[Coco] A bit more of CoCo history dies...

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 14 August 2009, wdg3rd at comcast.net wrote:
>> From: "Gene Heskett" <gene.heskett at verizon.net>
>> To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
>> Sent: Wednesday, August 5, 2009 11:02:10 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
>> Subject: Re: [Coco] A bit more of CoCo history dies...
>>
>> I could go on, but the examples I've mentioned are symptomatic of
>> poor management decisions for the last 25 years.  Had you jumped
>> on the m68k bandwagon and given us another, better amiga, the world
>> might just not be so ruled by wintel cpu's with largely broken
>> architectures that are now demanded because of the legacy software
>> out there that wouldn't have a clue what to do if it suddenly didn't
>> have to work around the broken intel design from the gitgo.  Heck, I
>> would have thought you would have learned from the z80 debacle.  My
>> mistake.  There are lots of far better cpu architectures out there
>> than intel and its clones.  How about the arm cpu that can run at
>> 200mhz using 1/4 watt of power?  Or the 500 mhz version that runs on
>> 2 watts?  Both run linux natively.  But because that's (wintel crap)
>> what I can get, that's what I'm running here, an AMD quad core phenom
>> 9550 at 2.1Ghz, burns 65 watts  sleeping, and 4Gb of ram is almost
>> enough to make it do what I want to do, which, come to think of it,
>> is everything.
>
>Gene, Tandy did a lot with the 68k _before_ there was a bandwagon.  The Mod
> 16 running Xenix on a 68k was around well before the Lisa, never mind the
> Mac. 

I never knew what was in the 16..  Figured it was probably an 80186.

> For a while, the Mod 16/Tandy 6000 was the largest single vendor base
> of Unix computers in the wild, except that instead of being in research
> labs and megacorps they were in offices and mom&pop shops actually getting
> some work done.  True, they weren't as fast as a Cray or as pretty as an
> AT&T 7300.

The AT&T 7300 wasn't purty to me, it was a fire waiting to get started better, 
and sometimes did.  We had one for about 10 years at the tv station, handling 
the CBS network messages to their affiliates.  It destroyed 5 motherboards and 
3 10 megabyte HD's from the heat in that little bitty box.

> And the CPU cycles were dedicated to getting real work done
> rather than playing games with a mouse (a singularly lousy gaming tool,
> especially with only one button) or drawing cute greyscale (until much
> later) pictures.

Yup. No arguments there.

>Yes, my high-level bosses (1981-1986) made a lot of stupid decisions, two of
> which caused me to bail (only PC compatibles henceforth aside from contract
> obligations, and an order to shave). 

That latter was the straw I'll bet.

> The Z-80 was not a bad decision for
> the first machines.

Half the production of that chip that I have come in contact were brain dead.  
The hex $E5 instruction is supposed to swap the foreground/background register 
set, but it was intermittently flaky, so you never knew if the address you 
wanted was in the front register or not.  And they refused to replace it with 
a fully functioning chip when I found it.  Such screw the customer attitudes 
doom zilog to the footnote in history status just as much as their failed 
attempt to make a 16 bitter.  The 8 bitter, lacking a combined test and long 
branch facility, was always a drane bamaged architecture to me.  RCA's 1802 
got it right, why the heck couldn't zilog?

> But Zilog failed on producing 16-bit CPUs until years
> after they were needed.  In fact, I still use LS-DOS for day to day work
> (AllWrite by ProSoft is my preferred text editor/output formatter -- note
> NOT a "Word Processor") on a Mod 4 because it is flat out the best
> single-user operating system ever compiled.  (OS-9 & descendants are
> multi-user).  I would dearly love to see a Drivewire equivalent for the Mod
> 1/3/4 series (LDOS/LS-DOS, I don't care about TRS-DOS, NewDOS, UltraDOS or
> a few other alternatives that came around).  I've got a great emulator
> (xtrs from Tim Mann), but the drives in my 4p are getting flaky but I like
> the machine.  I can't hope for an emulator of anything in the 2/12/16/6000
> series.  Nobody else is intereste d and I am not a coder at that level, my
> main language is the Bourne shell and its descendants.

Today, sadly I'll plead guilty to that too, its plumb sexy to do it with a 
shell script.  The coco os9 should have had such a shell, sniff...

>Sorry for the late response, but the only folks I was going to miss when I
> left the NYC area (my first wife and her husband -- they introduced me to
> La Esposa back in '92) are leaving first and we've been helping them pack
> (bibliophiles helping bibliophiles pack is harder than any of the labors of
> Herakles) for their move from Brooklyn upstate to St Lawrence County about
> a million miles from here or from where I plan to settle in New Hampshire.

Rotsa ruck. :)

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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