[Coco]: Tandy's biggest mistakes thread

[John Guin]

Hello all,

I simply wanted to spin off the thread for Tandy's biggest mistakes from the
email thread about the Coco 4, and create a whole new thread for armchair
quarterbacking (25-15 years after the fact, no less).

Anyhow, had I been running the Radio Shack show, here's what I would have
done differently:

1.  Third party software, books and magazines in Radio Shack.  This easily
helped Commodore sell 10 million+ machines, and limited the color computer
to <<<about 1.3 million, best estimate?  Anyone know?  I think I've asked
this before...>>>
This first point is easily #1 in my book, and these other items are FAR less
important.

2.  Support for lower case letters and more than 32 characters per line.
This really limited the word processing capability, and made the machine
compare poorly to the C64 and others (except the VIC, of course).  On the
flip side, setting the default to 32 was a great idea so the early adopters
who wanted to hook this thing up to an older TV could get a decent picture.

3.  The weird 32K limit for BASIC.  I consider this the equivalent of the
640K limit on DOS, and there was really no reason for it.  You could
"re-org" the ROMs around and get about 40K available for BASIC anyhow, so
this should have been the default.  Again, the C64 powered up with ~39K
free, and the COCO should have done the same.

4.  Better keyboard from day one.  They finally fixed this with the Coco 2,
but I don't understand why they didn't re-use the Model 1 keyboard or
something similar.  

5.  Over-reliance on the 6809 to do everything.  Fortunately, it could do a
whole lot, but having it bogged down with sound, graphics (no sprites) and
everything else seemed to "waste" that power on tasks that could have been
done with a different chip.


Anyway, thanks for letting me vent!

John