[Coco] Today, Boisy is the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 20 November 2012 09:52:26 Sean did opine:

> That was an amazing history to type out in just over an hour for a '78
> year old'!
> My dad passed at 71 last year and I don't think I've ever seen an
> e-mail longer than three lines from him.  Of course I had to build all
> his computers and he would never ever use his credit cards 'on the
> internet'
> 
> Though his computer skills were horrible, he was the one who started
> me on the computer. He was given a Timex Sinclair 1000, and when I was
> instructed never to touch it, he said he came back home to me having
> some amazing graphics of a waving flag running when I was 6 or 7 (I
> must have typed it from a magazine)  I have no memory of that
> happening.  But it was enough to get me a CoCo.
> 
Hey it worked!  And I'm glad he got you a coco, cuz while the TS-1000 was 
cheap, the diff in the brains was amazing.  I bought my kids a 1000 at the 
time, along with the 16k memory expansion, but it only took them a week to 
total the enter key, so the whole thing wound up in a sloped panel box with 
some sort of a real keyboard, a TI99 I think, mounted in the box.

But at the time, I had embarked on a helper tool for production at KRCR in 
'78, using a Cosmac Elf kit, which had an RCA 1802 cpu in it, one of the 
more unusual architectures extant at the time, and the code I wrote & the 
hardware I built to interface with the then new 3/4" U-Matic machines of 
the day, ran for about 15 years doing its job at KRCR, long after I'd 
saddled up & got the heck out of Kalifornia for the last time in '82, 
eventually winding up in late '84 as the CE at the local CBS affiliate & 
trying to blend in with the WV folks, picking up some accent along the way.
After about 2 years here, I came to the conclusion that I had found my 
home, so I caught an old maid school teacher (or she caught me) & married 
her 22 years ago.  I've put down roots I guess you could say.

I'm sorry to say that I didn't discover the coco before the 2nd took the 
kids & went back to Nebraska about 1.5 years later.

I needed something for my office at the tv station so I yard sale'd a 
couple old grey ghosts, expanding them to 64k so they could run os9, and 
the rest is history.  And I still have both of them.

I wrote some more stuff for the Z-80 in about '81, but came to the 
conclusion that it was the most drain bamaged cpu around.  Some faster than 
the RCA 1802 I started with, but far less capable.  When I grasped the 
concept of position independent code the 6809 could do, the floodgates 
opened.  It couldn't change contexts as fast as the TI-9900 could, but it 
certainly was fast enough for the girls I go with & generally still is.  I 
would have liked to have gotten to know the TI-9900 better, but TI had real 
access to it locked up behind some pretty expensive hardware as I never saw 
a PEB offered for less than $400, which was the first step only, you could 
easily put $3000 into that box.

Almost anything you could want for a coco, was both reasonably priced, and 
capable of working with commodity parts.  My first HD was an ST-238r 
Seagate used with a B&B black sandwich that could not reliably read a 
sector of the FAT with a 44 magmun stuck in one ear, so I learned a lot 
about repairing file structure with that combo.  That was on a coco2 at the 
time at home.  But I bought one of the gold colored stamped B&B kits for my 
office machine a few months later, it was a coco3 by then, and put a 10 meg 
and a 20 meg dual drive setup on it.  I still have that whole kit, desk and 
all.

And that B&B kit, slow as it was, never dropped a single bit that I'm aware 
of.  I tried to power up the drive cage about 3 years ago & had to give the 
cage a whack on the corner to get those old Tandon drives started, but both 
then spun up, squeaking ground springs on the ends of the spindles and all.  

That is the machine I used to write the edisk software for the coco2 that 
did that job for the production video switcher, making level 1 boot disks 
on it while running level 2 on the coco3.  That coco2 was doing a job, with 
english language filenames for the operators instead of 2 digit code 
numbers, and 4x faster than Grass Valley Groups own $20,000 accessory for 
that switcher could do it.  And both had the same 6809 processor in them.  
It did that job till that switcher was replaced, about 14 years.  How is 
that for code longevity?  In the pc world, 14 years is a couple of eons.

But for the coco, its just getting started.  Look at what we've done, with 
the help of about 5 or 6 very talented people, just in the last 4 to 5 
years.

But now a challenge: Its time for yet another drive interface to be 
designed as the drives that fit and work with the ones we have, are going 
extinct.  IDE/ATAPI was killed by SATA, and scsi tried to grow into wider 
busses for more speed, but that also meant 10k & 15k spindle speeds and 
gigahertz+ head drivers with a working life under 6 months because you 
could fry eggs on them.  We need a sata interface now, capable of handling 
at least 2 drives for backup purposes.  Mark?  Darren?

There is lots of life left in this now 30 year old machine.

And I've rambled on for way too long, blowing my own horn at that.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up!
Timing must be perfect now.  Two-timing must be better than perfect.