> <snip>
>
> Whoa, jeez. I think i'll stick to commenting on CoCo stuff from now on.
I hope you didn't interpret that as a personal attack. I know you were
just trying to be helpful, and had undoubtedly gotten the information
from an inaccurate source. I just wanted to make sure no one was led
astray. Connecting EIA-232 directly to EIA-422 could let the smoke
out of something, and we certainly wouldn't want that.
On the other hand, I'm plenty interested in CoCo stuff, so comment on
them all you like. I got my first Color Computer 2 back in 1984 or so,
with 64K of RAM, a pair of TEAC FD55-F floppy drives (80 track double
sided), a PBJ Word-Pak 80-column card, and some sort of PBJ backplane
that did basically the same thing as the Radio Shack Multipak but was
cheaper (and also less expensive). I ran OS-9 on it. After a while
I added an RS-232 pak and one of the first USR Courier 2400 modems, so
I could dial into a VAX running BSD 4.2.
I don't recall now where I got a floppy controller, or what brand it
was. Did Radio Shack sell the controller separately? I definitely
didn't buy any Radio Shack drives back then, although last year I did
buy some on eBay.
Eventually I got a Coco 3, and gave much of my Coco 2 stuff to a friend,
who has within the last two years given most of it back.
I was surprised to learn recently that there's a SourceForge project
to reverse-engineer, document, and extend OS-9 for the Coco:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cocoos9/
Also a package of command line utilities for Linux and MacOS X to
access OS-9 disk images, and a cross-assembler:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/os9tools/
Received on Thu Sep 05 2002 - 02:00:01 BST