[Coco] CoCo Video Player

[Nick Marentes]

It is truly amazing what can be achieved with a 2Mhz (1.89Mhz) CoCo3.

Modern computers run in the Gigahertz. My single core Pentium 4 
four-year-old PC runs at 3.2Ghz and modern PC's have  multi-core 
processors and a minimum of 4Gig of RAM and excellerated graphics with 
their own GPU processors onboard.

But the end of the day, are they *that* fast. I mean, is a 3Ghz PC 
exactly 1500 times faster than our trusty CoCo3?

Not in a long shot!

There's more to the CPU speed. There is a lot of inefficiency in the 
modern designs. The biggest culpruit is the OS itself. Now, of course 
the modern OS's are so much more capable and do so much for things but I 
wish we didn't have to carry all that bloat, all those thousand lines of 
code just to make the machine ready to run the application you want to run.

Where is the good old lean and mean OS written in machine  language to 
truly use the speed that modern machines are capable of.

There are some third part "hobby" OS's written for the PC in 100% 
assembly language.

http://www.menuetos.net/   is an example of one that contains many of 
the assentials for an OS including a GUI written completely in assembly 
language, fits on floppy disk and is blindingly fast. Proof that the 
bloat of a modern OS written in a high level language comes with a hefty 
speed penalty. A penalty which isn't totally apparent on a modern fast 
machine which tends to hide most of the loss but imagine what we *could* 
have and what we are missing out on.

That's what was good about OS-9 (NitrOS9), lean and mean and could be 
configured to include just the parts you need.

Or the iPad, harking backto the days when you turn on the computer and 
you are greeted with the application menu almost instantly.

Bring back the good old days....

Nick Marentes