[Coco] The Tri-Annual CoCo 4 Thread

[Michael Robinson]

On Thu, 2014-02-13 at 14:37 +1100, Mark McDougall wrote:
> On 13/02/2014 12:55 PM, Michael Robinson wrote:
> 
> > Explain to me how a faster modern 6309/6809 successor can be built
> > without introducing: direct memory access, interrupts, memory protection
> > hardware, etcetera?  For a COCO 4 to be popular, really popular, it has
> > to compete with Playstation 3, Wii U, and XBOX.  
> 
> Woah! Hold on. Who said *anything* at all about a Coco4 competing with PS3
> & XBOX??? That's just crazy talk. You do realise that in order to compete
> with these systems, you're looking at whole teams of professional hardware
> and software engineers, and multi-million dollar investment - right!?! Not
> to mention you "require" support of some weird and wacky OS's that
> probably have a user base no bigger than the Coco itself...

The Coco isn't a wacky computer, just an abandoned one.  Need I mention
that the wildly successful Commodore was designed by one man?

> I think you're very much misconstrued the whole 'Coco4' project
> discussions and what we're trying to achieve here (not to mention what can
> realistically be achieved). You're talking about real pie-in-the-sky
> stuff, IMHO of little value to anyone with even an interest in the Coco,
> and has been re-iterated, basically a PC.

No I am not talking about pie-in-the-sky.  A PC has to have a
questionable OS installed to a questionable media device to even be
usable.  That's crap compared to what the COCO was back in the day.
With nothing but a cassette recorder, a color computer can be programmed
and the program can be reloaded in the future.  Color computers don't
boot, hit the power button and they are ready for action.  Modern
computers are dominated by one company, Microsoft, that doesn't do the
best job of designing software to say the least.  Intel is complicit
with Microsoft and should be driven with extreme prejudice out of
business IMHO.  I don't care for nothing is practical concerning the
COCO coming from an Intel employee.  When did it become accepted that a
multitude of computer types is not the future?  The Commodore and Amiga
are dead, the Coco is dead, the Motorola Macintosh is dead...  There
are reduced instruction set computers, I'm thinking Android.  Even Apple
computers these days are Intel computers.  The computer industry does
not belong entirely to Intel despite Intel's size and current dominance.
Where attempts to unseat the WinTel Monopoly have failed in the past, it
is only a matter of time.  Intel's and Microsoft's monopoly are not good
for the industry.  Monopolies never spur innovation.  Innovators have a
very different attitude than, "that will never work."  

A strictly hobbyist approach to developing a COCO 4 hasn't worked and
probably won't work.  The problem is, it has been a long time since the
COCO died and you have to go bigger.  Maybe IBM can help.

> > My older brother who is an electrical engineer says the COCO3 can be
> > cloned easily using Xylinx or Microchip or Texas Instruments processors.
> 
> I'm really not sure what this statement has to do with the specifications
> you throw about. It's also old news, and has also been done before. And,
> FTR, I *am* an electronics design engineer; one that has worked on designs
> for modern intel base-boards and PCI & PCIe boards so you might say I know
> a little about modern computer design too...

Are you calling me a liar?  That's what it sounds like to me.  This
response from an engineer supposedly should be more respectful than
this.  I am talking about these programmable embedded processors as
a starting, not a finishing point.