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by jacquesm 915 days ago
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 :)
1 comments
ansible 915 days ago
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.

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jacquesm 915 days ago
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.

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