[Coco] The COCO vs The Apple II

[Tony Cappellini]

I've spent the last week or so learning 6502 Assembly language,
just for the sake of nostalgia ( retrocomputing).

I never used Apples back in the day, so I'm learning absolutely
everything from scratch. I'm talking about booting the machine,
loading & running files, saving files, copying files, etc.

I should also mention that i"m doing this on an emulated Apple II
running on OSX (I will say this- this Apple II emulator is extremely well
written, and complete)

I am just dismayed at how primitive the Basic & DOS are compared to the
Coco's.
I had to run a binary program from disk just to copy files between
floppies. This sounds like CP/M.

To make a floppy bootable, a bunch of stuff must be written to it, using up
most of the space.

We have everything in ROM on the coco. Don't need to boot DOS from a disk!!
All of the commands are just there waiting to be invoked.

I was trying to setup a loop using by decrementing a 2-Byte number in a
6502 register. It wasn't working. The 6502 has only 3 (general purpose)
8-Bit registers, compared to the 6809's 5, 16-Bit registers. (I'm not
counting PC, Stack ptr,and flags because I don't consider them to be
general purpose, even though they can be used by the user for esoteric
things) WTH!!

I'm having fun though, learning all of this, but it begs the question..

How did the Apple II being having such a primitive basic, DOS, & CPU outsell
and be so much more popular than the Coco? The Apple II was approximately
3-4 times the cost of the Coco.

There tons more programs, books, games for the Apple II than what I've seen
for the Coco.

One place the coco has it hands down is with OS9 & NitrOS9. I haven't been
involved with the Apple II that long, but I haven't heard about any "real"
OS's for the Apple II. I think the closes thing is the OS that runs on the
IIGS. (It looks & feels a bit like the toaster Mac OS)

Tandy really messed up, but at least they got 3 coco models out there
before they cancelled the program.