[Coco] The COCO vs The Apple II

[Nick Marentes]

On 10/01/2015 6:11 PM, Tony Cappellini wrote:
> How did the Apple II being having such a primitive basic, DOS, & CPU outsell
> and be so much more popular than the Coco? The Apple II was approximately
> 3-4 times the cost of the Coco.
>
>

The Apple targeted a more "mature" market. It looked more like a "real" 
computer (it had a real keyboard and connected to a monitor) and 
hardware folks loved the 6 expansion slots, all internal to the machine 
yet hidden inside to preserve the professional looks.

The Apple had a disk drive available (you pretty well had to have one) 
and Visicalc was released. An 80 column card was available for business use.

The CoCo had the chiclet keyboard. It was smaller with no expamsion 
slots except for the cartridge slot. It was marketed by Tandy as a home 
computer. It had a glorious 32x16 VDG screen in green on a TV set.

No Visicalc or real business programs so it was not a business computer.

We had OS-9 Level 1 but with no "killer ap" to lure the outside world, 
is still even unknown today to people outside of the CoCo circle.

We had a great Extended Basic and a 6809 CPU but not everyone was a 
programmer... they wanted great games and the Apple had lots of the 
leading games at the time.

I'm actually surprised the CoCo got anywhere at all, a testament to 
having such a large distribution channel via Radio Shack and also the 
Rainbow magazine.

I know for me, if it weren't for those 2 factors, I would have gone 
elsewhere. Radio Shack finally got me interested with the CoCo3...if 
only they did it 2 years earlier.

Nick