[Coco] So, would you like a little Internet with your CoCo?

[Steve Bjork]

I can understand the appeal of the Internet. From email to web pages and 
the latest fads like Twitter, it would be great for the Color Computer 
to have a piece of the action. For myself, I go nuts when the Internet 
is down at my office. Without access to all the information on the World 
Wide Web it feels like my computer is still turned off.

The Color Computer is based on 30 years old technology and computers 
have grown a bit since then. The new computer that I’m designing is 
54,000 times faster than my 23-year-old CoCo 3 system.

The Internet has gown with the power of our computer systems. Gone are 
the simple text pages that the CoCo could handle. The entry page of 
CoCo3.com is almost 500,000 bytes when you include the HTML, Graphics, 
CSS and Javascript data it takes to build it. A far cry from a bit more 
than a decade ago when most web pages took just a few hundred bytes. 
That’s why I’ve posted messages that the CoCo cannot handle most modern 
web pages.

We can’t turn the whole Internet back round to those simple days but we 
can take a lesson from mobile phones. They also had real problems 
rendering those big web pages on underpowered devices with small 
screens. They got around their problems by making their own version of 
the web by creating their own standards and so can we for the CoCo.

Their “WAP” standard for mobile devices was design for a low speed CPU 
in the first smart Cell phones. These devices also have small screen 
with limited color. Sounds familiar? You can see the direction that I’m 
Going with this.

We don’t try to get the CoCo to use the whole Internet, just the parts 
it can handle. We can also create new Internet applications that are 
design for what our “little system” can do.

Many of you would love to get the CoCo directly connected to the 
Internet with a TCP/IP Network Pak. Well, there are none out there for 
the CoCo. Someday, that may change. But for now, we have to use other 
solutions.

The quick and cheap solution is to use a modern PC to handle the 
Internet protocol and feed the processed data to the CoCo via the serial 
RS-232 port or Deluxe Wireless RS-232 Pak from CoCo3.com. Since the 
technology is here today and working, a new server application could be 
written quickly. (Maybe in the future a standalone TCP/IP card could be 
created for the CoCo. But for now, let just get the project off the 
ground without any extra delays because of a design cycle for new hardware.)

So, what could a CoCo do with an Internet design it? Maybe not view the 
main entry page of CoCo3.com. But view alternated web page design for 
the CoCo in mind. How about a live chat room for just CoCo users? These 
would be a piece a cake for a CoCo running the simple browser client 
using the CoCo Internet protocols.

Let us not forget the games and other applications that could benefit 
from a web server designed for real time information transfer for the CoCo.

These are just a few of the ideas for an Internet design for the CoCo. 
But first, there is a need for CoCo Internet standards.

Much as there are web standards for formatting pages we will need to set 
standards for CoCo web pages. First, the TCP/IP server running on the PC 
would report to the website that it’s interacting as a “CoCo” client. 
This would get the website to create generic HTML code or in the case of 
CoCo friendly website to use CoCo protocols.

The naming structure for files for the CoCo standard should follow the 
file “types” as the web standard. For ease, let us just add the word 
“CoCo” to them. A CoCo HTML file would be “cocohtml” for example.

We will address other protocols or standards in later documents. To that 
end, a standards committee will need to be created. Any volunteers?

Please note that I’m already in line to help this project.

Steve (6809er) Bjork