[Coco] [Color Computer] YouTube - 1981 primitive Internet report on KRON (CoCo pictured in the ba

[wdg3rd at comcast.net]

----- "James Diffendaffer" <jdiffendaffer at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- In ColorComputer at yahoogroups.com, shadow at ... wrote:
> >
> > On 30 Jan 2009 at 5:32, James Diffendaffer wrote:
> > 
> > > Very cool.  I'm pretty sure it's actually one of Tandy's early data
> > > terminals based on the CoCo hardware like AgNet used.  You can see
> the
> > > LED in the RAM button at the start of the interview with David
> Cole.
> > 
> > I missed the link. But that sounds like the old Vidtex terminal. I 
> > used to have one (complete with the fake leather carrying case.
> > 
> > Don't recall what happened to it.
> >  
> From: "James Diffendaffer" <jdiffendaffer at yahoo.com>
> I was replying to the CoCo mailing list.

So was Shadow.  The Vidtex terminal looked exactly like a Color Computer One, except for an LED where the RAM button should be.  It booted into the same program you would if a Vidtex cartridge was plugged into a CoCo.  There was a phone jack where the CoCo's serial DIN would be (same case cutout) so I assume a circuit related to the Modem-1 was inside, but I never took one apart or saw one taken apart by one of the techs I worked with.  The Vidtex terminal was announced the same day as the Color Computer, the TRS-80 Model 3 and the Pocket Computer One.  It was not a very popular product, and I don't recall any sold out of any RSCC I worked in.  (Eventually they vanished from the stockrooms -- there must be a secret landfill, probably under that new football stadiom between Fort Worth and Dallas).

The AgNet terminal was a Vidtex terminal with a different label.  Never saw one in person (Los Angeles was no longer an agricultural powerhouse by the 1980s, in fact the orange groves of my early childhood had been mostly developed into housing before I first left in 1970).  (Yeah, I left LA at 15 for New Hampshire, then went back to LA in 1981 -- been stuck in New Jersey 17 years now, and want to go back to New Hampshire, I'll probably never set foot in California again unless that warrant catches up with me, but I'm pretty sure they gave up).
-- 
Ward Griffiths        wdg3rd at comcast.net

<home.comcast.net/~wdg3rd>
(page has stale links and resume is not up to date as I'm employed at a dead end job with a health plan and if I quit for a short-lived high-pay consulting gig, La Esposa will make me homeless before the first check arrives)