The CompuColor pretty much sucked. (Score 2, Interesting)

The CompuColor. This was a great machine. It only had an 8080 processor but was one of the very first "off the shelf" machines to come with amazing (from memory) 128x128 8-color graphics. It also had the disk-drive built into the color screen with a whole 84Kbytes of formatted storage.

What about the downsides of the CompuColor?

• Very poorly put together (I worked in a computer store at the time, and clearly recall the owner/technician/salesman cursing the unreliability of the thing. It was hard to keep the display model working, let alone the one's he'd sold...
• You had to buy pre-formatted floppies from the manufacturer. The "format floppy" command was really justan "erase" command. The OS couldn't (wouldn't) format floppies on its own.
• The pixel-addresssible graphics mode was really broken up into little regions that (coincidentally?) were about the same size/shape as a character cell (my recollection: 384x256, which would be 64x32 character cells at 6x8 pixels each, but I may be wrong). You could only have two colors in any one cell: foreground and background. If you drew two lines that crossed in a cell, the color of the pixels from the first line would coerce the pixels from the first line into the new color. So, while you could individually address all those pixels, you couldn't really control the colors properly.

On the plus side, it had a really cool color Star Trek game, that used the limited graphics in ingenious ways. I think it had a very flexible character generator, and the game was all done by creating a custom character set that had little enterprises, klingons and romulans...

I'm not even going to get started on the NorthStar Horizon (64K of RAM!, dual floppies!, case made of WOOD!), or I'll start showing my age.

Whoops, too late.