[Coco] The COCO vs The Apple II

[Bill Loguidice]

Honestly, the Atari 800 was a brilliant machine and should have dominated
the market. Atari made several mistakes along the way (not properly
documenting the architecture in the early years, not advertising
effectively, etc.), though, not the least of which was being unable to
compete effectively on price before it was too late.

One thing I'd like to reiterate too is that one of the advantages the
Commodore 64 had over other 8-bits was that it always came with 64K,
meaning developers always had the same spec to target from 1982 to the
early 90s. Other platforms ranged from 4K - 16K as their bases, which often
meant that the lower specs were targeted in place of the upper specs in
order to maximize the potential audience (and certainly with the Atari
8-bit example, that meant 16K rather than 48K). This placed obvious limits
on the software. Certainly the CoCo was not immune to this, and even with
the CoCo 3, certain software ended up being held back by targeting older
specs.

The only platform where memory concerns were less of an issue was the Apple
II series, as its users moved relatively quickly from 16K to 48K, then 64K
and even 128K, with little effect on sales. That's not necessarily as
surprising, though, because as was discussed, we're talking a higher ticket
item and a more affluent target market, which translated to upgrades when
available. Of course, 48K was still where the mass of software ended up
targeting, so it was not a total success in that regard.

-Bill

===================================================
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 Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 3:11 PM, Nick Marentes <nickma2 at optusnet.com.au>
wrote:

> 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
>
>
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