[Coco] Just a thought‏

[Francis Swygert]

Date: Tue, 12 May 2015 20:15:51 +0000
From: James Ross <jrosslist at outlook.com>

> What would a Coco look like today?
> If you walk into a computer store and the latest “2015 Tandy Color Computer” was on display.

Along the lines of those who also answered this in the spirit of the question, as opposed to what a "CoCo 4" would be if it were built today, what would it be if Motorola/Radio Shack (Tandy) had made different decisions? Here's my two bits...

Instead of Motorola dumping the 6809 Machine Language and Registers model w/ the 68000 they would have in essence done what Intel did w/ the 8086 - made the 80186/286/386/486/Pentium etc... and until this day even a x86-64 8 core CPU w/ 8 meg on chip cache can run original 8086 native machine code directly by entering a "legacy mode". So there would have been a 68109 (the follow-on to the 6809, then a 68209/309/409/509 etc... each one adding more registers and modes but maintaining complete backward software compatibility.  I remember feeling cheated when I first read in Byte Magazine how the 68000 assembly language and registers were completely different than the 6809 - why the 68xxx moniker then?  

That software backward compatibility - that was the true success of the Intel x86 line. That was where Motorola screwed up. Were there not a lot of S-100 boards out there at the time? 

But Radio Shack also screwed up. If not already in the original CoCo 1, at least the CoCo 2 and CoCo 3 should have had better graphics chips in them - to make them more attractive as game machines to developer and users. Some of my favorite and most popular arcade games of all time (i.e. Defender and others) were running on 6809 chips around that same time period - imagine a computer that could run games of that caliber at home in the day? 

They could have also marketed a "business" computer w/ a 6809 in it w/ a monochrome monitor (I guess the problem there would have been software availability. But all they needed was a decent Word Processor and a Spreadsheet (+ a dBase clone would seal the deal) and BAM! - an affordable business computer - IMHO it would have sold like hot-cakes.   

Well... basically - my point being is that a modern day true descendant of the CoCo would very much look like today's modern hardware except the CPU legacy mode would still be able to run CoCo ECB. 
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As far as looks I agree -- it would probably look about like most of the smaller computers of today. Mac Mini might be a bit too small, more like the compact desktops and smaller business network machines. 

Intel has slowly been disintegrating backward compatibility over the years. In the early days that limited what they could do with the next generation. Running an 8088 program on a modern computer can only be done through a virtual machine.  You can't load DOS on a modern quad core machine. At least I don't think you can, I've never tried! At the time Motorola made the decision to make the 68000 a leap ahead, which meant no object code compatibility with the 6809 and limited source code compatibility. It was a hit for hobbyist, but not so much for their industrial customers, which was their bread and butter. 

 I could see Tandy leveraging their strength and having a custom 68109 made as you suggest, IF the "home" computer market hadn't imploded. There wasn't enough of a user base nor demand for more computers of that type -- everyone wanted an IBM (more specifically, an MS-DOS) compatible, since there were inexpensive clones available. IBM didn't think their PC would sell like it did of they wouldn't have made it so open, something they tried to "fix" later with  proprietary buss, and failed. They did sort fo drop the ball when making the CoCo3, but I think they could already see the writing on the wall for home computers and wisely switched over to MS-DOS compatibles. They made more money on each sold and it didn't cost much more (if any) to make a T-1000 than it did a CoCo (comparatively equipped, which would be a 512K CoCo with dual disk drives -- but no hard drive). Frank Swygert
Fix-It-Frank Handyman Service
803-604-6548