officially supported for the CoCo were 10 Meg.  The 5 Meg drives were ancient history before the first official Tandy CoCo HD adapter, though if you had one it worked fine.
--
Ward Griffiths    wdg3rd at comcast.net

These histrionics were probably unnecessary, since there was no reason to think anybody would be watching us with more than casual interest until I made my first move to follow Buchanon's trail, in London.  Still, somebody might check back this far later, and I always feel that if you're going to play a part, you might as well play it all the way, at least in public -- and it's hard to tell what's public and what isn't, these electronic days.
Donald Hamilton, _The Devastators_, 1965