back in those days we used a radio shack color computer. While the 64 had superior sound and graphics, the color computer had better disk i/o and a better processor. What impressed me alot about the 64 was the video chip had 9 sprite levels, which made programming games alot easier, the chip itself even had a 10th sprite level that could accept a video signal, so you could effectively create text or graphics with video behind it (like you see on the news for example) the 64 itself didn't support it, but the chip did. and SID was extremely advanced for sound. The biggest drawback to the 64 was it's disk drive. It had a serial interface, so loading off of a disk took just as long as tape. The color computer had a true disk system that supported both floppy and hard drives.
Actually, the CO-CO had NO drive controllers, or ANY hardware I/O. Drive controllers were optional (but often "bundled" so so many don't realize that). Hard drives were only available with OS-9, and not available until the mid-80's.
While the 6809 was a more powerful processor, it ran at a slower speed (.89 Mhz, as opposed to the C-64's 1 Mhz) until the Co-Co 3 in 1986 (the Amiga was introduced one year later and blew the doors off the Co-Co in pretty much every way).
With the C-64, the drive controller was part of the floppy drive. This helped keep the cost of the computer low, but increased the cost of the drives considerably - about $250 each IIRC. Since the drive had it's own processor and memory, there were some neat tricks that allowed yo to use that memory, and even the processor, to "supplement" the on-board resources.
With the Co-Co, which had no I/O specific hardware, ALL i/o operations were handled in software - and used 100% of the processor's cycles. While the Co-Co would load a program faster, any disk i/o performed during run time meant putting the program "on hold" for the duration of the disk access. With a C-64, you could perform disk i/o in the background - loading new sections of a map for instance - without having the game suddenly freeze for a few seconds. This is one of the reasons why many games - especially flight sims - never got ported to the Co-Co.
Overall we viewed the coco as the better system as it was far more powerful of a computer system, yet "good graphics and sound" goes a long way, and the C64 had those advantages. The color computer also had a rudimentary OS with functions to get a directory entry, copy, delete, etc. C64 lacked ANY OS whatsoever, so to get a directory listing (get this) you had to type:
LOAD "$",8,1
LIST
to get a folder listing!!!
Meanwhile Color Computer's DOS had "dir" for directory. Oh, the fun of the old days... looking back both machines were good in their areas of strength, and overall albeit different strengths, about equal machines.
Early Co-Cos used MSDOS, later models first loaded the MSDOS to RAM, then applied a Microware patch during boot-up. Unfortunately, this caused quite a variety of bugs and hardware incompatibilities. With the CoCo 3, OS-9 (a Unix type OS) was available, starting in '86. By this time, GEOS was available for the C-64, which provided a Mac-like graphical environment using the joystick as a mouse. GEOS could be loaded from floppy, and was also available in cartridge form.
Of course, by '86, Commodore was focused on it's upcoming Amiga platform which rendered the C-64/128 and Co-Co's more or less obsolete.
Until the Co-Co 3, the only thing a Co-Co did better than a C-64 was floating point math, which it did about 10% faster - but only if there was no I/O going on at the time. The Co-Co couldn't even display lower case letters without a hardware modification, and the Co-Co 1 had a "chicklet" keyboard almost as unusable as the Sinclair's membrane - so it was useless in an office setting. It had lousy graphics and sound, plus the I/O issue, so it wasn't much good for the home market due to poor gaming performance.
The Co-Co 3 was starting to become a real computer (it even had lower case letters and could display 8 colors at once!), but internal politics at Tandy killed it off in favor of the Tandy-1000 - a particularly poor IBM imitation that pretty much ended Tandy's aspirations in the PC market.
