[Coco] 8 bitter coming home

[gene heskett]

On Monday, November 28, 2011 01:09:37 AM Timothy Keith did opine:

> 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
> 
Welcome back Tim.  And amazingly I had one of those HL-620 pickups in the 
late '70's.  Great little truck.  Despite its seat being a medieval  
torture rack, you could get in it and go 1100 miles with only gas etc stops 
and still be 100% functional at the other end of the trip.

Just be sure the air cleaner insert actually fits, I found out the hard way 
that the genuine Datsun paper cartridge was about 1/8" too short to be 
properly sealed, I towed it behind a motor home from N. Cal to S.D. to go 
deer hunting, over quite a bit of dirt road coming across Nevada which 
filled the air cleaner & covered the engine in fine dirt.  When I started 
it up in S.D. to run into Rapid City for some eats, it sucked all that dirt 
into the engine and wiped out the rings in about 10 seconds of firey 
particles blowing out the exhaust.  OTOH, it had about 140k miles on it by 
then so it really didn't owe me much.  I traded it somewhere along the line 
rather than tow it back to Redding where I was the ACE at KRCR-tv at the 
time.

We apparently come in all ages although there is a decidedly older 
contingent here, I am 77 but not the oldest by at least a decade.

> --
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> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco


Cheers, Gene
-- 
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-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene>
"...if the church put in half the time on covetousness that it does on 
lust,
 this would be a better world."  - Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days"