Re: Your first A2.

["william strutts" <wrstrutts1@home.com>]

"Liam Busey" <buseyl@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:9hiln9$rtc$1@bob.news.rcn.net...
> william strutts wrote:
>
>
> Huh?! I'm amazed. Even with its cartridge ports, cassette interface,
> railroad external expansion bus, and wireless IR chicklet keyboard the
> PCjr still qualifies as mundane, boring, and souless PC? Come now! This
> machine belongs in a circus freak show!
>
Laughable. Yes. It was a joke.  IBM thought home users would
flock to that ridiculous crippled machine.  Do you recall that
Lotus and Wordperfect came on ROM cartidges?  It was a
nightmare to expand and not cheap either.  No one supported
the machine except the Tandy 1000 which was a clone of
the graphics and sound of the machine.

>
> Weren't the Rat Shack 1000 series computers PCjr clones? I don't
> remember. Trash 80s are okay but I always wanted to try out a Coco. With
> the 6809 MPU and OS/9 they must have been a joy to play with.

Yep.  That is what made it interesting.  It out engineered the Big Blue
dudes in the design.  At least the thing was a reasonable PC compatible
unlike IBM PCjr.  It had standard slots and you could add XT style
3/4 length slots to expand the capabilities unlike the frigging side cars
of the Jr.  It was a joke the way that thing expanded.  You had to
buy several side cars to get it to max mem at 640K.  It only came with
128K with 256K sidecars.  Then if you wanted Hard drives etc
Too much a joke.  Like the Coleco Adam was.

As far as the Coco, I owned two different ones.  I had a Coco 1 and
a Coco 3.  The coco 3 had 512K RAM, dual floppies, RGB monitor,
and OS-9 Level II.  Nice machine.

> I agree that the original IBM PC was a rather uninspired machine but I
> believe the blame for the proliferation of PC clowns belongs to Phoenix.
> IIRC, IBM tried its darndest to recapture the market with MCA and its
> PS/2s but ultimately failed.

Well it was those frigging Microchannel proprietary slots that killed
the PS/2 machine.  The cards were more expensive and you had to
be licensed by IBM to build microchannel machines.  No one wanted
to pay a huge licensing fee to build clones of that.

> It's too bad bad Apple was so successful killing its clone problem.
> Otherwise the II might still be around.

The II wasn't marketed after the Mac came out. I believe Apples
lack of interest in the II series is what killed it.  Why?  I have never
figured it out since the Mac lost them money for most of the 80's and
the II's kept them in cash until they could get the Mac line off the ground.

--
--
William R. Strutts - wrstrutts1@home.com - Whatever!

C'est moi!  http://www.facelink.com/wrstrutts

Just hacking away...