On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 12:44 PM Liam Proven via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> > And whereas it's easy to forget now, I think the roles of colour and > sound in gaining the attention of children is underestimated. > > I look at the specs and capabilities of something like the Acorn Atom > in 1980 -- _way_ ahead of a ZX80 or ZX81, and to me now, looking back, > far more desirable (and far more expensive, of course). But to me at > 12? Black and white, silent? REPEAT...UNTIL loops? *BOOOORING!* Err, the Acorn Atom could do colour at least in some graphics modes. It used the 6847 video chip that turned up in the Tandy Color Computer/Dragon. Maybe the base machine was monochrome video only, but there was a PAL encoder board available (offically from Acorn) that fitted inside. > > > ham radio shack was slang for wherever a amateur radio hobbyist set up. > > Other than that, "shack" referred to an improvised/impromptu dwelling, FWIW, 'Shack' is a commonly used in the UK in the amateur radio sense. When I was at university (late 1980s) the amateur radio club had a litteral wooden shed on a nearby farm containing the transmitters and receivers. It was always called the 'shack' > > such as ones made of tar paper, so it had similar negative connotations to > > everybody but amateur radio. When they wanted to move upscale, they set > > up "Tandy Computer Centers/Stores" to start to get away from the "Radio > > Shack name. It was ABOUT 1983 that they discontinued using the "Radio > > Shack" name. Transition is apparent betwen models of the Model 100 and > > the "Color Computer". > > Aha! > > Bear in mind, as I said, we didn't have most TRS-80 models here. The Yes we did!. The only TRS-80 that I know not to have been officially sold in the UK was the Color Computer 3 (the one with the MMU, up to 512K RAM, 80 column screen etc). I had to have mine sent from a dealer in the States. The Model 1, Model 3, Model 4 family were all sold over here in Tandy shops. So were the 'business' machines with 8" drives -- the Model 2, Model 12 and Model 16. And the laptops, Model 100 and Model 200 at least. I _think_ the Tandy 2000 IBM-incompatible was sold over here too. The Tandy 1000 series and later PC compatibles were certainly sold in Tandy shops (but I wasn't interested in those). > CoCo was the 6809 one, right? The underlying reference design was put > in a different case and sold as the Dragon 32 here. There were a few changes (the most annoying one being that the basic tokens were in a different order so a tokenised program saved on a Dragon would not load into a Color Computer or vice versa). But yes, both based on the Motorola application notes for the 6883 SAM chip. Was OS-9 ever officially sold for the Dragon? It was for the Color Computer range (and was sold in the UK in Tandy shops, along with BASIC-09, Pascal, C compiler, etc) > > I never got an Amstrad, but I was impressed with the 3" disk design, and > > had some 3" drives. > > Hitachi designed I believe. Hitachi certainly made 3" drives (I have some), they may well have been the originators of that disk. I don't think the Amstrad drives were Hitachi though, the ones I saw were nowhere near as well made as the Hitachi drives I have -tony
