[Coco] CoCo Hard Drive History

[Robert Gault]

Mark J. Blair wrote:
> I recently got an OS-9 Level 2 package for the CoCo 3. This is my first time experimenting with OS-9. I may upgrade to NitrOS-9 someday, but I'm going to get familiar with this original OS-9 with its matching manual first.
>
> The manual makes several mentions of hard drives. Were there any commercially supported hard drive packages for the CoCo back when it was in production, or are these mentions of hard drive support leakage from other OS-9 distributions, or referring to something that folks were expected to home-brew, etc.? I do not recall ever seeing a hard drive package for the CoCo back then, but I quit paying much attention to anything CoCo-related around 1985 or so.
>

Tandy sold a hard drive for the Coco but the first really good system was sold 
by Ken-Ton. These were scsi hard drives and initially used an ASDAPTEC 4000A 
board as a controller. I've a Tandon TM252 that was part of such a system.
The disk interface/controller that Ken-Ton sold was able to talk to scsi drives 
directly and I've a second drive, Seagate ST296N on the system.

The software (Disk Basic) supplied with this system by RGB Computer Systems was 
RGBDOS. It could be configured for several types of hard drives not just scsi. I 
modified RGBDOS so it could be used with Coco emulators such as the JVC and 
MESS. It was used with my permission in the VCC emulator.
RGBDOS was bought by Cloud-9 and a revised version is sold as HDB-DOS.

Robert