I had an X10 setup for years, think of it as a sophisticated plug in lamp timer. (The boxes with the 24 hour dials with the "on" and "off" levers you slide around it) X10 was great for turning the outside lights on at night and off again in the morning. No more coming home to a dark house for me. (And no need to keep the lights on all day) Both of those units displayed accepted simple programs from the host computer, and then could be disconnected. There was no need to fire up the computer (coco or otherwise) to turn on a light, the unit would operate independently once it was programmed. Radio shack also sold a 16 button wired remote you'd put on an end table to allow you to manually override the programmed timers if you wanted to turn a light on remotely. Radio Shack sold the X10 products under their "Plug-n-Power" banner, they sold plug in lamp controllers, appliance controllers (Good for electric blankets to pre-heat them in the winter before bed) and light switch replacement units. The X10 technology was superseded by Insteon, which actually supported X10 for a while - before completely supplanting it. X10 would transmit their signals on the household wiring during the zero crossing of the current 120v AC phase. Since houses in the US had two phases separated from one another - if you had a controller on one phase and a receiver on the other - you would need a 240v bridge to allow the signals to cross them. Modern day equivalents are Google home, and Apples HomeKit controllers, along with Zigbee et al. Modern day units no longer use the house wiring for communication purposes - they use your home wifi network or bluetooth. This eliminates the need to bridge the phases and increases the range potential between the transmitting unit and the receiver.
In defense of the DVI - a two-drive machine and monitor cost less than a Model 4 disk system. You'd be able ro come back from class or your sales trip or your research or interview and then use a full size bright 80 column screen to clean up your notes and turn them into a paper you could submit. It let your 100 become the keyboard to a desktop system -- a keyboard you could detach and use as a laptop on the go. Pretty nifty
The Model 4 cassette based computer had no actual Model 4 cassette programs available for it. You could only run already-outdated Model III tape programs
None of the "monitors" (TV sets) pictured with the CoCo 2 in the catalogs actually matched the CoCo 2's design and coloration. The CoCo 1 had the TRS-80 video display whose case mostly matched the CoCo 1's silver. The CoCo 3 had the CM-8 which for all its flaws actually matched the CoCo 3. But not the CoCo 2
The MC-10 was a disaster not just in terms of being a quickly canceled flop.. its use of money and parts thereby denied to the CoCo is arguably responsible for the CoCo 2 not having improved graphics or sound. This in turn helped pave the way for Commodore to cement the 64 as the dominant machine of this class
"Dungeons of Daggorath" is deservedly legendary but has a bug that is not well-known. Because of a programming or data entry error, the first two shields you get are useless - blocking no or almost no damage from conventional attacks - the kind you're going to be encountering in the early stages of the game. Their strong protection against magical attack is an error and a useless one at that given how you're not going to be attacked that way early on
The book "Tandy's Little Wonder" said that Tandy's official CoCo hard drive controller cartridge was bad because it could only work with a few hard disk models - all from Tandy. And weren't those gigantic early Tandy hard disk drives worthy of criticism for their sheer size?
The official CoCo 3 monitor - the CM-8 - deserves more criticism because it lacked a composite port and thus could not show many CoCo 1/2 programs in color. You had to go 3rd party like Magnavox or Sony and use a special third party cable for the RGB picture to be able to show both RGB and composite color. Speaking of which, the CoCo 2 should have had a composite port but didn't. You'd think years of 3rd party manufacturers offering composite mods for the CoCo 1 would have made Tandy wake up and add it to the CoCo 2 but no. Combined with a very limited color pallete, no hardware sprites, no ability to delegate graphics and sound tasks to dedicated chips to free up the CPU, made the CoCo 2 embarrassingly weak and outdated when it arrived in comparison to its contemporaries like the Atari 800 line, the Commodore 64, and the Coleco Adam (despite the latter' bugs).
The CGP-220 looked drool worthy and gorgeous in the catalog but it was slow, its text printing didn't look great, and didn't it have substantial limitations in terms of what colors it could print especially next to each other? Thus preventing it from being able to actually print what the screen showed?
A++
I had an X10 setup for years, think of it as a sophisticated plug in lamp timer. (The boxes with the 24 hour dials with the "on" and "off" levers you slide around it)
X10 was great for turning the outside lights on at night and off again in the morning.
No more coming home to a dark house for me. (And no need to keep the lights on all day)
Both of those units displayed accepted simple programs from the host computer, and then could be disconnected.
There was no need to fire up the computer (coco or otherwise) to turn on a light, the unit would operate independently once it was programmed.
Radio shack also sold a 16 button wired remote you'd put on an end table to allow you to manually override the programmed timers if you wanted to turn a light on remotely.
Radio Shack sold the X10 products under their "Plug-n-Power" banner, they sold plug in lamp controllers, appliance controllers (Good for electric blankets to pre-heat them in the winter before bed) and light switch replacement units.
The X10 technology was superseded by Insteon, which actually supported X10 for a while - before completely supplanting it.
X10 would transmit their signals on the household wiring during the zero crossing of the current 120v AC phase.
Since houses in the US had two phases separated from one another - if you had a controller on one phase and a receiver on the other - you would need a 240v bridge to allow the signals to cross them.
Modern day equivalents are Google home, and Apples HomeKit controllers, along with Zigbee et al.
Modern day units no longer use the house wiring for communication purposes - they use your home wifi network or bluetooth.
This eliminates the need to bridge the phases and increases the range potential between the transmitting unit and the receiver.
In defense of the DVI - a two-drive machine and monitor cost less than a Model 4 disk system. You'd be able ro come back from class or your sales trip or your research or interview and then use a full size bright 80 column screen to clean up your notes and turn them into a paper you could submit. It let your 100 become the keyboard to a desktop system -- a keyboard you could detach and use as a laptop on the go. Pretty nifty
The Model 4 cassette based computer had no actual Model 4 cassette programs available for it. You could only run already-outdated Model III tape programs
The original CoCo joysticks had metal sticks. I got stuck with the plastic sticks and one bent so I wished I'd had the metal sticks.
None of the "monitors" (TV sets) pictured with the CoCo 2 in the catalogs actually matched the CoCo 2's design and coloration. The CoCo 1 had the TRS-80 video display whose case mostly matched the CoCo 1's silver. The CoCo 3 had the CM-8 which for all its flaws actually matched the CoCo 3. But not the CoCo 2
The MC-10 was a disaster not just in terms of being a quickly canceled flop.. its use of money and parts thereby denied to the CoCo is arguably responsible for the CoCo 2 not having improved graphics or sound. This in turn helped pave the way for Commodore to cement the 64 as the dominant machine of this class
"Dungeons of Daggorath" is deservedly legendary but has a bug that is not well-known. Because of a programming or data entry error, the first two shields you get are useless - blocking no or almost no damage from conventional attacks - the kind you're going to be encountering in the early stages of the game. Their strong protection against magical attack is an error and a useless one at that given how you're not going to be attacked that way early on
The book "Tandy's Little Wonder" said that Tandy's official CoCo hard drive controller cartridge was bad because it could only work with a few hard disk models - all from Tandy.
And weren't those gigantic early Tandy hard disk drives worthy of criticism for their sheer size?
The official CoCo 3 monitor - the CM-8 - deserves more criticism because it lacked a composite port and thus could not show many CoCo 1/2 programs in color. You had to go 3rd party like Magnavox or Sony and use a special third party cable for the RGB picture to be able to show both RGB and composite color.
Speaking of which, the CoCo 2 should have had a composite port but didn't. You'd think years of 3rd party manufacturers offering composite mods for the CoCo 1 would have made Tandy wake up and add it to the CoCo 2 but no. Combined with a very limited color pallete, no hardware sprites, no ability to delegate graphics and sound tasks to dedicated chips to free up the CPU, made the CoCo 2 embarrassingly weak and outdated when it arrived in comparison to its contemporaries like the Atari 800 line, the Commodore 64, and the Coleco Adam (despite the latter' bugs).
Wouldn't the Model I's Expansion Interface notoriously unreliable?
The CGP-220 looked drool worthy and gorgeous in the catalog but it was slow, its text printing didn't look great, and didn't it have substantial limitations in terms of what colors it could print especially next to each other? Thus preventing it from being able to actually print what the screen showed?