[Coco] A CoCo-nut's tale, was Re: Shell + 2.2a

Robert Emery theother_bob at yahoo.com
Tue Jul 13 22:14:28 EDT 2004


> 
> IIRC, The fun part for me was the feeling of satisfaction you get when
> the system is humming along *exactly* the way you want it set up...

Yeah, I do agree. When the Shack disco'd the line I picked up LII and Multi-Vue
for 10 bucks each. (If I had paid full price I'd probably have been more
motivated "get into" it, but I was a poor lad.) At that time I had recently
acquired a 720K 3.5" drive for $15 at a surplus store (by comparison, a 1.4M
drive 1 was still like $99 at RS). On a side note, also at that time I had just
cut my MS-DOS teeth on a T1000(A?) installing a 30MB HD with WD controller and
custom power supply. That was cool. The guy who owned it was impressed.

I managed to make a custom 35T boot disk that loaded the 80T /D1, played with
MV a bit and got my first printer ever - a 150 baud TTY terminal of some sort.
Rigged up a cable and was very pleased to see it work. Never could get an 80
track disk to boot though, and I only had 128K (in fact I just got my first
512K upgrade a couple of months ago) and every CoCo BBS I found a local number
for was already gone... that was about the time I put the whole thing up,
gathering dust until early 2002, because I had acqired a 386 motherboard with
8Megs of ram... the final pieces I needed to complete my own PC clone.

When I did finally stumble across the online CoCo community and decided to
shake the cobwebs out my old system, I had to do the same thing to my memory.
So I went with the stuff I knew best, remembering how to program in Basic, this
time concentrating on the updated graphics... let's see what this thing can
do... and so Color FOG was born. (I'm not one to brag, but I myself am
impressed with it so far and still have many ideas.)

Soon I'll delve into the depths of NitrOS-9... working on the manuals for Boisy
is refreshing my memory on it, so we'll see where it leads.

The CoCo was my first love and I'm glad I kept my stuff even through hard
times. Above all else, no matter what, the CoCo is fun and entertaining.
Especially these days when retro is the in thing. I enjoy "schooling" poeple
who think of Nintendo as old-school. <G>

cheers,
Bob



		
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