[Coco] The COCO vs The Apple II

[Nick Marentes]

On 12/01/2015 5:39 AM, Bill Loguidice wrote:
> While it's true that the C-64 had the slowest disk drive of its era, it was
> still nice that it was direct connect and daisy chainable right out of the
> box, i.e., it didn't require any additional hardware or software (DOS) to
> work. While I had a C-64 and then C-64c growing up, my preferred C-64
> system in my collection these days is a C-128DCR with JiffyDOS. One of the
> advantages of the C-64 being so popular is that you had a nice choice of
> form factors, including the SX-64. The other nice thing was that Commodore
> got the C-64's spec's just right out of the box, so it really wasn't
> necessary to improve upon it with subsequent hardware (though they
> eventually tried with the unreleased C-65) to maintain interest.
>
> Again, each major 8-bit had something of interest, and, as long as there
> was a minimum power threshold that was met, it could continue to provide
> incredible amounts of enjoyment regardless of what you were interested in
> doing with it.
>
>

I always thout the Atari 800 got the Serial bus working quite well. It 
too allowed daisy chaining of devices but it ran fast than the C64.

The Atari800 also had the colored and custom function keys. They stood 
out and they were labeled having a set purpose so that software 
developers used the keys for that purpose (they didn't have to). I 
prefer a function key marked HELP rather that saying F1 (to be 
interpreted for HELP).

Of all the early systems, the original Atari 800 was my favourite. Big 
box, real keyboard, slots for expansion, hardware sprites, sound chip, 
reasonable BASIC.

That's been superceded with my CoCo3 (7 years later).   :)

Nick