[Coco] Coco Armatron Interfacing

[Andrew]

All,

I have just posted to my website a writeup about an article I found in 
the April 1984 issue of Color Computer magazine on Aaron Wolfe's 
website, CoCoCoding. Aaron had linked to his website about another issue 
in regards to Mr. Bjork's sitting on a quad at age 25 (interesting 
article and pictures, that!). I started reading thru some of the other 
issues - and found the Armabot!

It was an article on interfacing the Armatron to the Color Computer, 
something I knew had been done before (there were advertisements for 
such conversions in the Rainbow, for instance, by Analog Micro Systems), 
but I had not seen any discussion on how to actually do it (there was an 
article series about something called the ROS which detailed a general 
bus interface geared toward robotics - but this had nothing to do with 
the Armatron, AFAIK).

So - I "ripped" a copy of the article and made a PDF of it, and put it 
on my website, here:

	http://www.phoenixgarage.org/show_article/106

I credit Aaron Wolfe's website and his collection, as well as the 
magazine issue; I hope this is OK - I am not trying to step on anyone's 
toes, I just collect and archive articles on my website dealing with 
interfacing the Armatron to computers - there were quite a few projects 
of this nature during that time period.

I wanted to announce it here, in case anyone was interested!

-- Andrew L. Ayers
    Glendale, Arizona
    http://www.phoenixgarage.org/


> Message: 8
> Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:39:51 -0400
> From: Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Good memories with Mr. Bjork
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Message-ID:
> 	<AANLkTikXiXaLMxO-d-+6N+QLHTEgr391a8dktnDiUoNC at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 8:02 PM, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:
>> On Jul 28, 2010, at 6:50 PM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>>> The picture on the first page is awesome.. ?Steve at age 25, sitting
>>> on a four wheeler (apparently indoors), wearing a sports coat and full
>>> on 80s tie. ?Man that takes me back. ?Makes you appreciate how much
>>> has changed in ~30 years. ?Those were good times.
>> I remember that! I must have that issue somewhere. 25? Really? Wow. I'm dumbfounded thinking at how young alot of these folks were that were cranking out so much software.
>>
>> If I recall the story, they had that four wheeler in a booth at whatever show that was at, and wired up the CoCo joystick interface to controls on the actual four wheeler so folks could ride and play ... Dessert Rider?
>>
> 
> Another interesting bit of trivia.  I'm guessing it wasn't "dessert"
> rider, but who knows? the 80s were strange times :)
> 
> FWIW, you can read the article online here:
> https://sites.google.com/a/aaronwolfe.com/cococoding/home/magazines/color-computer-magazine
> 
> (if your email client doesn't mangle the massive url)  it's on page 86.
> 
> I only have a couple of the CCM magazines converted so far, but lots
> of other mags fully OCR'ed and shrunk in size are available to read or
> download.  I do the conversions in the background when I'm working on
> boring jobs.  google indexes the contents once they are OCRed, so you
> can do full text search over tons of magazines/issues, sort of cool.
> Some day Google is supposed to be adding context to the results like
> they do with web searches, but right now all you get is links to the
> matching issues with the search terms highlighted in the text if you
> open them.  Not ideal but maybe useful.