>a lot of key early gaming milestones happened on the Apple II, for a variety of reasons. One was the extremely clever floppy drive controller made by Woz. You

>a lot of key early gaming milestones happened on the Apple II, for a variety of reasons. One was the extremely clever floppy drive controller made by Woz. You could have actual decent sized games that would load in seconds. I disagree that the floppy drive was the reason for Apple II being so influential in early computer gaming. Being the only inexpensive, readily available early microcomputer with color support until the Atari 8-bit c. 1980 was why. >I know there's a lot of weird nostalgia for waiting large fractions of an hour for screeching bits to load off of tape, but that wasn't great for complex games. I don't disagree on the weirdness of the tape nostalgia among non-North America computer owners (and it's not even universal; the 1541 was widespread among German C64 owners, while Spectrum never got anywhere there). But even without the Disk II, I'm sure that the likes of Bill Budge and Dan Gorlin would have chosen the Apple II, if only because there was no better alternative.