And now I’m sad that my computer doesn’t have a MODE ENHANCE key.
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Before I knew how digital audio worked (or how much storage it consumed), I wondered if we might be able to listen to music stored on floppy discs.
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Kept my CoCo far too long.
0. Ran it with OS-9 100% of the time, loaded from dual DSDD floppy drive(s). VROOM!
- Had hand-soldered piggybacked memory chips for 64K.
- Had multi-pack expander with 80-column video card (for monochrome monitor only). Color Computer…?
- Had replacement, hand-customized system ROM chip with de-activate switch on top (for compatibility).
- Towards the end, installed 512K RAM “banker”, that cost $$$ and did hardly anything useful. Thanks, Rainbow Magazine, for tempting me to waste far too much money!
Well, I can’t say that it was all a waste. That little hunk of plastic and silicon convinced me to switch from EE to computer engineering, which changed the direction of my GPA.
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Is it mechanical? Because if it is the keyboard hipster brigade will be along shortly with soap and a washcloth to wash your mouth out.
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No, but interestingly enough the Tandy Color Computer had a clone called the Dragon 32/64 which was a Welsh(!) made computer. It didn’t do very well given that there were quite a few native British micros.
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Get your very own Superbrain now for $999.99!
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sorting that ebay category with price at the top may prove interesting.
You get the weird stuff thrown in with the “It must be old so it must be worth a fortune” type lots.
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Heh! I remember the ads for these. Never saw one in person. When I lived in Japan, I took a trip off-base and purchased a Casio PB-80 at an electronics shop for $36. Had 0.5 K of RAM and BASIC built-in, space for 10 programs, and a databank (shared with program RAM).
It still works. I even have the manuals for it.
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I recall that the Dragon was supposed to be much better than the Tandy
Lol. Oh I love a good mechanical keyboard but this is not it.
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I bought a Micro Color Computer in 1983, because it cost less than a color bar generator, and I could program it to make (shitty) color bars to test my TV set.
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It’s so comforting to see all those mentions of RS-232C. Aside from possibly needing a mechanical converter(probably one of the 25 pin to 9 pin ones), there’s one bus that should still be entirely compatible with modern hardware and software.
Now, on the RAM side, I’m glad we’ve left the past behind. Allegedly the $120 1981 dollars that a 16k RAM kit would run you are ~ 315 present-day dollars. Which would get you 64GB of contemporary RAM without terribly aggressive shopping. That’s the kind of progress I can get behind.
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RS-232C was utterly incompatible with itself. I learned this when working at the Byte Shop in 1978. There is no signal on the entire connector to mean “busy; hold on a moment”, so other random signals were forced to do this job. One printer had its ‘busy’ status on pin 11, another on pin 19, another on pin 4.
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I take it that this is why “hardware flow control” now exists primarily as a checkbox you carefully don’t check, rather than a commonly used feature?
Fortunately, the DE-9 connector only has two possibilities for which pin it could be, so this problem has mostly gone away. But yeah, hardware flow control is not used so much nowadays.
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We just used LaserDiscs. (Some movies came with color bars.)
Yeah, it seems like serial is evolving in the opposite direction from ‘universal serial’. USB sprouts another head and mutates whenever you take your eye off it for an instant; while RS-232, as actually found in the wild, has gradually dwindled from a 25 pin connector with a substantial percentage of those pins actually used for various esoteric things; and toward “RX, TX, GND”.
The “erosion will take care of the rough edges, given geological time” strategy isn’t exactly an exemplary example of standards-making; but many of the rough edges have eroded by informal consensus and sheer exhaustion; despite the fairly shoddy standardization work.
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RS-232 did OK for a standard that was written two decades before personal computers even existed.
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and is still strong - for lab automatization RS-232 is still more common than USB (or ethernet, for that matter).
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