[Coco] Help me digitize Color Computer Magazines

[wdg3rd at comcast.net]

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Chuck Youse <cyouse at serialtechnologies.com>
> On Sat, 2008-09-06 at 13:24 +0000, wdg3rd at comcast.net wrote:
> > ( ... I happen to be very fond of the TRS-80 Mod 16 and Tandy 6000
> > line).  
> 
> Join the club.  You're big on 68K-based Unix machines, huh? 3b1,
> TRS-XENIX?
> 
> The problem with the Tandy 6000 is that it seems to be extraordinarily
> rare, but I've been looking for one for years.

Where are you located?  I've got contacts here and there that occasionally need to dispose of one and I hate to see them go to landfills, but I've already got more stuff than La Esposa is willing to tolerate and no room for another.  (If you're in the northeast, I can probably connect you to a guy with a couple of dozen and obviously a more tolerant wife).
 
> I often toy in my head with porting V7 (or even UniFLEX, close enough)
> to the Coco 3 but it's an awful lot of work and probably wouldn't see
> much of an audience.  But it would be cool.. I think it would run like
> an champ.
> 
> C.

At least as capable as the PDP-8 that V7 first ran on.  I got spoiled by the Unix toolkit early on (Xenix was released in January '83, but I got a head start because one of my customers was a beta test site), a year and a half before Tandy started shipping OS-9 Level 1 (and 8 months or so before they started delivering MS-DOS on the Tandy 2000), since I was doing tech support at an RSCC.  That's what caused me to actually read the L1 manuals, notice that some of the commands implied multi-user capability and so I set up a two-station OS-9 system in the classroom at the RSCC in Downtown L.A. that would have retailed (including special sale pricing and assuming you already owned two TV sets) $1,071.38 including CA sales tax with the Los Angeles regional surcharge.

Parts list:
(1) 64 k Color Computer (The CoCo 2) wasn't out yet
(1) Floppy Drive with controller
(1) 16k Color Computer
(1) CoCo serial cable, modified to be a null-modem
(1) Vidtex Rompak
(1) OS-9 package
(1) weird sense of humor attached to some geeking skills and a store manager that tolerated that sort of thing.

Yeah, the "terminal" only connected at 300 bps, and characters were dropped if you typed while the "server" was accessing the floppy drive.  It wasn't a production system, merely a "proof of concept" that the company ignored  (although a number of other RSCC instructors and CSRs adopted it).  (Yeah, we were in communication and had uucp set up on our "demo" Mod 16 Xenix systems long before Fort Worth told us how to).
--
Ward Griffiths    wdg3rd at comcast.net

"What I know [about the art of the sword] boils down to this:  If you see a guy running at you with a sword, put two rounds in his chest to slow him down, then one into his brain to finish him off".  Aaron Allston, _Sidhe Devil_

Of course, another few kilobucks, and a much more functional system was available