[Coco] Re: Color Computer 3 prototype

[alsplace at pobox.com]

Nick -- the CoCo 3 prototypes have been sitting in storage at 
Microware.  During a recent housecleaning, when everything in the 
'morgue' (room of all the old hardware and such) had to be cleaned out, 
they were set aside for preservation.  I never knew they existed until 
I spoke with Mark Hawkins a year ago when he was stopped by.  He 
commented on the CoCo "prototypes" he'd seen us mention, and said the 
CoCo prototype was still here -- explaining that it was a big board 
kind of thing and not the early production run CoCos that Brother 
Jeremy ended up with.

So, these are the two boards Microware did Super Extended Color Basic 
on -- so unless they worked on it w/o any graphics support initially, 
then wrote the rest when production CoCos with GIMEs came out ... I'd 
think these had to be the real deal.  Also, since SUper Extended 
basically ONLY was the CoCo 3 graphics (and memory handling), I can't 
imagine these would have been of any use to Microware for the BASIC 
project without having the GIME.

Also, another Tandy developer says he had access to one of these for a 
very brief time -- I'll ask and see if he can remember if it had a 
GIME-workalike.

     -- Allen