[Coco] Re: : Tandy's biggest mistakes thread

[RJRTTY at aol.com]

In a message dated 4/20/05 6:56:28 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
yahoo at dvdplayersonly.com writes:

<<  Later, I bought a 4k coco($400). It was pretty cool!
  Then I ordered the tech manual for it from RS and discovered it was exactly
 the same as the Motorola design except for a small difference in an AND
 gate(IIRC). >>


   I think one major reason RS didn't "screw-up" the design of the
coco1 was because they used the standard Motorola configuration.

All they had to do was add the ADC for joystik, sound and cassette
support.
     Some here have lamented on the overuse of the 6809 for
software I/O support like the bit banger and sound but I think
doing it that way kept the coco1 affordable and usefull.
If you needed hardware based solutions to I/O there
were aftermarket options available like the RS232 pak,
the PBJ wordpak 80 col. card and ORc 90 sound pak.    It was there
if you wanted it but not nescessary if you couldn't afford it.
Throw in OS9 and all the other choices available and you had
the perfect machine for the early 80's... in my totally biased
opinion. :)))

Roy