[Coco] WordPak RS/CO80

[Steve Bjork]

Art,

Way back in the old days of the CoCo 1, (while working at DataSoft) I 
created a 80 Column display for coco software development.  It was nothing 
more then a cheap "stand-alone" terminal with output of the coco's serial 
port was tied to it.  While the terminal's keyboard could not be used for 
input, the screen could be quickly updated when running at 19,200 baud.

The main use for the terminal was writing Assembly Language code and EDTASM 
was perfect for it.  You see, EDTASM user interface was written for 
terminal I/O and it was not hard to patch the code of a pre-release version 
to output to the terminal. (I later patched EDTASM with an On Screen line 
editor (see my SECS),  extra long labels and Disk I/O with file includes.)

About this time, Mark Segal (sp?) left DataSoft for Tandy and took the 
technology with him.  Soon, Tandy and other Developers were using this 
simple system for their 80 column displays.  There was also talk about 
selling a patch cable and drivers through the store or at lease the direct 
order system. All of that was dropped once worked started on the CoCo 3.

Steve 6809er Bjork

At 12:23 AM 1/4/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>On Mon, 3 Jan 2005, Boisy Pitre wrote:
>
> >
> > There's more than just a base address difference.  The co80 driver that
> > I started with is very simplistic in what it does, and doesn't even
> > begin to address the complexity that this card has when it comes to
> > setting up.
> >
> > I did dig up something interesting about this driver in one of the
> > Kissable OS-9 columns in the Rainbow.  Puckett was writing about one of
> > the Microware OS-9 expos in Des Moines, and one of the programmers
> > talked about the CO80 module being written according to a specification
> > that Tandy provided them, but with hardware that was in prototype
> > stage.
> >
> > What a mystery...
> >
>
>In that case, my guess would be that Tandy was planning to come out with 
>its own
>80-column display at the time, and had a driver programmed according to its
>specs and included with OS-9.  Then, that device was scrapped in favor of
>offering a version of the PBJ WordPak through its Express Order program (or
>whatever that program was called, where you could get non-RS products at RS
>stores by special order), and so the co80 driver actually drives no existing
>device at all.  I believe the WordPak-RS originally came with an OS-9 driver
>on disk, though I'm not 100% certain.  Somebody out there surely should have a
>copy.
>
>Art