I thought this was pretty great! “Codebase and tooling as extended cognition” is a helpful way of understanding why it just feels so bad when technical debt passes a certain threshold.
I’ve seen this sentiment a lot, and I do understand it but… I just feel so completely differently. The 2000s web, early web apps and Flash, the iPhone and smartphone revolution, the incredible buffet that is modern video games, virtual and mixed reality, and yes, even (imperfect, fraught) AI have all seemed as magical to me as those wonderful things from the 80s and 90s. Probably not coincidentally, many of those things have featured in my working life pretty heavily!
Thanks for taking the time to write that! I really enjoyed hearing about your journey, and I learned a fair bit about the Coco too, which wasn’t really known in my part of the world. Sounds like a great little machine, actually!
Yes, it was quite decent and attracted a strong community of advanced hobbyists who were attracted by the 6809 CPU's power. The Coco had quite a lot of third-party hardware upgrades made by hobbyist garage companies and by leveraging these it could be inexpensively upgraded to quite a nice system, much like the Apple II's expansion capability - except the Coco had no internal slots so we had to solder wires to chip pins (another good learning lesson :-)).
Radio Shack wasn't really a full computer company like Atari, Commodore, Apple, Sinclair, etc. They were primarily an electronics retailer who did their own manufacturing to drive down costs but only dabbled in original computer design. While they did a few somewhat unique designs like the Model 1, 2, 3, 4 series of 6502 machines, they tended to stick close to designs based on off-the-shelf chip manufacturer parts and didn't often do custom chips. Some of their computers were even private label rebrands of other manufacturer's computers, like the Model 100/200 and all the Pocket Computers.
Because of this, Radio Shack's Color Computer was a straight off-the-shelf implementation of Motorola's 6809 system reference design - and Motorola had no cool graphics hardware support in their 6847 video chip. However, the upside of no GFX hardware was all that money went to the CPU which was two to three times more expensive than the 6502 or Z80. In fact, Woz wanted to use the 6809's earlier ancestor the 6800 in the Apple I but they were far too expensive at the time. Many don't know that most of the team that created the 6502 actually worked at Motorola designing the 6800 but were frustrated that when visiting customers all they heard was "Great chip, way too expensive" so they left and founded MOSTEK to create a cheaper, less powerful 6800 clone. Their first CPU, the 6501, was actually compatible with the 6800 but Motorola sued them so they changed it enough to be incompatible and called it the 6502. Due in part to the lawsuit sapping their resources, MOSTEK started running out of money before completing the 6502 and that's how Commodore was able to buy their own chip company at a good discount.
The UK had the very similar Dragon 32 and 64 computers (and I have both!). They had the same hardware design but included a hardware serial port chip instead of a software bit-banger port. Software was mostly compatible between the Coco and Dragons as they used the same ROM-based Extended Color BASIC licensed from Microsoft. Dragons were also sold in Spain for a while and very briefly in the US by another company Dragon licensed. I think there was also a Coco-alike in Australia but can't recall the name. I don't think of these systems as Coco clones because they were all based on the same Motorola reference design and Microsoft ROM BASIC, which Motorola created to drive sales of their 6809 chip family (6883 system controller, 6847 display chip and 6821 UART).
I had the same reaction, and had to read it three or four times to make sense of it. (Native speaker, with a degree in English.) I think it’s a very hard-to-follow sentence construction.
Is there a mechanism for applying, or were you able to ask via a friend? This is right up my alley — I like the Lobsters format, and have long wished for a game dev-specific take on it!
For a recent side project, I made a short incremental game to teach myself F#. I absolutely loved the experience, so put my hand up to do what turned into a fairly big blog post for the 2024 "F# Advent Calendar".
