[Coco] Midwest VCF

[gene heskett]

On Tuesday, September 27, 2011 04:51:01 PM RJRTTY at aol.com did opine:

> In a message dated 9/27/2011 12:45:44 P.M.  Eastern Daylight Time,
> 
> gheskett at wdtv.com writes:
> > Gene,
> > 
> >  Do you still have the Elf?
> >
> >I wish, but no Mark, there was  only one purchased, based on a
> 
> presentation
> 
> >I did to the GM at KRCR, one  that I saw as a problem that was hurting
> >our commercial  production.  I didn't even get to where I was talked
> >out
> 
> before
> 
> >Dick said lets do it.  I guess I must have made a good case out of 
> >what
> 
> was
> 
> >200% blue sky at the time
> 
> I hate guys like you two.  :)
> 
> You were ahead of the curve before the coco came out.
> I had to start flat footed with the coco1 .   bought the
> EDTASM cartridge and the world changed.....
> 
> Roy
 
NP, Roy, and hate is a wasted emotion for something like this.  We all had 
to have our eureka moment, and if that moment hasn't hit, you sure aren't 
going to be on this list, so its safe to say 'we' ;-)

You might say I had 3 actually because my next project at a small town ma & 
pa radio station was an automatic transmitter control where I designed & 
built everything but a pair of Z80 based Micro-Professor boards.  But after 
about a years coding and hardware building in my spare time, I came to the 
conclusion that the Z80 world was a heck of a good place to be _from_.  And 
never went back, that cpu was as dane bramaged as the 6502 IMO.  It turned 
out I was fighting with buggy silicon, and zilog would not replace it since 
it took me 6 months past the original 90 day warranty to determine it was 
flaky.  The $EB command byte was supposed to swap the foreground and 
background register sets, but it only worked about 95% of the time.  

Sorry Zilog, but none of your products was ever again considered for any 
projects I dreamed about.  Besides, the 6x09 is easily 10x smarter than 
your Z80, so there.  Zilog's loss maybe, certainly not mine.
 
When I finally figured out what was so different as to be magic about the 
TI9900 cpu, it was no longer a contender for new designs, primarily because 
the price of a ticket to get into that arena was a 4 digit figure and the 
first digit wasn't a 1.  The TI could have been a good chip, but TI wanted 
ALL the money up front rather than a 50 cents each commission on 50 million 
of them.  Shrug.  I still have a TI99/4a though, but its not been powered 
in years.  It did work the last time though.

Cheers, gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
A soft drink turneth away company.