[Coco] Deskmate 3 article link

[Willard Goosey]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 11:04:55PM -0400, RJRTTY at aol.com wrote:

> Sometimes I wonder why Tandy even bothered with the coco and coco3.

Or, at least, why it was the machine it was.  I can see wanting to
cash in on the color-TV-using low-end 8-bit market, but why did a Z80
house like Tandy/Radio Shack suddenly put out a 6809 machine?  (I'm
very glad they did, but it still seems strange!)  A color version of
the Model I/III would have been more expected.

Then again, they probably didn't want to go to their fellow Texan
competition for the 9928, hacking a 6845 to do color is just that, a
hack, the Z80/6847 combo doesn't seem to work very well(*), there's no
way they could license the VICII, and they sure weren't going to
design their own video chip.  So, what else could they do?

By the time the CoCo 3 rolled around, well, it could compete fairly
evenly with the Tandy 1000, and that just wasn't allowed. :-(

(*)Judging by that wierd Japanese machine that was discussed here a
few years ago.
>  
> Why make the effort in the first place?

Money, of course.  The FCC killed the Model 1, the Model II was a
"serious business machine" and the Model III was expensive.

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
I search my heart and find Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.
  -- R.E. Howard