[Coco] Another Radio Shack Article

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 06 January 2014 09:46:50 Boisy Pitre did opine:

> > Re - Boisy's mention of something that appears in what would seem to
> > be an excellent book.
> 
> Obviously we could not interview (or speak for) the dead. Nor could we
> force the very small number of people who either refused to respond to
> our interview requests or insisted on terms we could not agree to, to
> provide their perspective.  We did, however, interview a large number
> of people and went farther than I think anyone has ever gone in
> compiling the history of the CoCo.  Naturally, recollections are often
> flawed, but wherever possible, multiple perspectives and hard evidence
> were used.

I might point out that near the bottom of page 157, you give credit to the 
3 Canadians for doing all the heavy lifting for the 6309-ization of OS-9.  

There were more than those 3 involved, because I was the one that did 
RBF.mn at the time.  But nobody paid any attention to my comment that SAS=8 
in a dmode report was going to be an ankle biter.  I said at the time that 
$10 (doubling the 8) was probably a good idea on floppies, and I routinely 
use $20 on my hard drives.

And Boisy got bit, as have I myself, fortunately just a floppy lost, and 
because I knew what happened, I was able to salvage the important stuff.  
So the "archive" bit got removed, and we are forever stuck with making full 
backups.  Majority rules I guess.  But I'd put it back in in a NY heartbeat 
if there was an otherwise unused bit that didn't have secondary effects 
anyplace in the first $20 bytes of an FD.Sector, but it is all 100% 
committed.

Obviously I can't steal one in the last 5 bytes of the last, 48th, FD.SEG.  
Lesson learned.

Lets clarify another point, while doing that, I put back in all the 
multiple sectors per cluster stuff (and fixed a bug in it) that Kevin 
Darling took out in one of his "Christmas presents" which in reality was a 
torpedo amidships to our ability to ever use a hard drive size in excess of 
131 megabytes.

I'm not yapping because I think I needed an honorable mention, but I do 
think some of that praise could have been worded "and others". I am 
reasonably sure there were other volunteers besides myself involved, but at 
the time we as a group weren't sure we could do it without repercussions 
from Des Moines so it wasn't publicly discussed as to whom was doing what. 
IMO if there were others, its long past due they should at least raise a 
hand and wave to the crowd. I think its safe now. :)

I have to assume a good word from Boisy may have smoothed the way in that 
regard, and that we should be giving a bit of credit there for the freedom 
we have had in this effort.  I won't say it's unique, but OTOH, where are 
the now community supported upgrades for TOS on my Atari 1040ST-E?  And 
amigados has been tied up in litigation for decades now.  Nuff said.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>

Yevtushenko has... an ego that can crack crystal at a distance of twenty 
feet.
		-- John Cheever
A pen in the hand of this president is far more
dangerous than 200 million guns in the hands of
         law-abiding citizens.