[Coco] Another Radio Shack Article

[Mark J. Blair]

On Jan 4, 2014, at 10:45 , Arthur Flexser <flexser at fiu.edu> wrote:
> The most obvious example of CoCo hobbling was the boneheaded decision
> to limit the CoCo 1 to a 32-character text screen so that it could be
> used with a TV.
> No monitor output. That made it look like a toy and I think that's the
> major reason why it was rapidly outstripped by the Apple II, Commodore
> 64, Amiga 400, etc., despite Tandy's huge marketing advantage in
> having the Radio Shack stores to sell it in.


Later on, I think that the same connection to TV compatibility contributed to the Amiga platform's end. I got an Amiga 1000 in 1986 right before I headed off to college. It was a very powerful and innovative platform. Its graphics resolution was excellent at the time, and nothing on the consumer market came close to competing with it in graphics performance. Even though it used an RGB interface, it was still tied strongly to NTSC scan rates and resolutions. That was a strength for a while, as the Amiga platform created the desktop video editing market. Later on, the Amiga platform was hobbled by resolutions tied to NTSC scan rates, while the PCs and others had moved beyond.

Sometime around 1990, I set aside my Amiga and started using an old Sun 3/60 instead. A couple years later, I replaced that with a PC running Linux. Better graphics resolution was a big factor in my decision to move on from my beloved Amiga. Commodore did offer higher resolution on later models, but I think it was too little, too late, as the Wintel platforms were already entrenched.

-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/