Replying to a message of William Schaub to Bob Ackley:

 WS>   Re: Color Computer users
 WS>   By: Bob Ackley to William Schaub on Fri May 14 2010 06:27
 WS> am

 >> Replying to a message of William Schaub to papabill:

 WS>>>   Re: Color Computer users

 WS>>>   By: papabill to All on Wed Oct 14 2009 08:12 am

 >>>> Are there any "Coco" users out there?


 WS>>> My very first computer ever was a coco my parents got it
 WS>>> for me and my sister in 1985.

 >> My first was a kit.  A Heathkit H-89 that I built in 1978.

  WS> I wasn't even born in 1978, That was about two years before 
 WS> I was born.

.  You were still in diapers when I retired from the Air Force
(Dec 1, 1983).

 WS> I wish I had been able to build a heathkit and understand
 WS> the hardware better

I have 3 H-89s.  One of them was one of the last fifty machines sold by Heathkit -
and that was in 1985 (they were cleaning out their warehouse stock).  IIRC I paid
about $150 for it, brand new kit in the box (except for the CRT, which I had to order
separately); the H-89 kit originally cost $1,800 (and that's what I paid for my first
one).  That's for a machine that used an 8-bit processor (the Z-80), was limited to
64KB of RAM (and came with 48KB, the other 16KB was an extra-cost add on kit) and
one single sided hard sectored floppy disk drive that had a capacity of
90KB per disk.

Heath did bring out a hard disk for the H-89, it was designated the H-67.  Durn
thing is about 17" wide, 18" deep, 9" high, weighs 110
pounds and cost $5,999.00.
Storage capacity a whopping TEN megabytes .  It does, however,
have a built-in
eight inch floppy disk drive for doing backups.

 WS> in the process. I also wish I had had a chance to learn
 WS> assembler back then

There's nothing stopping you from learning it now...

FWIW, back in 1976 when I went to programming school the first six weeks were
problem solving, we didn't do anything but solve problems - and document those
solutions.  The next five weeks were assembler, followed a week of FORTRAN
and a week of COBOL.  When you've mastered problem solving you are a programmer,
the rest of it is just coding - and you can do that in any language.

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