knudsen@ihnss.UUCP (10/03/83)
I too had thought of the possible market value of a compact 6809 machine, oriented towards "serious" (ie, business & SW development) uses. In short, do for the 6809, FLEX, and 0S9 what Osborne did for Z80 and CP/M (& stay in business a little longer?) Two flavors: (1) Essentially a Coco (64K and no memory mgmt), with a 6845 text-video chip (80x24 chars) instead of 6847, one or more real UARTs and full RS-232 handshakes, full ASCII keyboard, and replace one of those 6821s with a 6522 to get Hardware Timers. No ROM except a little disk bootup for FLEX or OS9 (that saves at least $200 in chips and Microsoft royalties w.r.t. the Coco). This box could be mass-produced to sell for $400 less disk and monitor. With monitor and 2 5.25" disks, should be priced in the Morrow/Kaypro range, ie, bare-bones Apple or $1500. If FLEX or OS9 were as popular as CP/M, we'd already be knee-deep in these boxes. (2) Add memory management, 256K DRAMs (next year?), bury a 10-20 Mbyte winchester insside, just one floppy for entry & backup. Optional extra RS-232 ports to support multiple users on LEVEL 2 OS9. Optional synchronous lines for networking. With the Winnie we're talking at least $3000, but it would still give GIMIX et al a hell of a scare. Of course, you can say that with all that supporting hardware, why not go to a 68000? Because most business applications (esp word proc) don't need more than an 8-bit bus. Does anyone make a video chip that supports both 80-col chars AND color graphics? Would be nice if verssion (1) could be poked into "Coco-look-alike" mode. mike k