[Coco] The COCO vs The Apple II

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday, January 11, 2015 08:28:54 AM Mark McDougall did opine
And Gene did reply:
> On 10/01/2015 7:11 PM, Tony Cappellini wrote:
> > I'm having fun though, learning all of this, but it begs the
> > question..
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> Heh, this thread has the potential to be longer than the old Coco4
> thread...

And I have to put in my $0.02.  ;)
 
> As others have noted, it's all about timing, advertising budgets,
> software support and brand loyalty. Beyond that, capabilities do come
> into it at some point.
> 
> My father opted for a TRS-80 Model I so I was "married" to Tandy for
> many many years. I found the hires Apple II graphics enviable but to
> me, the gameplay of the TRS-80 titles were superior to Apple titles.
> 
> Eventually my father got sick of me using his Model I and he bought me
> a Coco. Although I was well versed in Z80 by then, I never really
> learned 6809 and after playing games on it for a few years my father
> eventually bought me a "serious" computer to study Computer Science -
> A TRS-80 Model 4P! That got me through 4 years of uni, including a
> ray tracing assignment!!! :O
> 
> I've since dabbled in 6809 and more recently ported Apple II Lode
> Runner (6502) to the Coco 3 - that was a real eye-opener! Ever the
> Z80 fan boy, I've been converted to 6809 since that exercise and
> despite its limitations, even manage to recognise the 6502's
> strengths (though still not on par with Z80 IMHO).

That is a matter of personal prefs I think.  Having learned machine code 
level programming by looking it up in the makers programmer manual, and 
entering the code I wanted to run via a hex monitor, first on the RCA 
1802, then on the Z-80, with a foray into TI-9900 stuff that wasn't too 
successful (but the first 2 were) before finally discovering the 6809 and 
its assembler that came with os9 level 1.00.00, that was indeed a breath 
of fresh air.  The Z-80's I had, a pair, one of them was defective and 
zilog would not replace it. It would only execute the $EB instruction 
about 75% of the time. And to top that off, there was NO tally bit to 
check as to which set of registers it was using.  So my impression of the 
Z-80 will be forever flawed by that experience.  Throw in the lack of any 
facility to do position independent coding on the Z-80 was my biggest 
disappointment, as was its conditional jump limit of an 8 bit jump.  The 
next result of that being that I had to reserve about $40 bytes at the 
end of each "page" of memory to hold the long jumps needed to get my job 
done, which in this case was a transmitter automatic system.  All that 
kludging around to make a nominally 6K of eprom system do its thing 
soured me on the Z-80 forever.  It was to me, a processor looking for a 
job it could do well while sleeping on the job. I did look at the 6502 & 
friends, but the lack of registers meant you spent more time fanning the 
stack to cool it than in actually doing the job.
 
> Aside from a TRS-80 Model I, 4P, Coco 2 & 3, these days I also own an
> Apple IIe, IIGS, Commodore VIC20 & C64, and Atari 130XE 8-bit
> computers - amongst others. And knowing a lot more about them now, I
> can appreciate their strengths and weaknesses and give a nod to the
> fan boys of the day.
> 
> But for me it'll come down to nostalgia and what I knew growing up. I
> still think the TRS-80 held its own in the day, despite the lack of
> hires or colour graphics, or any sound to speak of. The Coco 3 was
> too little, too late and could have been a lot more successful under
> different circumstances.
> 
More support from the shack would have been nice, and so would CS 
decoding down to the the 4 byte block.  Stopping at $20 bytes per decoded 
CS was criminal. 

Process shrinks applied to the 6809 or 6309, could by today, have given 
us a 400MHz cpu, but that never happened.

I'll get me coat, and I know where the door is... :)

> Regards,

Cheers, Gene Heskett
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