[Coco] New CoCo Ideas

[Robert Emery]

--- David Gacke <dgacke at ektarion.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I've been thinking about all this building new CoCo equipment that is
> being discussed off and on for awhile now, and I really agree with some
> of the points mentioned that make the CoCo stand out from the rest.
> 
> The things that I think make the CoCo unique are:
> 
> 1. The simplicity of operation - You turn it on, it works!
> 
> 2. It's a great experimentation platform. It's good for building things
> and attaching them to the system bus with great ease.
> 
> 3. It had for its day an excellent version of BASIC built in. Whether
> you like Microsoft or not, you have admit this point. It was far
> superior to any other platform of the time's version. 
> 
> 4. It had a great CPU for its time as well. The instruction set was very
> powerful compared to similar 8 bit machines.
> 
> 5. Its disk drives were very fast, as fast as the Atari's and WAY faster
> than the Commodore 64's.
 

Heck, the cassette was faster than C64 disks! And the C64 cassette was barely
faster than typing it in! ;-b

I still love programming in BASIC, it's the instant results... no wait for
compilation or remembering totally bizarre programming syntax. With Roger's
Portal-9, I plan to get more into assembler (finally) and really see what I can
do with my gui tools.

I agree about the MS basic and am still surprised at how well it handles the
gui tasks I'm using it for, and the ease of tweaking it just a little to get a
big boost is pretty cool too. 

I think the bottom line is that compared to todays systems,it's relatively easy
to give yourself a "sense of accomplishment" with a CoCo straight out of the
box... something that PC or Mac programmers will end up spending hundreds of
additional dollars to accomplish, just to buy a language SDK, then they'll need
books and/or training classes to be able to actually use the mess. Just my
$.02. 

Bob Emery
http://www.geocities.com/theother_bob


	
		
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