[Coco] Blast from the past!

[jdaggett at gate.net]

On 30 Jan 2008 at 23:13, Mark Marlette wrote:

> This makes the third person that had strong ties to the CoCo in some
> shape or form to deal with us at Cloud-9. This person worked with
> Terry Ritter, another customer, when he came out of school to help him
> with the review / repair of the VDG. This was in the early days. Terry
> later went on to create the 6809.

Terry Ritter and Joel Bonny I believe were the primary desing engineers 
behind the 6809 MPU. While at Motorola I never knew Ritter or the design 
team but had many dealings with some of the design engineers in SPS for 
later processor designs (HC05 and HC11) as well as other proprietary 
ASICs for paging products. I used to know about half a dozen or so 
including some top level managers in SPS. 

One thing I said to one was the biggest mistake they made on the 68HC11 
was not to include the fourth pointer register(U). That would have made the 
HC11 a lot more powerful. 

There used to be a bunch of real sharp design engineers back in the late 
70's and through the 80's. I bet you they could tell you a bunch of stories. 
That was before HDL and CAD systems were readily available. Most ICs 
back then were breadboarded first to get the concept of what it should do 
and functionality. Man I can only imagine what a 6800/09 or even the 6847 
breadboards would looked like.  

james