[Coco] TRS-80 Color Computer: Wikipedia Article

[Lothan]

Don't forget that Tandy did not want the Color Computer to compete with the 
Model III and IV because Radio Shack considered those "business class" 
computers even though they were inferior in many ways. The real 
differentiator in those early days was that Radio Shack had sunk a ton of 
money into business applications for the Model III and IV and was heavily 
promoting those to small businesses and promoted the Color Computer 
exclusively to the education/home hobbyist/gaming market.

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From: <farna at att.net>
Sent: Monday, November 30, 2009 11:32 AM
To: <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Subject: Re: [Coco] TRS-80 Color Computer: Wikipedia Article

> That's a perfectly good argument James. Though the 6800 was more 
> comparable to the 6502, it was used in a machine (the CoCo) that was in 
> direct competition with 6502 based machines though. Drove Tandy's cost up, 
> but made for a comutationally much more powerful machine. In the end that 
> really didn't matter -- marketing did. If Tandy had done more with the 
> CoCo it would have been a lot more popular, but they wanted to restrict it 
> to game/beginner machine status so it wouldn't compete with their 1000 
> 8080 based series. I think it could have supported a bit higher price than 
> the other home computers had the power been exploited, and it probably 
> wouldn't have competed with the MS-DOS based boxes that much simply 
> because it didn't run MS-DOS! They should have paired the CoCo as a 
> workstation with their 68K Unix machines (or whatever the Tandy flavor of 
> Unix was), but then the Tandy 68K boxes didn't fair all that well either. 
> Heck, OS-9/68K might have been better for those!
>
>
> -------------
> Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:30:06 -0500
> From: jdaggett at gate.net
>
> I wont argue that Motorola pricing was higher. I would argue that the 
> MC6800
> pricing would
> be a better comparison to the 6502 rather than the MC6809. The 6800 and 
> 6502
> have similar
> function and instruction sets. By 1981 the 6502 and 6800 were very similar 
> in
> pricing while
> the 6809, a much more pwerful processor, was definitely higher in price. A 
> more
> comparable
> chip to compare the MC6809 to was the 8080A chip. That was the chip and 
> the
> market that it
> originally competed against.
>
>
> --
> Frank Swygert
> Publisher, "American Motors Cars"
> Magazine (AMC)
> For all AMC enthusiasts
> http://farna.home.att.net/AMC.html
> (free download available!)
>
>
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