[jacquesm]

CoCo had a UK clone made called the Dragon 32, which under the hood actually shipped with 64K ram, some careful tweaking and copying of the ROM to it's own spot allowed you to switch that upper 32K on and suddenly your ROM was RAM which meant you could extend the basic interpreter. Oh and you could also double the clock with a single poke 65495,0 .

[ansible]

Yep, we did both of those back in the day. The bank switching was needed for ROM copies that didn't relocate as easily, or if you were modifying the BASIC interpreter itself.

Towards the end of the 1980's I upgraded to a CoCo3, with 512KiB of RAM (wow! so much), a disk drive (156KiB) and OS-9 level 2. Also got the C compiler for OS-9 when it was on sale (discontinued).

My final setup would have the entire operating system loaded into RAM, with a RAM disk, upon which I'd copy in the C compiler. And display it via a glorious 80 columns on a monochrome monitor. It was with all that I started writing my own vi clone, but didn't get too far.

[jacquesm]

Oh wow that was a nice bit of kit for those days. For me the route was: TRS-80 at work -> TRS-80 pocket computer -> KIM-1 -> Dragon 32 -> BBC Model B -> Atari ST -> 286 -> 386

And a bunch of homebrew in between. But a 6809 with 512K RAM would have been very nice :)

[ansible]

The CoCo3 ran fairly well, though it did run hot. The higher speed variant of the 6809 in the CoCo3 was still fundamentally a 8/16-bit processor. The main upgrade compared to the older versions was a bank-switching chip. You could apparently map any 8KiB of the 512KiB to any of 8 positions in the 64KiB address space of the 6809. It was sort of like segment registers... except less flexible.

I sorely wanted an Atari 520ST when they first came out, but it was more than I could afford at the time.

After graduating from university, I eventually got a Gateway 386 with a whopping 4MiB of RAM. In part to play Wing Commander and Castle Wolfstein. I've mostly been a PC guy since, though I've dabbled in RISC-V more recently. Not ready yet to make that my main desktop though.

[jacquesm]

I've never even seen a CoCo3 in the wild here in Europe, and that's in spite of having worked for Tandy/RS. Maybe that was after the pull-out? That Dragon had a fantastic keyboard compared to the CoCo by the way, and that was one of the main reasons why I picked it.

The ST was my first 'serious' computer, with a massive amount of memory and an optional hard drive it really unlocked a whole bunch of capabilities, such as compiled languages and more RAM to work with, I used it for all kinds of commercial projects. In many ways X86 felt like a step back after working with the ST, especially after I figured out how to add more RAM to it. It also had a whole slew of useful ports including MIDI.

Today I use an old Thinkpad as my daily driver and it's funny, it's probably the oldest piece of hardware that I have here (a W540, 9 years old, $300 second hand including the 32G RAM in it), but it performs admirably and it uses very little power (everything on solar here so that matters a lot).

But I've been eyeing that RISC-V stuff as well and like you I'm still in hold mode. But it's getting closer.