[Coco] Back, in the days ...

[George Ramsower]

Ward Griffiths  reminds me:

> 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 wasn't so sure. I THOUGHT it was IBM, so did some checking...Now  I don't 
think anyone ever said that.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
  a.. Often attributed to Gates in 1981. Gates considered the IBM PC's 640kB 
program memory a significant breakthrough over 8-bit systems that were 
typically limited to 64kB, but he has denied making this remark.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

>>  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).

Someone told me once that the SASI interface was a downscaled SCSI and the 
coco controller was even more hacked. Memory may be bad on that. I knew the 
drive itself need an adapter. My first hard drive was an MFM drive, a SCSI 
controller and a SCSI interface card on the coco... the same card I'm still 
using today
>
> 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.

 Bit rot in the brain again.

> --
> Ward Griffiths