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You both forgot the Apple II, which did all that stuff much earlier. Any history that writes out Woz is missing the point. Fundamentally the Atari 800 was an
by ajross 4y ago
You both forgot the Apple II, which did all that stuff much earlier. Any history that writes out Woz is missing the point. Fundamentally the Atari 800 was an attempt to make a better Apple and target it at the home market. The C64 was a better Atari and won the fight. But the paradigm for how both those systems work was settled in the summer of 1978 when the Disk II shipped. That was four and a half years before the Commodore reached market. (Four and a half years after the C64 release we could buy 32 bit PCs and Macs. It's a long, long time in this context.)
- jdswain 4y agoPlus the Apple //e (January 1993) had 80 columns and lower case, which coupled with the disk drive made it useful for business. But I guess the IBM PC (August, 1991) already had all that by then (and the Apple ///, November 1990).
- ajross 4y agoActually 80 column cards[1] were a pretty routine thing in II+ machines from early 1980 on. Those and the Microsoft Z80 CP/M card were more or less the standard "business computer" until the IBM arrived. These got you full ASCII and lower case support, and ran things like WordStar and VisiCalc as well as anything on the market. It wasn't until 83 or 84 that the XT/AT "lots of memory and hard drive as standard" configuration drove DOS software (c.f. Wordperfect, Lotus, Turbo Pascal) farther than the IIe could reach. The Apple spent an absolutely shocking amount of time as "the best computer to buy" for a working professional. It really was way ahead of its time. [1] The Videx Videoterm was most popular, but there were many clones. These were all based on the MC6845 controller with their own framebuffer RAM. In essence they were mostly identical to the IBM MDA card, though without the special character attributes and high-bit graphics characters.