[Coco] Color computer 2 educational version

[Bill Loguidice]

I'm frankly amazed that your school SWITCHED to CoCo's over Apple II's. I
can only think that they had a very limited number of Apple II's and to do
a mass buy the numbers worked out better in the CoCo's favor for whatever
reason. I mean, there were lots of things I didn't like about the Apple II
(although my appreciation for it has grown by leaps and bounds after the
80s), but in terms of educational-centric software, it was second-to-none.

Of course, now that I'm reading over your post, I'm thinking that maybe you
meant (and I misunderstood) that when you went to high school, they had
CoCo's instead of Apple II's. In other words, Apple II's weren't replaced,
they were just never there in the first place.

In my school system, there were only a handful of Apple II's out and about.
We were a Tandy-centric school system. In Junior High, in our computer labs
(programming classes), we had Tandy Model III's and 4's, and then Tandy
Model 1000's. I enjoyed both platforms a great deal, and certainly my use
of the III/4's made me fall-in-love with all-in-one computers, which, to
me, looked like how a computer "should" look.

My first real exposure to a CoCo outside of Radio Shack-centered stuff
(catalogs, stores, commercials, etc.) was my first job at 16, where I
worked at a "five and dime" store (sort of a smaller K-Mart). One of the
managers ran the bookkeeping on a CoCo 2 and tape deck of all things!

-Bill

========================================================
Bill Loguidice, Managing Director; Armchair Arcade, Inc.
<http://www.armchairarcade.com>
========================================================
Authored Books
<http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Loguidice/e/B001U7W3YS/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_1> and
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in touch <http://about.me/billloguidice>
========================================================

On Tue, Apr 4, 2017 at 10:43 AM, Steve Strowbridge <ogsteviestrow at gmail.com>
wrote:

> That is Wicked Cool!
>
> My Junior High was all Apple II when I was there, but when I got to high
> school, they switched over to CoCos.
> I was able to go back and visit and act as the CoCo consultant, and show
> them all the cool things I was doing, what some of the awesome games and
> music were like, and I remember showing off this really cool game in the
> Rainbow that was in BASIC, but had 4 panels of assembly language scrolling
> in it, and the teachers and the class were all just blown away.
>
> It was nice to see the same pompous and elitist teachers who were all up
> Apple's ass eat crow, if even for a day :)
>
> I never understood why people would get so high and might on the Apple
> being such a good computer, when the average kid really couldn't do
> anything with it themselves, and the things I could do in BASIC on my CoCo
> ran circles around AppleSoft BASIC.
>
> I felt then, and I do now, that it doesn't matter what the machine is, it
> really matters on what you can do with it, and the CoCo literally empowered
> me, I felt pretty invincible when it came to what I could do in BASIC,
> which is embarrassing at this point :)
>
>
> Steve Strowbridge, aka
> The Original Gamer Stevie Strow
> http://ogsteviestrow.com
> ogsteviestrow at gmail.com