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Radio Shack TRS-80 Vs. Commodore 64: Battle of the Titans
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.'"
Sorry to hear about your warts.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
Once again the TI 99/4a gets left out. Anybody want a Jello Pudding Pop?
And to think all my friends and family said that conversational Klingon course I took was a colossal wast of time!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
For all you know he may find anal warts hilarious and is enjoying April Fools Slashdot.
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.....
My mother and father were programmers, so they came up with many creative uses of the C64. In his free time, my father would program math-based games to teach us multiplication tables and would allow us to play chess. Mom was the only one to get copies of games for us to play. In general, I have many warm memories of sitting in front of the tv playing games on the ol' C64 with my siblings. I also remember solving boring math problems. In all, I played plenty of games and excelled in math enough to obtain a PhD. I have admit the C64 played a big part in that. I know nothing about TRS-80, but I'm sure my childhood would have played out the same way. As a professional, I understand the technical differences between the hardware, but still...
my mom posts on slashdot.
Timex-Sinclair baby!
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
"Fake" doesn't automatically equal "Funny".
Am I the only one who would like to see a real review?
I get the joke "hur dur, let's pretend we're reviewing some really old computers", but I would genuinely like to see benchmarks and stuff.
It would also be funnier to compare the c64 to the WiiU, complete with benchmarks.
Slashdot is completely useless the rest of the year too.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Dude.. MSX came almost 5 years later, mostly by manufacturors who realized they already missed the boat. Commodore was king - with the Vic20, the C64 and later the Amiga. Competition came from the british Sinclair, Tandy, Philips, the BBC, Acorn, Atari, and a few more.
When MSX finally came to market, most of those hobby computer users were already making the switch to the slowly-getting-affordable IBM clone pc's. MSX was outdated at the time it was released. It was also not as standard as it suggested it was. And was way outperformed on graphics and audio by the Amiga before MSX ever got popular.
Get your facts - MSX has never a competitor of the C64.
Got a Commodore 64 in 1985 and it still works. Amazing how things made back then were made to last
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Redirecting Isaac Asimov's output onto William Shatner is just rude.
I took it as a nostalgia piece, and actually found it to be a welcome relief from all of the other April Fools things.
A... robot. May not... InjureA human BEING or... through inaction, ALLOW a... human being to.. ComeToHarm. Mister.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The 1541 was a *serial* communicator, which kind of wasted the possible data-transfer rates off a floppy disk itself.
I recall a review of the C64 as a machine for your kid, which offered in the unkind review comment: "For both game-playing and educational software, the slow floppy disk may test the patience of most children. In fact, it would be possible for some smaller children to actually grow up while waiting for their game to start".
I saw things done on the coCo that blew away the C64 in graphic.
Obviously you haven't kept up with the C64 demoscene. Might want to do that before you claim the CoCo had better graphics ability than the C64.
And it still did not cover up the fac tthat the CoCo floppy drive was 80X faster than the C64.
This could be mitigated through a number of ways with third-party products on the C64. Also, the C128 combined with 1571, 1581, or CMD drive had built-in fast serial.
Oh and the CoCo supported 4 of them out of the box.
No, it didn't. You had to buy a separate controller card in order to have support for even one drive, let alone four. The Commodore machines had built-in support for multiple floppy drives going all the way back to the PET, without the need for a disk controller. The original drive manuals always mentioned devices 8 through 11, and I think it's technically possible to use devices above 11.
Before you think I'm some anti-CoCo nut, I owned both a CoCo 2 and a C64 growing up. I know which machine I preferred. However, I did enjoy both, the CoCo did have its merits. However, to say that the CoCo was better than the C64 in technical ability is just pure fanboyism.
FC Closer