CoCo's *are* real... (was: OT: PC Motherboard with a vacuum tube

From: Ben Franchuk <bfranchuk_at_jetnet.ab.ca>
Date: Fri Sep 6 22:35:00 2002

Eric Smith wrote:
> "tim lindner" <tlindner_at_ix.netcom.com> wrote (regarding the Radio Shack
> Color Computer and Color Computer 2):
>
>>What really sucked was the 32 column screen. I never bought one of the
>>many 80 column cards, they were all serial based. Only useful under
>>OS-9.
>
>
> "Serial based"? The one I bought, the PBJ Word-Pak (sp?) didn't have
> anything to do with serial. It had a 6845 (or maybe a 68045 or 6545,
> I don't recall exactly) right on the bus.
>
> They may have had some hack to use it from BASIC, but I only ran OS-9
> anyhow.
The Coco had real crappy I/O hardware. This made it imposible to have
a clean version of OS-9 with interupt driven hardware.
Received on Fri Sep 06 2002 - 22:35:00 BST