[Coco] The COCO vs The Apple II

[Bill Loguidice]

I had a completely different reaction to the III's and 4. To me, they
looked like what a computer "should." I just loved the form factor. As for
the primitive visuals, I still had great fun creating graphical games for
them, despite having stuff like the C-64 and ColecoVision at home.  There's
something to be said for simple, particularly in beginner programming
classes.

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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director; Armchair Arcade, Inc.
<http://www.armchairarcade.com>
===================================================
Authored Books
<http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Loguidice/e/B001U7W3YS/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_1> and
Film <http://www.armchairarcade.com/film>; About me and other ways to get
in touch <http://about.me/billloguidice>
===================================================

On Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 11:11 AM, Chris Osborn <fozztexx at fozztexx.com>
wrote:

>
> On Jan 10, 2015, at 6:41 AM, Bill Loguidice <bill at armchairarcade.com>
> wrote:
>
> > I remember in my school system in particular, while they had the usual
> > smattering of Apple II's (usually one for every three classrooms), they
> > actually standardized on Model III's and 4's for the programming classes
>
> That pretty much describes the middle school I went to. There were II+ and
> IIe computers scattered about in different classrooms, mostly math classes.
> The “computer” class though was stocked with TRS-80 Model III computers
> because the principal of the school had a I or a III at home and had been
> sold on them.
>
> I remember the first day I walked into the computer class and sat down at
> a model III and was blown away by how crude it was. I had already been
> programming for a year or two at home on an Apple II+ and had written a lot
> of software and couldn't believe that the computers in the computer class
> were monochrome and had no true graphics capability! (If you want to see
> some of the Apple software I wrote back then, I posted it here:
> http://www.insentricity.com/a.cl/120 )
>
> I only used the TRS-80 for a day or two because I immediately asked the
> teacher why the computers were so crude and she found out I already knew
> how to program. For the rest of the class I sat off in the corner away from
> everyone else and worked on a IIe and II+ that were set aside for
> "advanced" students because they didn't have enough Apples for everyone.
> The assigments were trivial though and I remember finishing them in 5 or 10
> minutes and the rest of the class was goof-off time for me to work on
> whatever I wanted.
>
> A year or two after I graduated from that middle school I found out that
> they had realized how awful the Model III computers were and they had gone
> around and taken all of the Apples from all the scattered classrooms and
> put them all in the computer class.
>
> --
> Follow me on twitter: @FozzTexx
> Check out my blog: http://insentricity.com
>
>