Radio Shack TRS-80 Vs. Commodore 64: Battle of the Titans 135
Nerval's Lobster writes "The one and only Jeff Cogswell is back with a new article comparing the two biggest competitors in the home-computing business: the Commodore 64 and the Radio Shack TRS-80. What does he have to say about these absolutely cutting-edge machines? The TRS-80 simply can't stand up to the awe-inspiring Commodore 64, which features the latest processor from MOS Technology, the 6510. Best of all, the C-64s graphics processor can display up to 16 colors simultaneously, and it can create a full screen made up of 320 x 200 'dots.' But the TRS-80 has some good points, as well, including a whopping 512 K of memory (not that you'll ever use that much, anyway). As Cogswell writes: 'Let's cover these two bad boys and provide a totally unbiased review unencumbered by any alleged kickbacks (including a brand new daisy wheel printer and a case of Schiltz Beer) from Commodore, the maker of the awesome machine known as the Commodore 64.'"
Re:TRS-80 all the way, baby! (Score:4, Informative)
I wanted an Atari - my father got me a CoCo 1 with 16KB of memory... I was so mad - how was I going to play missile command on this!
Anyways, what a great starting machine for the day. It forced me to program, as I didn't have the recorder to save my work or load other peoples programs. A little later on, as I moved up in models, I was introduced to OS-9 and one of its programming languages Basic09. There was some jealousy over some of my friends with C64 - they had a way better game catalog. In the end though, the CoCo I think fostered a better learning experience, at least for myself. Plus Dungeons of Daggorath still has to be one of the best games I ever played back then... I even ran my first BBS off a CoCo. When I did finally get my first IBM compatible (another Tandy) - I was a little dismayed at the assembly language being "broken" and how hard it was to multi-task with MS-DOS (unless something like deskview was installed, and that was unstable at best)...
I still have a CoCo 3 laying around... I should replace my wifes computer with it as an April Fool.....
Re:TRS-80 all the way, baby! (Score:5, Informative)
I used to upset my C64 friends... The CoCo's casette deck would load a program FASTER than the C64 Floppy drive. C64 was cool, but the CoCo was the real hackers computer. I had 4 banks of ram that I could easy switch to, and with the completely exposed Address and data bus it was brain dead easy to interface the computer to things in the world. I had built a XY plotter that interfaced to the cartridge bus and even built my own eeprom cartridge that would take advantage of the paged ram I added.