[Coco] Disk EDTASM & text files

[Willard Goosey]

>From: Ward Griffiths <wdg3rd at comcast.net>
>Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 02:37:57 -0500

>On Saturday 27 December 2003 02:59 am, Willard Goosey wrote:

>> Besides Color TRS-DOS (ha!) what else cares?  I can't think of
>> anything else having problems with my text files.
>
>I've long wished that Logical Systems had been given a go at the Color 
>Computer.  LDOS (later LS-DOS) is still in my arrogant opinion the best 
>single-user OS ever made, and it would have been so nice on a 6809 
>instead of a Z-80.  (OS-9 is also great, but it's not single-user).  

Naa, I prefer OSs that store the filesystem bits in the sectors, not
between the sectors. :-)

I inherited a M4P not that long ago, and I've been playing with it on
and off.  TRS-DOS and its varients, like newdos, ldos, multidos, etc
are very strange and different.

Really, I have two objections to the TRS-80 OSs.  1)I have no printed
docs (not really its problem, but...:-) and 2) it's a pain in the ass
to read/write its disks on other machines.  I've been trying to get a
terminal emulator onto disk so I could just *download* stuff onto it.  

It would be interesting to see what Logical Systems would have done
with a CoCo 3.  For the CoCo 2, I don't know... A 32K RAM /32K ROM
setup is a lot shorter on RAM than the 48K RAM / 16K ROM Model III.
It might have happened if the CoCo disk controller ROM had been a boot
loader instead of the Disk BASIC extensions, or even if Tandy had
simply included "Color TRS-DOS" with the disk system.  

Since "Color TRS-DOS" was only included with Disk EDTASM, it was
useless for commercial software development.  You couldn't include it
with your software.  Disk EDTASM itself was a rare and pricey piece of
software, so there weren't many people with Color TRS-DOS.

Which is kind of a shame.  It might have evolved into something
interesting.
 
>-- 
>Ward Griffiths				wdg3rd at comcast.net

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
"I've never been to Contempt!  Isn't that somewhere in New Mexico?"
   --- Yacko