[Coco] First CoCo

[Andrew]

> Change of subject.;)
> 
> How many of us still have their first CoCo?

While I don't know the specifics like some (and I have no way to easily 
dig it out of storage right now), I still have my first CoCo - well, sorta.

It was originally a 16k CoCo 2 ECB machine with the "melted" keyboard. 
Got it when I was 11 years old (I'm 45 now), with the matching cassette 
tape unit RS sold, plus two cartridges (Canyon Climber and Reactoid).

I still have the cassette unit, and the Canyon Climber cartridge, but 
somewhere along the way of life I lost the Reactoid cartridge (no 
offense to SteveB, as I did like playing the game - but I'd have rather 
lost the Canyon Climber game). I recently bought a "replacement" of the 
cartridge off Ebay, though.

At some point with the cassette unit, I had the Pyramid game, Rainbow's 
First Book of Adventure tape and magazine/book - and at the time I was 
struggling with math so my parents got me this educational math tape 
thing from RS (I recall it would load a piece, then audio would play as 
you did the piece on the screen, etc). Helped me a lot, though. Got 
better at math...

Soon though, over time, I had (well - my parents paid, and I honestly 
don't recall asking for the upgrades, but I must have done so) the RAM 
upgraded first to 32K then to 64K. After the 64K upgrade, I eventually 
got a floppy drive, plus an MPI, and more cartridges (speech sound pak, 
rs-232 cart + modem, other games too).

This was all by the time I was in the 8th grade - so 13 years old or so?

BBS-ing on my phone in my room (albeit only at 300 baud), hooked up to 
my 19" TV. Somewhere in there I begged and got a copy of Diecom's Gates 
of Delirium". Not too long after that I got a CoCo 3 and later a 512K 
upgrade (Disto). Also somewhere in there I got a CGP-220 printer (when I 
had my CoCo 2 - I recall doing my spelling assignments on it, by coding 
quick programs to print my words multiple times; always got an "A" on 
those assignments - my teachers thought it was amazing I was typing out 
my words on my computer - little did they know...heh).

I still have all of those pieces of hardware, except for my TV which 
died a terrible death sometime around 1995 or so (like 
snap-crackle-pop-smoke) - but by that time I was in my own apartment and 
had my first job as a programmer for a small mom-n-pop shop here in 
Phoenix. I wasn't using my CoCo anymore (that was still back home with 
my parents in Cali).

When I moved from Cali to AZ to go to school, my parents bought me a 
Tandy 1100HD (I think that's right) - some kind of 8086 (?) IBM 
compatible "luggable" with a black-n-white CGA display, a floppy drive, 
and a 20 meg hard drive. I had that just before I left home - about 6-8 
months; one of the first things I did to that poor machine was mess it 
up terribly the first night I had it. It came with MS-DOS 3.0 - and that 
version had a bug that I had no idea about. First, I was only used to 
DECB on my CoCo (I never got into OS-9 - waaay too expensive for my 
parents to buy) - so I had little idea about "directories" and such. 
Anyhow, playing on it I created a sub-directory under C: - then in that 
sub-directory I created another, and I think maybe created a text file 
or something; then I went to "root" (C:\) and deleted the first 
sub-directory. The bug I encountered was something like where the system 
would delete the contents in the second-level sub-directory, but not the 
sub-directory itself, and there was no way to delete that directory at 
all; you'd get these weird errors. I didn't learn about this problem 
until much later - but I thought I had hosed the computer.

So I did what any kid would that thought he broke an expensive computer 
- I said nothing to my parents, broke out the system floppies that came 
with the machine - and did a system wipe (format) and re-install via 
instructions in the manual.

So there I was, sweating it out, praying a procedure I had never, ever 
done before (the closest thing I had done before was "DSKINI 0" of 
course!) - and hoping it would all work again; amazingly, it did, and I 
learned that much more about computers.

Once I got to Phoenix, over time at my first software gig I got into the 
Amiga, then when Commodore died, moved on to the PC. I also still have 
all of those pieces of hardware too. In fact, I have virtually every 
"first machines" I ever owned - with the exception of a laptop or two 
that were bought used, played with for a bit, then gotten rid of (and 
honestly, I wish I had kept 'em now).

Ok - well, that got larger than I wanted it too - but I hardly post to 
the list anyhow, so I'm just making up for lost time, k?

-- 
Andrew L. Ayers
Glendale, Arizona
https://github.com/andrew-ayers