[Coco] Re: Let me introduce myself (GW/CoCo BASIC similarities)

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 03 February 2006 13:28, Richard E. Crislip wrote:
>Hello Gene
>
><snip>
>
>> Needless to say I nuked that pile of steaming poo, and bought a copy
>> of SAS/C and never looked back.  I used it, a lot in those days. 
>> Its still sitting on the shelf about 3 feet away, the last version,
>> 6.58. Lots of miggy stuff here, but the 30GB HD in my 64 meg 68040
>> equipt 2000 with a picasso-II video card, threw a rod and it lost
>> its space on my desk.  Its in the basement now waiting for a real
>> collector to come along.
>
>Yeah, I know that too, but I hadta try ya know what I mean 8-)
>
>My miggy A4000 is in the process of throwing a rod too. The cursor
> keeps jumping horizontally about an inch at a high rate, but
> irratically. So when I attempt to open a drawer next to other
> drawers, very often the drawer I was trying to open ended up being
> dropped in a draw next to it. To make matters worse, my trusty A2065
> ethernet card seems to have packed it in too. <sigh> Sooo I'm using
> WinUAE a lot these days. Fortumately, I had copied all of my
> typesetting business to that a long time ago. The most the miggy get
> used for these days is to make ADF virtual floppies for WinUAE and
> E-UAE.

Unforch, on a 4000, much of it isn't socketed as they were on the 
500/2000/3000's.  If my 2000 started that, it was time to pull the 
chips one at a time and clean the legs with an eraser, underwater to 
absorb the static the eraser would generate if used dry.  The miggy's 
mouse, as we all know, was one of the smoothest mice ever because it 
had true quatrature detector stuff wired all the way into the position 
counters in the amiga, which in the earlier ones was in the Paula chip 
IIRC.  Thats why the mouse cables were so big and stiff, it used all 
the 9 wires in a db9 connector to do that.  Your 4000 put that function 
into the alice chip I think, and that puppy is surface mounted.  The 
other possibility, and a good one on a 4000 is that those surface 
mounted electrolytic caps have now been in there about 7 years past 
their estimated lifetime, and a general shotgun replacement of them 
might work wonders for the mouse, and the machines stability over time.

We had a pair of 2k's and a pair of 4k's at one time at the tv station.  
And a 1200 that did the glass logo in the corner of the screen for 
several years driving a supergen genlock.  It and both of the 4ks died 
right on schedule 5 years ago, but one 2k, with an F40 board in it was 
still working with typical uptimes of a couple of months running the 
script that grabbed the telepromter text from the news server in news, 
made html out of it, and put it up on our web page 5 minutes after the 
newscast went to air.  This was using an arexx script Jim and I wrote 
back in early 97, driven by the ezcron we also wrote, and it ran that 
way, headless, until a few months ago when Jim converted it all to php 
on linux.  Not as purty, but less trouble to keep it working once the 
infant mortality bugs were taken care of in the code.  Its still 
sitting there in the rack, just turned off.  I could take it home 
anytime, but don't have a place to use it anymore.

The longest running machine there was a trs-80 Color Computer 2, running 
os9 level one and a program I wrote that made it into an EDISK for the 
grass valley 300 series video switcher.  We used up two of those over 
the years, till parts got to be too darned expen$ive, but with a 
replacement floppy occasionally because we wore them plumb out, that 
'coco' sat there and did its job for 15 years.  Grass wanted $20,000 
for a unit that was capable of that job, but about as handy as tits on 
a boar hog.  4x slower than the coco, 2 digit numbers on an led dislay  
for files, where the os9 based filesystem had real names displayed on a 
5" video monitor.  I figured I had $275 in it at the time I built it in 
'88, ran it till '03. :-)  Its in a box in the basement now since the 
grass 300's been retired in favor of an echolab studio switcher which 
has a function similar to what the coco did builtin.

Thats why I always called the coco's "the machines that could do it".  
They could.  So could the amiga's.  Not everyone understands that 
between the vax's and the amiga's, and toss in a sun or two for good 
measure, the internet as we knew it say 10 years ago, was invented.  
All the windows stuff out there now is strictly Johnny come lately 
stuff.  And they are still trying to catch up.  Heck, IBrowse on an 
amiga with a decent video card in it is still one great browser today.

>Regards
>--
>Cruising on AutoPilot                        |
>        With an Amiga           ---o-o-O-o-o---  and a CoCo

-- 
Cheers, Gene
People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word
'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's
stupid bounce rules.  I do use spamassassin too. :-)
Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above
message by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.