Quote:

The Radio Shack Color Computer came out in 1980, three years after their TRS-80 Model 1, one year after the business-oriented Model II, and about the same time as the much more popular Model III. The Color Computer, with LOGO, never really caught on.



Depends on whom you ask. True, the CoCo never had the mass appeal of the C-64 or the Apple II. To the cognoscenti it was marketed as a programmer's machine. IIRC, LOGO was presented as an "easy to learn" programming language for children. What almost no one knows is that it supported OS-9, a Windows-like color environment years before either Apple or IBM advanced beyond monochrome graphics. Though it only supported 8-bit graphics, there was a fast switching mode between two color sets, so a devoted hacker could display high-resolution 16-bit color images.

I got started with them as a gift from my stepfather--the EEE who was at the meeting where the first Apple was introduced? He set our family up with two 64 CoCo's hotrodded with 128 Kb RAM each. I later picked up a CoCo 3 with 512 Kb and two fast 5-1/4" double-sided floppies. I wrote a book with that machine, and also learned several versions of BASIC. I even learned DEC VAX, to which OS-9 was amazingly similar, for a computer science course.

A large part of the machine's downfall was that it used cartridges for programs as well as for a hardware interface. If the cartridge became dislodged while the power was on it smoked the CPU. The Motorola MC-6809 chip could be easily and inexpensively replaced by a hobbyist, but this was hardly family friendly.

I think that this is in part relevant to this thread. Hobbyist magazines of the time would present programs in several versions of BASIC so that users could adapt a routine to whatever machine they happened to own. Being the insanely voracious reader that I was I would read and retain everything, so I could program, at least at a rudimentary level, in BASIC on whatever machine I happened to be sitting at. It was a lot of fun.

I always lusted after an Apple IIe and the music hardware and software that was available for it, but by the time I could afford it I was into PCs instead. (I traded a very nice Takamine 12-string for my first PC. Sometimes I wonder about that decision, but in the end it has been worth it.) That slowed me down as far as computers and music production for about a decade, but that path led me directly to where I am now as a BIAB user and forum member.

As always throughout this course of events I am grateful to be a part and intensely curious to see where it will all lead.

"My primary musical instrument is the personal computer."