> It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed It happened in a matter of a f

> It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed It happened in a matter of a few years. The Apple II was built as a machine capable of running Breakout in software. Woz picked the 6502 (originally for the Apple One) because he could afford it. It wasn't that long after that Commodore released the C64. They chose the 6502 because they'd bought the 6502 fab to protect their calculator business (and then they used it to assemble custom video and audio chips). From there, we were off to the races with respect to larger and larger engineering requirements. Oddly, I wrote a bit about it a few days ago (in the context of John Gruber's recent discussion on the Apple and Commodore microcomputers): https://mschaef.com/c64 https://mschaef.com/c64