[Coco] Hello to my fellow Enthusiasts!

[Corey Bryant]

Hello all.  New member here.  I regret that it took me this long to unpack my gear and rejoin everyone that held on to a very great thing.   But, life happens.  I'm 38,  and started with CoCos and Model X machines in roughly 1985 at the age of 9 when I found a bunch of TRS-80 hardware in the closet of a home my parents bought from my dad's best friend who said they didn't want it anymore, and thought I might like it.  It was a goldmine.  Complete with a CoCo 1 including monitor and MPI, a CoCo 2 64k  with MPI/Disk Drives/Cassette Player, a Model 3, and tons of software, cassettes, cartridges, a modem, cables and everything else I needed.     At that point I'd never done anything but play arcade games.   So, naturally I absolutely cherished these things.   I dove in and within a year was using the modem to dial local BBSes I'd found in a list, using a BASIC terminal program I'd found the code for in a book.   I retired the TRS-80 gear in 1993, and went the IBM compatible route.  Hating every minute of it, but knowing it was the future.

I still have my original  CoCo 2, disk drives, cassette player, plus a CoCo 3 128k, Model 3 and both a Model 4 and 4P that my dad had bought me later on.  The CoCo 1,  and MPIs I no longer have.
Just yesterday, I was lucky enough to pick up 512k CoCo 3 with the "Forgotten Chip" OS-9 serial port mod which I've been playing with to see if it's operational.  This will be the CoCo I use for everything.  I also scored a couple of very clean disk drives with it.  Oh!  I bought a MPI for the CoCo 3 with the PAL mods already done from someone I met over in the Facebook group .  Happy about that, as those seem to be hard to come by and I was sad that mine was gone.   I've  picked up a CoCo SDC from Ed, as well as ordered a RGB2VGA mod kit and  Cloud 9 will be getting some of my money soon enough.    I bought a CoCo Assembly book and EDTASM+ this past week so I also plan to learn some things there too.

To wrap this up, I'll say that I am really happy to see this many people still showing this much love for the CoCo.   These days, I'm the IT Director for a large property management firm, and I own a small data services company on the side so I'm surrounded by technology in a manner where everything is never working exactly as it should at any given time.   I'd forgotten how nice it was to walk up to a machine, turn it on, and it works.  Even 30 years later.  On the flip side, there would be far fewer guys like me making a living at this if they still made them like they used to.   This much, I know.

Pardon the mini-novel but I'm sure I'll be around indefinitely so I wanted to tell my story.  :)

Corey