[Coco] Re: The typical CoCo user is aged...?!?

[RJRTTY at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/27/05 10:21:06 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
boisy at boisypitre.com writes:

<< I was 15 and cut grass all summer of 1985 
 just to save up enough money to take my 16K ECB CoCo 2 off of law-a-way 
 at the local Radio Shack deale >>

That was the great thing about this machine.   Any kid could save up
his paper route money or allowance or whatever and afford to buy a
usefull system.    If he had not much money he could get a cassette
based system and hook it up to a TV which he already had.    Not 
like the outragesly priced macintosh which cost $1500.
       Later on he could add on a fast industry standard disk drive unlike
the purely useless crap made for the commodore 64.
      Some people didn't like the 32 col. text display.   No problem.
Spend another $100 and get a Wordpak 80 col. text display card.  Now
you could have a text screen AND a color graphics screen display at
the same time.   That's what I did.
         You could easily modify the coco to improve its capabillities.   I
added a couple of resistors and used a couple of spare gates on the
motherboard to bring the built in A/D converter up to 8-bit resolution.
The coco came with built in RS232 for easy connection to a printer or
modem or whatever.    If you wanted something better and faster than
the "bitbanger" port you could add an RS232 card along with the multi pak
interface if you already had a disk drive system.

      Many people complained about the chicklet keyboard.    No problem,
there were after market keyboards available.   I also bought one for
my machine.   It was very nice.
      Starting the machine was very simple.   Turn the switch on stupid !!
It booted up right into basic.   Wonderful for a beginner.   Ready for 
something
better?   Get OS-9.    A REAL operating system you could boot into
when you learned more about such things.   And it beat the hell out
of anything else at the time regardless of price !!!
      The point is you could add to the system as your finances allowed
and it was a better value to boot.   In my opinion the best coco ever was
the last in the line of grey coco 1's which could be upgraded to 64k
without adding extra parts or wires.   The one whose motherboard was
designed for the optional upgrade.  That's the model I had and I applied
all the upgrades mentioned above to it.

long live the coco !!!

Roy