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Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

The 6809 was nice, but I think the CoCo otherwise was crap. Aside from the 32 column display and awful color scheme, the built-in serial port was bit-banged. This meant that floppy drive and serial access could not happen at the same time. This is very relevant when trying to use OS-9.

There was an external serial port as an option, but there was only one slot. So you also had to buy a slot expander (a Multi-Pak).

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Note that hardware flow control makes the bit banger a lot more reliable than it would be otherwise.

I had the bit banger connected to a compact printing terminal from DEC that ran at 300 baud and had an acoustic coupler so you could log into 300 baud services with nothing but the terminal. There was not a lot of risk that this device would overflow your buffers.

I had the multi pak and the external uart. The entry level price of the coco was low but I think I got most of the peripherals available for it, particularly the disks were crazy expensive. Adding it all up I must have spent more than I spent on the AT clone that replaced it ($1200)

In most ways the C-64 was a great machine but boy was the disk drive slow.

Perfect system == 6809 + SIO from the Atari800 + C64 SID + IBM PC keyboard + C64 VIC or maybe V9938.

That would be fun!

I would add the MMU from the CoCo 3, so one can bank in lots of RAM with only minor league fuss.

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