[Coco] OT: Amiga 30th Anniversary event at the Computer History Museum

[Mark McDougall]

On 17/04/2015 1:49 AM, Bill Loguidice wrote:

> I wonder what most CoCo users upgraded to back in the day? It seems a
> surprising number based on these comments moved onto the Amiga, though I
> suspect most moved onto some type of PC with the rest of the planet.

Here's one from left field for you - a TRS-80 Model 4P!

My father bought me a Coco simply to get me off his TRS-80 Model I. For a 
few years I got into it - mainly games I must admit - in my senior high 
school years. He & I frequented a local Coco User Group for the years that I 
used it. I eventually got a 3rd party floppy controller and a couple of 
drives. Even sampled OS-9 Level 1 but didn't do much with it.

I started uni, studying Computer Science, and needed a machine that was more 
"serious". My father bought me a TRS-80 Model 4P which I used throughout 4 
years of uni, programming all my assignments on it using Z80 assembler, CP/M 
Turbo Pascal, Lisp and even RS-COBOL I even bought the uLabs Grafyx Solution 
Hires board, wrote my own graphics library in Z80 for Turbo Pascal, and 
programmed my ray tracing assignment on it - yep, in glorious monochrome, 
using dithering.

I agreed to let my father donate the Coco setup to a friend of his not long 
after I got the 4P, as it was well and truly relegated to the back shed. How 
I regret that now, and still keep an eye out on local eBay auctions checking 
for the tell-tale switches we added on the side!

 From the 4P it was the Amiga 500, then my father's hand-me-down XT clone.

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"