[Coco] Just a thought

[Francis Swygert]

Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2015 17:11:31 -0700
From: Steve Batson <steve at batsonphotography.com>

I guess if you are to dream or imagine, you may as well go all the way. Companies have never worked well together back then or now, unless there was something in it for both. A bunch of competitors don't get together and design the next great thing that they will all compete on. Creating standards and agreeing on something that all can benefit from is one thing, or creating a technology that all could use is nice. But expecting several companies to work together with their competitors to create the next thing that they will compete with each other isn't reasonable. They could love each other, but giving away secrets and information to the competitor is just not wise.

But, dream on. ;)==================================
Exactly! If IBM could "take back" what became an open standard they would have -- and tried to with the VESA buss (I think that's the one...). They used open standards at first to get a small computer on market quickly and cheaply. They had no idea that it would take off like it did or they would have made it more proprietary and harder to compete with. The IBM architecture became a standard by accident, not on purpose!
The last FHL computers shared a common architecture and were 6809 and 68000 compatible by changing/adding processor cards. The "Tomcat" TC-9 (OS-9 compatible, DECB emulation never quite panned out) and the TC-70 both shared the same backplane. I seem to recall a couple other backplane style computers, mostly S100 buss, that could use one of several different processor cards to be whatever kind of computer you wanted, but use the same peripheral cards (some generic). Most would only use one processor card though. 
 Frank Swygert
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