[Coco] 8 bitter coming home

[Timothy Keith]

I joined the mailing list today.  I have owned a Coco from 1980, have
3 or 4 of them, but I have not used them for years.   I then enjoyed
the Coco for its technical elegance and simplicity, especially the
6809.  I played some Coco games, but really I liked this little
machine for clean design.  I am not much of a gamer.   My father
worked for Motorola for almost 40 years as a hardware technician, he
can repair any hardware it seems, a skill I wish that I had.  I have
worked with Unix since '83, OS-9 always appealed to me, not so much a
fan of BASIC.   The Coco was a natural choice for me, but as a poor
college student I couldn't afford much than the base system. Soon
after the Coco3 was released I picked up  mine at the Tandy retail
store in Fort Worth headquarters, the CM8 and Multi-pak, got the Cloud
9 512K upgrade several years ago, have several sets of floppy drives.

I recognize some names I see here from the Rainbow and Hot Coco from a
time before I knew about the Internet.  I'll mostly be lurking, there
is lots of talent here.  Coco 4, stock gray boxes, modded systems,
they're all okay with me, as are any of the retro home micro systems.
I'm not a Ford or a Chevy guy, I like them all, but I'd like to do
some assembler just for the joy of the machine.   I often wonder, how
might a contemporary desktop PC perform if it had a minimal OS like
NitrOS-9?  Boy, I'd bet that would really fly!  The Intel assembly
language is not the hoary brain teaser that it was 25 years ago. I
recall how 16 bit Intel was poked fun of then, but it sure has matured
since then. Tiny, small, medium, far etc.

Today I came across the name and projects of Jeri Ellsworth, an
8-bitter that's done a lot for the C-64.  There are also several very
capable 8 bitters on this list. I'm hoping to learn some things here.
A few weeks ago I got a Datsun 620 pickup, I like simple things. Going
small and slow is still okay with me. I want to learn about hardware
mods.   I'm almost a newbie again.

Tim