[Coco] Mark Seigel Found?

[Nick Marentes]

 >Mark Siegel is a common name in America and quick Google search is not
 >going to be too helpful.

True, but we need to start somewhere. This one is a spokesman for AT&T 
in Texas.
His e-mail address is here...  http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=1916
Anyone know how to draft a suitable e-mail to ask him if he is who we 
are looking for?   :)

 >Also, Mark is far from being the Father of the CoCo since started
 >working for Tandy years after the CoCo hit the market. But he did have
 >something to do with getting OS-9 for the CoCo and some specifications
 >for the CoCo 3. He was a project manager when he worked with me at
 >Datasoft and was not a programmer or hardware engineer.

"Father of the CoCo" were *his* words when I interviewed him in March 
1999. Isn't it funny how some people like to gain total ownership of 
things.   :)

 >For the record, the nonexistent "256 color" of the CoCo 3 was Marks
 >idea. But the limits on cost for the Coco 3 kept it out of the design.
 >His final 256 color design (never used thank god) was a joke with only
 >80 dots (more like blocks) per scan line. Even that mode could never
 >work because the Video DAC was only 2 bits per color for a total of 64
 >colors. Even years later, he would tell CoCo users that there was a 256
 >mode hidden inside the GIME. Why, who knows?

I agree with the video DAC limitations preventing 256 colors... via RGB 
anyway. I've been long saying that someone should at least analyse Al 
Huffman's prototype boards to confirm if it has a high DAC bit count. 
Also, to see if the 512 byte ROM that this board contains could actually 
be a 256 color palette ROM. For some reason, this prototype board 
remains locked away from analysis.

I agree, I'm sceptical of it's existance in the GIME chip. I would like 
to know if it existed in the original prototype that Al Huffman has and 
it would be good to corner the "Father of the CoCo"  and question him a 
bit more about his claims that he had activated this mode on a 
production GIME chip.

Another name that would be good to interview regarding the development 
of the CoCo is Dale Chatham - Director of hardware engineering at Radio 
Shack back then and involved with the CoCo design. Anyone got any links?

 >The stuff I was fighting for in the design for the CoCo 3 was real UART
 >for true RS-232 port and simple sound system that could play a few notes
 >at once. But in the end I had to be happy with a programmable timer
 >with interrupt to "fake" the UART and sound chip.

Cost was the factor here and I guess that Radio Shack felt the CoCo had 
these already in the form of the "Deluxe RS-232" and "Sound and Speech" 
paks. Yes, I would have preferred that these were built in and a 
standard part of the design rather than an add-on requiring that 
dreadful multi-pak. I guess Radio Shack were a marketing company and 
opted to go this way to make more money selling the add-ons.

Nick Marentes