[Coco] Anyone else collect other old computers/game consoles beside the Coco?

[gene heskett]

On Saturday, August 27, 2011 10:59:30 AM Joel Ewy did opine:

> On 08/27/2011 05:16 AM, Mark Marlette wrote:
> > Joel,
> > 
> > VERY cool machine and history for sure.
> > 
> > I have the TC-9 schematics here somewhere and the mods I made to two
> > TC-9s to stabilize the machine. Design flaws, IMHO. All neat though.
> > 
> > I'll take a look around, see what I can find and package up. Remind me
> > if this gets too far out. Couple weeks?
> 
> Oh, that'd be cool!
> 
> > I met David Graham as well at the fest but never purchased one then.
> > Got one at one of the CoCoFest auctions. Carl Kreider was at this
> > past years fest, now the AT306/WCP306 was a cool machine. We had some
> > great conversations on that machine, Karl is truly at talented
> > Engineer, hardware, software, he got it. Sigh....the memories!!!
> 
> Yeah.  It seemed like there was a real opportunity for a while for
> motivated people to develop OS-9 drivers for all kinds of ISA bus
> hardware for the AT306 / MM/1b / PT-68K.  But I guess the OS-9/68K
> market was too fragmented.
> 
> JCE

I don't think that was it at all Joel.  The only place to get a legal copy 
of os9-68k was from Prof. Digby Tarvan, whom I have had correspondence with 
just in the last 3 or 4 years.  He said he lost his shirt on it at $600+ a 
copy, and did not really push it since it had no gui at all.  I had at one 
point, considered putting it on my amiga, but with no gui, and no support 
for the 68040 card and its 64 megs of dram, that was a deal killer for me.

The bottom line I think was that Microware saw it as a controller type of 
program and never put any more effort into it that it took to make it run 
traffic lights.  Zero interest in attempting to compete with amigados was 
what killed os9-68k.  They were probably correct, given that the only real 
programming languages for the amiga were SAS-C, and the Bill Hawes written 
ARexx they sold, and for all the sales, Bill never saw a penny of it.  Not 
one, that is how honest the commie people were.

As a language, it was actually a huge superset of Rexx/Regina, so much so 
that I was never able to make Rexx/Regina execute any of the code Jim Hines 
and I wrote for the amiga, including a workalike to cron we called EzCron.
The system call hooks that were the star of ARexx programming are totally 
missing from Rexx/Regina, reducing it to far less capability than a bash 
script.

In retrospect, Bill should have sold it independently for $200 or more, it 
was capable of making the amiga do anything a computer could do.  It was 
the best documented programming language since the original os9 we could 
buy from Tandy. Its one major bug, in its library, was rather exasperatedly 
fixed by Joanne Dow close to 20 years ago, long after Bill had washed his 
hands.

As for DW on a 68k board, I have not checked, but since I expect the m68k 
versions of linux, uclib equipt because most of those machines do not have 
a memory manager chip at all, might be able to build java, at which point 
DW4 written in java might accidentally work.  I think it is something that 
should be investigated, and will if and when I can get an external PSU 
cobbled up for the A4k/060 machine I brought home from the tv station a 
year ago.  Maybe this winter when the garage workshop has been commandeered 
by Dee & the Toyota.  Right now its mid-project, making seating/storage 
benches to go around a neighbors nearly 10 foot long dining room table. ;-)

Cheers, gene
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