[Coco] Re: [Color Computer] Is this a discussion about a new Coco?

[James Diffendaffer]

--- In ColorComputer at yahoogroups.com, "Boisy G. Pitre" <boisy at b...> wrote:
> Hi James,
> 
> This is Boisy Pitre, the other half of Cloud-9. I think I can speak to 
> some of your questions.

> We chose the ConnectOne chip as our ethernet and TCP/IP stack solution 
> because it uses a simple serial interface to allow us to do some very 
> high level work, like sending/receiving mail and doing things like 
> serving web pages.  The idea here was to push the TCP/IP stack into 
> hardware and focus on alleviating myself the burden of writing a TCP/IP 
> stack on the CoCo under NitrOS-9 (which itself would be a project).  
> It's not just the ethernet chip that we are talking about, but also the 
> intelligence behind doing all of the protocols that this thing does.  
> See http://www.connectone.com/ for more details.
> 
> If you know of something cheaper with the same functionality, we're all 
> ears.


Who are you purchsing the part from?  I'd be checking around... even
for everything that does it sounds pricy.  I'd think $45 would be much
closer to the single quantity price.

I think someone was doing something with a couple open cores like that
 but I'm not sure.

See the rest of my response below.



> > you don't overdesign the thing) for under $10 at Radio Shack!
> 
> Mark is in a better position to defend his hardware pricing, but I 
> don't see it as out of line.  Supply and demand in this market seems to 
> support the prices we set.

Look, you are allowed to charge whatever you want.  I'm not saying
there is some law against it.  If people will pay for it... go for it.

I know what is involved in a design like the IDE board and I don't
think it justifies that price.



> > were doing about $90,000 per month and had 4(?) products.
> 
> That's great.  Why exactly then are you on the attack here?  If you 
> want to design your own product, then by all means go ahead.  Live 

I said I wouldn't buy something that expensive because I thought it
was over priced.  It's an opinion and other people have a different one.

Look, you may be charging a reasonable amount based on your design...
but that doesn't mean you didn't overdesign it.

It's a CoCo... if I want to build a web server, web browser or
whatever... I can do so with a PC for under $400 (just built a 2.4GHz
512MB PC for my parents for that) and it will be far better at it than
the CoCo ever will.  So... why use a $65 chip???  This computer only
has a max of 2MB RAM... Just how much can you do with it???  Web
browsing can involve larger web pages than that!  Ask yourself... does
this make sense????  Does the superboard include a chip to
decompress/scale JPEGs and GIF files too?  

I can see sending and receiving email, browsing with Lynx and stuff
like that.  But those are very simple and with the source code out
there it probably makes more sense to write it on OS-9.

I think it's great if you guys can make some money on the CoCo market
and at a hobby at that.  It's nice to see someone supporting the
machine.  But I don't see spending that much on a hobby just so I can
say "look what my CoCo can do".  That's just my opinion.






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