[Coco] TRS-80 Color Computer: Wikipedia Article

[farna at att.net]

That's a perfectly good argument James. Though the 6800 was more comparable to the 6502, it was used in a machine (the CoCo) that was in direct competition with 6502 based machines though. Drove Tandy's cost up, but made for a comutationally much more powerful machine. In the end that really didn't matter -- marketing did. If Tandy had done more with the CoCo it would have been a lot more popular, but they wanted to restrict it to game/beginner machine status so it wouldn't compete with their 1000 8080 based series. I think it could have supported a bit higher price than the other home computers had the power been exploited, and it probably wouldn't have competed with the MS-DOS based boxes that much simply because it didn't run MS-DOS! They should have paired the CoCo as a workstation with their 68K Unix machines (or whatever the Tandy flavor of Unix was), but then the Tandy 68K boxes didn't fair all that well either. Heck, OS-9/68K might have been better for those! 


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Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:30:06 -0500
From: jdaggett at gate.net

I wont argue that Motorola pricing was higher. I would argue that the MC6800 
pricing would 
be a better comparison to the 6502 rather than the MC6809. The 6800 and 6502 
have similar 
function and instruction sets. By 1981 the 6502 and 6800 were very similar in 
pricing while 
the 6809, a much more pwerful processor, was definitely higher in price. A more 
comparable 
chip to compare the MC6809 to was the 8080A chip. That was the chip and the 
market that it 
originally competed against.


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