[Coco] Today, Boisy is the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Tue Nov 20 14:12:22 EST 2012

On Tuesday 20 November 2012 14:10:27 John Donaldson did opine:

> Gene,
>     Very interesting history. Mine is not so romantic if you consider
> that I am presently living in the Twilight Zone.
> Consider this.
> 
> June 1999
> 
> I land a job with Johnson and Johnson in Roanoke, VA
> I move to Roanoke in June, 1999. The wife stays in Houston, TX because
> we don't want to leave the house empty.
> One week after I moved, my older sister's husband (brother-in-law)
> suddenly dies and I go back for that.
> In Nov. 1999, my boss decides to carve up the duties of the pilot
> assembly line and the senior software engineers become
> team leaders for each section of the pilot assembly line.
> I spend Thanksgiving in Roanoke.
> I go back to Houston, TX for the week of Christmas.
> Then house sells in January of the next year (2000) and wife and babies
> (cats) move to Roanoke.
> 
> 
> Now fast forward thirteen (13) years (2012)
> 
> June 2012
> 
> I land a job with General Dynamics in Fairfax, VA
> I move to Fairfax in June 2012. The wife stays in Dallas, TX because we
> don't want to leave the house empty.
> One week after I moved my middle sister looses her battle with Lung
> cancer and passes and I go back for that.
> In Nov 2012 (a week ago) my boss decides that the product that I am
> supporting needs to be overhauled, so makes me
> team leader of the project overhaul.
> I will spend Thanksgiving here in Fairfax, VA
> I will be going back to Dallas for a week at Christmas.
> So I expect the house will sell in January of next year (2013) and wife
> and babies (cats) will move here to Fairfax.
> 
> So I am either living in the Twilight Zone or I'm in a thirteen (13)
> year Time Loop.
> 
> John Donaldson
> 
> 
> ________________________________
> From: Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com>
> To: coco at maltedmedia.com
> Sent: Tue, November 20, 2012 11:10:36 AM
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Today, Boisy is the Answer to Life, the Universe,
> and Everything.
> 
> On Tuesday 20 November 2012 09:52:26 Sean did opine:
> > That was an amazing history to type out in just over an hour for a '78
> > year old'!
> > My dad passed at 71 last year and I don't think I've ever seen an
> > e-mail longer than three lines from him.  Of course I had to build all
> > his computers and he would never ever use his credit cards 'on the
> > internet'
> > 
> > Though his computer skills were horrible, he was the one who started
> > me on the computer. He was given a Timex Sinclair 1000, and when I was
> > instructed never to touch it, he said he came back home to me having
> > some amazing graphics of a waving flag running when I was 6 or 7 (I
> > must have typed it from a magazine)  I have no memory of that
> > happening.  But it was enough to get me a CoCo.
> 
> Hey it worked!  And I'm glad he got you a coco, cuz while the TS-1000
> was cheap, the diff in the brains was amazing.  I bought my kids a 1000
> at the time, along with the 16k memory expansion, but it only took them
> a week to total the enter key, so the whole thing wound up in a sloped
> panel box with some sort of a real keyboard, a TI99 I think, mounted in
> the box.
> 
> But at the time, I had embarked on a helper tool for production at KRCR
> in '78, using a Cosmac Elf kit, which had an RCA 1802 cpu in it, one of
> the more unusual architectures extant at the time, and the code I wrote
> & the hardware I built to interface with the then new 3/4" U-Matic
> machines of the day, ran for about 15 years doing its job at KRCR, long
> after I'd saddled up & got the heck out of Kalifornia for the last time
> in '82, eventually winding up in late '84 as the CE at the local CBS
> affiliate & trying to blend in with the WV folks, picking up some
> accent along the way. After about 2 years here, I came to the
> conclusion that I had found my home, so I caught an old maid school
> teacher (or she caught me) & married her 22 years ago.  I've put down
> roots I guess you could say.
> 
> I'm sorry to say that I didn't discover the coco before the 2nd took the
> kids & went back to Nebraska about 1.5 years later.
> 
> I needed something for my office at the tv station so I yard sale'd a
> couple old grey ghosts, expanding them to 64k so they could run os9, and
> the rest is history.  And I still have both of them.
> 
> I wrote some more stuff for the Z-80 in about '81, but came to the
> conclusion that it was the most drain bamaged cpu around.  Some faster
> than the RCA 1802 I started with, but far less capable.  When I grasped
> the concept of position independent code the 6809 could do, the
> floodgates opened.  It couldn't change contexts as fast as the TI-9900
> could, but it certainly was fast enough for the girls I go with &
> generally still is.  I would have liked to have gotten to know the
> TI-9900 better, but TI had real access to it locked up behind some
> pretty expensive hardware as I never saw a PEB offered for less than
> $400, which was the first step only, you could easily put $3000 into
> that box.
> 
> Almost anything you could want for a coco, was both reasonably priced,
> and capable of working with commodity parts.  My first HD was an
> ST-238r Seagate used with a B&B black sandwich that could not reliably
> read a sector of the FAT with a 44 magmun stuck in one ear, so I
> learned a lot about repairing file structure with that combo.  That was
> on a coco2 at the time at home.  But I bought one of the gold colored
> stamped B&B kits for my office machine a few months later, it was a
> coco3 by then, and put a 10 meg and a 20 meg dual drive setup on it.  I
> still have that whole kit, desk and all.
> 
> And that B&B kit, slow as it was, never dropped a single bit that I'm
> aware of.  I tried to power up the drive cage about 3 years ago & had
> to give the cage a whack on the corner to get those old Tandon drives
> started, but both then spun up, squeaking ground springs on the ends of
> the spindles and all.
> 
> That is the machine I used to write the edisk software for the coco2
> that did that job for the production video switcher, making level 1
> boot disks on it while running level 2 on the coco3.  That coco2 was
> doing a job, with english language filenames for the operators instead
> of 2 digit code numbers, and 4x faster than Grass Valley Groups own
> $20,000 accessory for that switcher could do it.  And both had the same
> 6809 processor in them. It did that job till that switcher was
> replaced, about 14 years.  How is that for code longevity?  In the pc
> world, 14 years is a couple of eons.
> 
> But for the coco, its just getting started.  Look at what we've done,
> with the help of about 5 or 6 very talented people, just in the last 4
> to 5 years.
> 
> But now a challenge: Its time for yet another drive interface to be
> designed as the drives that fit and work with the ones we have, are
> going extinct.  IDE/ATAPI was killed by SATA, and scsi tried to grow
> into wider busses for more speed, but that also meant 10k & 15k spindle
> speeds and gigahertz+ head drivers with a working life under 6 months
> because you could fry eggs on them.  We need a sata interface now,
> capable of handling at least 2 drives for backup purposes.  Mark? 
> Darren?
> 
> There is lots of life left in this now 30 year old machine.
> 
> And I've rambled on for way too long, blowing my own horn at that.
> 
> Cheers, Gene

I vote for the time loop, John, but 13 isn't supposed to be a lucky number.  
I can see why there is a certain concern.  Best of luck, beat the odds and 
all that. ;-)

Cheers, Gene
-- 
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