[Coco] The COCO vs The Apple II

[Arthur Flexser]

I can think of several reasons why the Apple II outsold the CoCo.

1.  It got there first, and acquired a lot of devoted fans very fast.

2.  It had an open architecture, amenable to third-party add-ons.

3.  Tandy deliberately hobbled the CoCo with a toy-like 32-column screen
and no provision for a monitor.

4.  Tandy marketed the CoCo as a toy.

5.  Tandy was not particularly welcoming to the third-party market, and its
own software for the CoCo was generally third rate.

Art

On Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 3:11 AM, Tony Cappellini <cappy2112 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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.
>
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