[Coco] Just a thought‏

[James Ross]

> What would a Coco look like today?
> If you walk into a computer store and the latest “2015 Tandy Color Computer” was on display.

Along the lines of those who also answered this in the spirit of the question, as opposed to what a "CoCo 4" would be if it were built today, what would it be if Motorola/Radio Shack (Tandy) had made different decisions? Here's my two bits...

From a hardware end/user perspective it would look very much like a modern PC or Mac either Desktop or Notebook (since they are both virtually based on same technology now days)... software / OS wise, I would imagine something more akin to Macintosh OS X (since it’s based on UNIX and since OS-9 was UNIX-Like way back when).

Instead of Motorola dumping the 6809 Machine Language and Registers model w/ the 68000 they would have in essence done what Intel did w/ the 8086 - made the 80186/286/386/486/Pentium etc... and until this day even a x86-64 8 core CPU w/ 8 meg on chip cache can run original 8086 native machine code directly by entering a "legacy mode". So there would have been a 68109 (the follow-on to the 6809, then a 68209/309/409/509 etc... each one adding more registers and modes but maintaining complete backward software compatibility.  I remember feeling cheated when I first read in Byte Magazine how the 68000 assembly language and registers were completely different than the 6809 - why the 68xxx moniker then?  

That software backward compatibility - that was the true success of the Intel x86 line. That was where Motorola screwed up. Were there not a lot of S-100 boards out there at the time? 

But Radio Shack also screwed up. If not already in the original CoCo 1, at least the CoCo 2 and CoCo 3 should have had better graphics chips in them - to make them more attractive as game machines to developer and users. Some of my favorite and most popular arcade games of all time (i.e. Defender and others) were running on 6809 chips around that same time period - imagine a computer that could run games of that caliber at home in the day? 

They could have also marketed a "business" computer w/ a 6809 in it w/ a monochrome monitor (I guess the problem there would have been software availability. But all they needed was a decent Word Processor and a Spreadsheet (+ a dBase clone would seal the deal) and BAM! - an affordable business computer - IMHO it would have sold like hot-cakes.   

Well... basically - my point being is that a modern day true descendant of the CoCo would very much look like today's modern hardware except the CPU legacy mode would still be able to run CoCo ECB. 

James


> From: efqut at bigpond.com
> To: coco at maltedmedia.com
> Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2015 00:23:18 +1000
> Subject: [Coco] Just a thought
> 
> Hi all,
> What would a Coco look like today?
> If you walk into a computer store and the latest “2015 Tandy Color Computer” was on display.
> What spec would it be?
> What would it look like?
> Just a thought