[ale] Need Tractor Feed Dot Matrix printer

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Fri, 2005-05-27 at 11:46 -0400, tfreeman at intel.digichem.net wrote:
> On Fri, 27 May 2005, Sean Kilpatrick wrote:
> 
> > On Friday 27 May 2005 06:52 am, aaron wrote:
> > | Your list of 1980's era computer contemporaries relying on Basic might 
> > have 
> > | also included the Texas Instruments Home Computer, the TI-99 (1981), 
> > though 
> > | those were 16 bit systems as well.
> > 
> > 
> > Weren't the first Trash-80s 8-bit boxes? They came with the same
> > cassette tape drives and low-density, single-sided, 5.25 floppy
> > drives as the Commodores and the Ataris.

> As I recall, TRS-80 was considered an 8-bit system, as it was based upon 
> the Z-80 processor. The earliest systems shipped with only cassette tape 
> drives, with floppy drives available later. The Z-80 used an 8-bit word, 
> but used 16 bit addressing. The processor of the Apple II was truely 
> 8-bit, but that opens up a whole new can of wormy discussion. 8-).

	The TRS-80 Coco (Color Computer), which was a different beast entirely,
was a 6809 processor.  That was a 16 bit processor (internal) with an 8
bit bus (external).  Later, you were able to get OS-9 for it (the "9" in
OS-9 comes from the 680"9" for which it was designed though it was later
ported to the 68000+ family line and is still a popular embedded OS).

> Floppy drives of the era had a tremendous range of formats, styles, 
> desities, etc. Hard sectored, soft sectored, 8 inch, 5.25 inch, what have 
> you.
> 
> 
> Radio Shack also released a TRS style machine based upon the 69000 which 
> ran a very early version of Xenix if I recall correctly.

	Never ran into that.  I did have two Coco's (one original silver and
one later while Coco-2) running OS-9 w/ multiple floppy drives plus
40Meg MMDF hard drives.  Multiprocessing system w/ dial-in all in 128Meg
of RAM (with the original silver Coco, you had to solder the second bank
of 64Meg on top of the first back with a bank select pulled out to a I/O
pin).

> > Sean
> > 
> > 
> 
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