Why Apple II Is the World's Best Selling Personal Computer (1978)
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It's not well known that the Apple was not the obvious winner of the three; the TRS-80 was. Every small town in America had Tandy's Radio Shack stores, and even if Radio Shack had a reputation for selling toys and gizmos as opposed to computers, it had a reputation. As a startup, Apple didn't. Commodore wasn't as well known as Tandy but was an established calculator and office-equipment company, with its own semiconductor fab that produced the 6502 CPU that Apple and other rivals used.
And, in fact, until about 1980, the TRS-80 dominated the market. What happened?
* The disk drive. All three computers only used tape storage in 1977, but their makers soon provided disk drives. Tandy's drive is a horrible, unreliable kludge. Commodore's PET disk drives are gigantic monstrosities that are fast and reliable[1] but far too expensive. Steve Wozniak's Disk II is a combination of a brilliantly simple and reliable disk controller, and inexpensive-to-make (and thus highly profitable) drive mechanism, that still run well today, 40 years later.
* Third-party products. Apple published everything needed to create software and hardware for the II. Its slots invited engineers to design cards. The TRS-80 came with a superb BASIC tutorial, but Tandy otherwise kept all technical information secret, hoping to monopolize third-party development.[2] Radio Shack stores were not allowed to sell non-Tandy products, and couldn't carry third-party publications like 80 Micro that by default became the major way companies sold TRS-80 products (since other retailers didn't want to compete with Radio Shack stores). Commodore's Jack Tramiel never ever understood the importance of software development, and the PET fell far behind Tandy and Apple in the US; until the VIC-20 in 1980 most of Commodore's computer sales were in Europe and Canada, where Apple and Tandy didn't compete.
* VisiCalc. Because of the above, VisiCalc was written for the Apple when market share should have caused it to be written for TRS-80 (Dan Fylstra of Personal Software, VisiCalc's publisher, was one of the first owners of the TRS-80). Being only available for Apple massively drove sales of the II; for the first time, people bought a computer to run a specific killer app, as opposed to the other way around. In turn, others chose the II to develop for
Even after 1980, when Apple had clearly gained sales momentum, Tandy still had the bulk of the installed base. 80 Micro's December 1982 issue (https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1982-...) has 484 pages. I'm pretty sure no Apple magazine ever came close to that thickness; the only other computer magazines in history to be that thick are 1) PC Magazine before it went bimonthly in 1984 after the December 1983 issue hit 800 pages, and 2) BYTE. Wayne Green, the publisher of 80 Micro, had by that time written editorials in almost every single issue pleading with Tandy to encourage third-party developers. Tandy didn't relent until the Model 16, introduced that year, had zero third-party software after six months. But by then it was too late.
As fat as they are, reading Tandy magazines like 80 Micro and Rainbow (https://archive.org/details/rainbowmagazine-1983-12/) from the early 1980s is like visiting a sad and barren alternate world; instead of Origin, Epyx, MicroProse, and SSI, there are much cruder-looking ads from tiny companies offering bad clones of popular arcade games.
[1] Two virtues Commodore's later drives did not retain
[2] It's clear in retrospect that TRS-80 was intentionally designed to not be compatible with the existing 8080/Z80 standards. ROM's location in the memory map broke CP/M compatibility, and the expansion bus is not S-100 compatible.
As I mentioned, independent computer stores—the Byte Shops, the Computerlands—didn't bother to carry TRS-80 products, despite the huge customer base, because they understandably didn't think they could compete against Radio Shacks everywhere. Same with toy and department stores that after 1980 became the primary home-computer sales channel for Commodore and Atari. Since company-owned Radio Shacks couldn't carry anything without the Tandy logo, 80 Micro and other magazines became the only way for third-party developers who didn't or couldn't get approval for resale by Radio Shack to reach customers. And since corporate policy prevented Radio Shack clerks from admitting that third-party magazines or products existed (even while a Tandy executive wrote a regular column for 80 Micro, and the company regularly advertised in its pages), the only way a TRS-80 or Color Computer customer knew of this gigantic ecosystem's existence is if a friend told him, or he happened to walk by a newsstand with 80 Micro or Rainbow magazine.
Compare this to Apple. A very important factor in the II's early popularity was school districts buying it to run educational software from MECC like Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand. But this was not inevitable. A teacher or administrator in a rural school district in 1979 looking to purchase computers would naturally look to the Radio Shack in town, but would only have found incredibly crude Tandy-published software. Even with such handicaps Radio Shack had a substantial portion of the educational market, which after 1980 quickly eroded until 1985, when Tandy had an unexpected second computer boom driven by the PC-compatible Tandy 1000.
Funny you should mention that - the original Oregon Trail program (including it source code in BASIC) is on page 132 of the Creative Computing issue!
This is exactly the same time as David Ahl (founder of Creative Computing)'s monumental BASIC Computer Games book. While that book was the single most important source of source code for the earliest personal computer BASIC game programmers, another important resource was articles like this one. BYTE printed source code for important early type-in programs like Star Trek and Hunt the Wumpus into the early 1980s, too.
Well, there are a bunch of game (and other) ads that look pretty cool to me in 2020 (Epyx is on page 355 of 80 Micro.) One issue with games for that system is that graphics are in black and white, but then again so were Space Invaders, Pong, and Asteroids! Not to mention the first version of Tetris. Apple's original Macintosh still had monochrome (but much more detailed) graphics, and many interesting games were made for it.
Most computer game companies were probably tiny in the early 1980s.
It is interesting to think about what the computer industry would look like today if Commodore, Radio Shack and other companies/platforms had managed to keep up with Apple (and DOS/Windows) over the long term.
> Tandy otherwise kept all technical information secret, hoping to monopolize third-party development
Didn't many vintage computers (and other electronics) come with schematics so you could troubleshoot/repair the machines and/or design your own expansions?
You are under the impression that Commodore did not keep up with Apple. As others have said in this thread, the Commodore 64 dominated computer games in the 1980s in the US; Apple was a strong second, until Nintendo on the low end, and PCs on the high end, took over from both after 1988.
Compare the Commodore magazine Compute!'s Gazette for December 1983 (https://archive.org/details/1983-12-computegazette/mode/1up) to the 80 Micro and Rainbow issues I previously cited. It has ads from
* Spinnaker
* Atari
* Epyx
* Orion
* First Star
* Infocom
* Datasoft
* Avalon Hill
* HesWare
* Sierra
* subLogic
* Access
* Adventure International
By 1984 several of the above would disappear because of the video game crash, but at this time all were still well-known publishers on multiple platforms. Of the list, the Tandy magazines probably has ads from Infocom (which published its games on every computer known to man) and maybe subLogic and Adventure International. Tandy desperately tried to revive the Color Computer by finally promoting third-party software, which is why the Color Computer 3 (released in 1986) has some releases like King's Quest III (but not any others in the series).
>Didn't many vintage computers (and other electronics) come with schematics so you could troubleshoot/repair the machines and/or design your own expansions?
Some. Of the three 1977 computers, Apple was by far the best, with complete schematics and Wozniak-authored articles in BYTE with technical details. TRS-80 had, as I mentioned, nothing other than the BASIC tutorial accompanying the computer. Commodore was not as good as Apple but much better than Tandy, and would put out even more detailed documentation for later computers; its Commodore 64 technical manual is considered a classic.
Other companies also varied. Atari had by far the most sophisticated hardware when its 8-bit computers appeared in 1979. It, like Tandy tried to keep technical information to itself, which no doubt handicapped developers attempting to use that hardware, but in 1981 completely changed course by releasing lots of documentation. TI always kept everything to itself until after discontinuing the 99-4A computer after losing against Commodore in a price war. But no company came anywhere close to what IBM did by releasing everything, even source code to its BIOS. The resulting immediate massive development of hardware and accessories by others was hugely important to the PC architecture becoming the industry standard.
Thanks for the interesting summary; what was the last year that you think Commodore was a viable competitor to Apple?
I do wish Apple paid as much attention to gaming on macOS as they do on iOS.
It is cool though that C64 is still a viable game platform in 2020, with products (C64 Mini) that you can buy. ;-)
> TRS-80 had, as I mentioned, nothing other than the BASIC tutorial accompanying the computer
Apparently you could buy this for $9.95: http://www.trs-80.org/trs-80-micro-computer-technical-refere...
Sorry, I should have clarified that I was referring to software development. Radio Shack, as a store chain prominently selling kits and Forrest Mims's books on electronics, would have embarrassed itself by not offering schematics for its computer.
What Tandy did not do was offer software documentation. Read this BYTE article from two years after the TRS-80's release (https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1979-08/1979_08_BYT...), which a) discusses how to implement machine language graphics and b) complains about the complete lack of Tandy documentation that motivated the author to write the article in the first place.
It looks like Radio Shack published this in 1979: http://www.trs-80.org/trs-80-assembly-language-programming/
It also appears that they supplied a machine language monitor/debugger, T-BUG. So armed with a Z-80 manual and a memory map of the system you could probably do basically anything.
Since the system used block character graphics (like ANSI block graphics), and a memory-mapped display, accessing them from assembly language (or any language) seems like it would be trivial unless they somehow kept the video RAM address and character set a secret.
However, it doesn't look like Radio Shack provided official source listings for their firmware the way IBM (and perhaps other companies) did. I expect that greatly helped with the development of software and tools for the IBM PC, as well as the development of compatible machines.
As much as I like modern computers and smartphones (and systems like the Raspberry Pi) which have absurdly higher speed and greater storage than vintage machines, it's always amazing to consider the explosion of creativity and fun that people managed to have with these pioneering "personal computers."
1985-1986, the period of about 18 months after the Amiga came out. You read BYTE magazine from then and it's clear that the magazine (and, more importantly, its readers) viewed the Amiga and the Atari ST as viable, realistic challengers to the Macintosh as leader of mouse-based graphical computing (i.e., anything not IBM/MS-DOS). Neither Commodore nor Atari succeeded in supplanting Apple for reasons I won't get into here.
But you're not asking the right question. Apple itself was having a very difficult time in convincing corporate customers that Macintosh was the answer to anything. Everyone acknowledged that Macintosh's user interface and software were excellent. But DOS was good enough, had a gigantic software library, and by the end of 1986 it was possible to pay $1000 for a PC clone that could run dad's spreadsheets he brought home, and also run Flight Simulator for him and educational games for the kids. The one exception was creative types; desktop publishing and graphic design, with the Laserwriter's PostScript capability, let Apple keep Macintosh alive, while the Apple II line kept bringing in cash even though the PC was eating it and everything else non-DOS alive.
By 1988, although the Commodore 64 still had the largest home computer installed base, the PC was growing so quickly that everyone knew that it would soon take over. Meanwhile, Nintendo was so popular that in one year it sold as the entire C64 installed base since 1982. So every game publisher began shifting to PC and/or consoles. Apple's also huge II installed base also kept it afloat as mentioned above, and the significant educational market let Apple keep producing II models until the early 1990s, almost exactly the same time as when Commodore went bankrupt and discontinued the C64. But realistically, neither the C64 nor the II had been viable markets for software or hardware companies since about 1990.
Apple survived because by the early 1990s Macintosh sales were finally trending upward, with the continuing creative market joined for the first time by substantial home and educational demand thanks to the low-cost Classic and LC models. But the relentless growth and dominance of the PC market, combined with mistakes by Apple in the mid-1990s, caused the company to come within moments of bankruptcy and/or sale in the late 1990s until Steve Jobs came back and pulled off a miracle.
Given Apple's revenue of $7.9 million in 1978, and a base price of $1300, Apple sold about 6000 Apple 2s in 1978. So I guess on that basis, Apple II > Commodore PET, but the history of 8-bit home computers was written by Commodore. Everyone else is a footnote.
The Apple IIc cost as much as an Amiga 1000, a machine which was a quantum leap better, than both the Apple 2 series, and greatly superior in HW to the Mac until the introduction of the Mac II's introduction (for $12,000 in 2019 dollars)
"Of course" is indeed is the right phrase to use here. The Commodore 2 is a computer from several years later, at time when Moore's law was in full swing. Put another way, my laptop or smartphone is better than an Apple 2 and was cheaper to buy... Yes, but so what? I don't see what point you're making (in either this comment or the GP one), except that hardware gets better over time.
The overall point I'm making is that for years Apple sold inferior hardware at vastly inflated prices, and made up for it only in superior marketing. Commodore had a whole team of Steve Wozniaks doing wonders, and managed to sell a ton of great, functional computers for people, but go unrecognized because of incompetent management that ultimately doomed the company.
HN is flooded continuously with Apple hagiography, but in the 80s, practically no one I knew owned an Apple, whether it was regular kids down the streets, or the hackers and phreakers, crackers, and demo scene folks I frequented with online. But somehow, an entire decade where Commodore computers were ubiquitous and dominated non-business environments, is unknown to today's millennials.
And here's what 1985 Amiga HW could do. This isn't Moore's law advantage (compare to 1984 and 85 Mac models).
Chips that didn't exist in 1978. The overall point you're making is that technology from several years later was better.
Or you're trying to hijack the thread into a rant about Apple in the 1980s and later for some reason.
Not relevant. Years later, even the Apple IIc (1984) wasn't close to a C64, not to mention an Amiga.
The thing you're missing is, Commodore had purchased MOS Technology, just like Apple purchased PA Semi to make their own iPhone SoCs, and had spent years investing in custom silicon going back to the VIC in 1979. The Apple II did not have a "video chip". Wozniak had cobbled together a video chip out of a bunch of 74LS TTL chips. Here, learn to built one yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7rce6IQDWs
That's what I meant by "superior design". Commodore actually had integrated CMOS chips for video, audio, I/O, that they had designed in house and fabbed themselves. The Apple 2, well into the IIc days, was built like a semi-decent Arduino project. Even the Mac had gfx and DMA cobbled out of TTL chips.
If you'd started your original comment with something like "Just a few years later, in 1984, Apple's new offering the IIc was barely any better than the original while C64 had a far superior (...) but Apples continued to sell better because of shallow marketing" it would've made it clear you were switching to a related but different subject. As it was, you seemed to just directly compare the original Apple against something much later. You don't seem to get why people keep making seemingly unrelated comments - it's because we're still applying your comments to the original Apple II, but you're actually not talking about that any more.
OK, explain to me how technology released in 1982 and 1984, and the sales of products not yet released, are relevant to statements about the then current state of affairs in 1978? You know, the topic of this whole thread. Maybe that's what I'm not understanding. Please enlighten me.
The overall point I'm making is that for years Apple
sold inferior hardware at vastly inflated prices, and
made up for it only in superior marketing
Marketing is not why Apple beat Commodore, or at least far from the only reason. Nobody bought Apples because of the ads. I don't remember even seeing an Apple ad on TV, and people weren't so impressed by magazine ads that they would go spend an extra $1,000 on Apple.
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1. The Apple II's were much more expandable thanks to their expansion slots, and there was a big ecosystem in place here already by the time the C64 gathered steam. You can see a somewhat similar dynamic at work today with RaspberryPi. There are competitors with more powerful hardware but with RaspberryPi, the ecosystem is the draw.
2. The Apple II (and soon after, the Mac) dominated the US education market. They developed strong relationships with schools, and had the most "educational" software titles.
3. 80-column mode. I know there were ways to achieve it on a C64, but what percentage of titles supported it? Additionally, a lot of folks had their C64s hooked up to crappy TVs that couldn't display it.
4. The C64's superior graphics and sound ability hurt it in the minds of many consumers. It was cheaper than an Apple II, but as far as parents were concerned that was still a lot of money to pay for a "game machine." Whereas the even more expensive Apple II, with a better selection of educational and "serious" software, was seen more as an investment in a child's future.
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I can tell you that in our household, #2 and #4 were why my (non tech savvy) parents bought us an Apple. They wanted me to have "what schools used."
Did they make the right choice? Well, the Apple IIgs we got was definitely underwhelming. Obviously a C128 or Amiga would have been better for gaming and writing fun stuff. But, our local school district did use Apples back then. So it was kind of an advantage for me, to have one at home.
Then why did the C64 sell 22 million units and the Apple 2 only sold 5-6 million if consumers had a bad impression of it.
> Obviously a C128 or Amiga would have been better for gaming and writing fun stuff.
And pretty much everything else. Seriously, in college, everyone in engineering used TeX. I used TeX on my Amiga. It produced superior output for math and engineering papers compared to the best you could achieve on a Mac with WYSIWYG.
https://www.pagetable.com/?p=547 (includes some neat serial number analysis)
Then why did the C64 sell 22 million units and
the Apple 2 only sold 5-6 million if consumers
had a bad impression of it.
I said it was viewed as a less serious computer; more of a games machine.
I can think of a few reasons for this, in addition to the ones I've named, such as being sold in literal toy stores. Do you think perhaps that influenced peoples' perceptions?
And pretty much everything else. Seriously, in college,
everyone in engineering used TeX. I used TeX on my Amiga.
It produced superior output for math and engineering papers
compared to the best you could achieve on a Mac with WYSIWYG.
However, the initial simplistic assertion that "[Apple] made up for it only in superior marketing" (emphasis mine) ignores quite a few other factors.
It leaves out the C128 sales, which is like leaving out the IIe/IIc.
> "[Apple] made up for it only in superior marketing" (emphasis mine) ignores quite a few other factors.
I wish I could agree, but from a HW perspective, Apple was doing a bad job. They had years and a ton of revenues from the Apple II, and failed to significantly innovate in HW. From a software perspective, they were much better than Commodore. Look, I had a Mac 128k in 1985 and an Amiga 1000, and although Mac OS and its DTP software was better in some respects than the Amiga, the HW was not, with the exception of LocalTalk/AppleTalk.
I also think you are ignoring why parents often bought computers for their kids in the 1980s -- because the kids asked for them. Because they could play games. It just so happened they could also be used for education tasks, but huge numbers of people were inspired to go into STEM because of playing games on early 8-bit computers, and then asking "How did they make this?"
For computers like the C64, lots of kids would type in game source code published in magazines like Compute! Gazette!, run the games, and when they got bored of them, they'd modify them. It was the early open-source model, learn by forking.
Most of my friends asked their parents for computers because of the sexy graphics and sound. They then serendipitously learned from them.
So whether the numbers are 12 million or 17 million or 22 million, I'm willing to bet there are far more engineers of my generation who cut their teeth on a C64, Atari, Spectrum ZX, or an Amstrad, because of the flashy graphics and games, then the children of parents who read splashy Apple full page ads talking about how 'educational' they were.
What's my point of of these rants? It seems unlike criticism of Commodore, people can't deal with any criticism of Apple Hagiography, that after shipping the first Apple 2 in 1978, they stagnated, and were never good at HW innovation. The lionization of the Apple 2 ignores the reality of the world of millions of Europeans who never saw one, effectively cementing an American viewpoint of 8-bit computing.
It seems unlike criticism of Commodore, people can't
deal with any criticism of Apple Hagiography,
This thread is filled with folks freely pointing out areas in which Commodore's offerings were superior, that the Apple II line clearly stagnated for a decade before culminating in the intentionally crippled IIgs. I don't see people even remotely promoting "hagiorgraphy", just folks (besides you) attempting to have a nuanced discussion.
Not to mention my vested interest in Commodore/MOS since I grew up just a few miles from MOS' HQ and have even visited the building. So to suggest I am locked into a US/Apple-only view of personal computers in the 80s is absolutely absurd. Good day and good bye. I certainly hope the rest of your HN interactions are not like this.
Having been launched many years after the II and the PET, I'd expect much better specs. One key selling point of the II was the software library. The Commodores had great games, but Apple II's, aided by the Disk II, had orders of magnitude more, in both numbers and diversity. Up to the 128, disk performance also hurt the Commodore 64 family. The IIs architecture remained very stable over the years and backwards compatibility was always excellent. This allowed Apple to have very healthy profit margins (to the point of hurting itself) because it protected the investment in software.
Don't get me wrong - I love the 64 (love the 128 a bit less) and the brilliant idea of having a disk drive that has its own computer inside (same applies to the 8-bit Ataris).
Disks were WAY faster on Apple II than C-64.
Also in the mid 80's when I was in elementary school, all my schools had Apple II's and all of them had 80 columns. I get the feeling it was better supported in software on Apple II than the options available for 80-column output on C64.
Both of these were more important to business use than the C-64's SID or VIC chips.
The main issue with the Apple ][ was that it stayed more or less the same for its entire life, and the way is was got dated. The difference between the PET and the C64 is that the design evolved (but the basic fabric was pretty similar.) I know there was the Apple 2 GS later, but that was a lot later and probably a little too late.
IMO the European computer scene was very different from the US, and in many ways more advanced. Because there was constant innovation and competition. That drove things forward, and affected the US computer manufacturers indirectly as they wanted to sell in to this market. So we had all the US computers (Commodore, RadioShack, Atari, TI etc), but also (at least in the UK) Sinclair ZX80/ZX81/ZX Spectrum (TS1000 and most other Timex machines were based on this range), Tangerine Oric 1/Atmos, Amstrad CPC/PCW/NC, Camputers Lynx, Dragon 32/64, Enterprise 64/128, Grundy Newbrain, Jupiter ACE, Memotech MTX range, Acorn Atom/BBC/Electron/Archimedes (latter, for which they invented and used the ARM processor). Our 80's 8bit journey was rich and varied.
The IIgs is a weird thing. It's a new computer with an Apple IIe built-in, a bit like the C-128, which was essentially a C-64 with two other computers built-in. In many aspects, the Apple /// was more of an Apple II than the IIgs.
The gs was also limited in performance so it wouldn't cannibalize Mac sales. A slightly faster 65816 would run rings around the 68000 in the Mac.
I wanted a IIgs for a while, but a BBSer convinced me the Amiga was a better choice.
I really doubt that. I had a Spectrum at home with the microdrives and the Sinclair printer (silver paper, remmber that?). I used Apple 2s at school and taught with them at summer camp. I loved both machines and learned both 6502 and Z80 machine code thans to them. We also had the gorgeous BBC Micros with the Tube coprocessor and disk drives.
The Spectrum was never going to be a business PC - just the keyboard tells you that. Not even the rather nice QL had a poper business keyboard.
The +2, +2A/B and +3 has much more standard keyboards.
The BBC dominated Schools in the part of the UK I lived in. I never saw an Apple ][ - I think the only one I ever saw in real life was in a museum.
It emphasises how much peoples views of these brands were shaped by geographical differences. Commodore totally dominated in large parts of Europe, where Apple was a weird curiosity, behind Commodore, Spectrum, Amstrad. Even machines like Oric and Apricot had more of a presence. Atari was also rare until the ST. Eventually even Acorn Archimedes became more common to see in my circles than Apple. Briefly.
Elsewhere in Europe the list of machines was different, but from what I remember Apple struggled to get a foothold most places until the Mac. Largely I suspect because it was so expensive compared to most of the above.
It was first in the mid-90s Apple became something I came across regularly.
So the protocol we used was that Americans would send them a 2400 baud modem, and make international calls to them, in exchange for hot new European game releases, because the extra speed would reduce the expense.
There's simply no way Europeans were going to buy overpriced, underpowered Apple hardware at that point in time. There was nothing an Apple 2 could do that a C64 couldn't, and a C64 could do substantially more than an Apple 2.
The results of the demoscene, which still exists for C64s, Amigas, Atari STs, and Spectrums, but is almost non-existent for the Apple 2, shows how under capable and uninteresting the platform was.
I never was that involved in trading. My circle stuck to mailing floppies, mostly within Norway. It was fun seeing how that too became optimised for quick turnaround - sometimes mailed without an envelope, just the protective cover taped in place... And with a lot of the more prolific traders eventually getting caught using wax over the stamps to allow them to scrape off the post mark and reuse the stamp to save money.
But, yeah, especially the lack of unmetered local calls in Europe was a massive limiting factor on modems, and coupled with no single standard for type approval of telecoms equipment which drove up the modem cost massively, especially in the smaller markets, it was a massive luxury until early 90's at least. I didn't get one until '93.
Same in Australia. My friend had feds staking out his place for reusing stamps :/
The C64 also has no equivalent to the seven expansion slots of the Apple II, which allow you to customize your computer (by installing a CP/M card to run Wordstar and dBase II, for instance, or by adding bank-switched RAM) and to easily develop your own hardware.
The graphics and sound capabilities of the C64 are superior to those of the stock Apple II, and I think that explains why demos are still popular on it.
Supermon has been around since the PET days. I had no problem exploring my C64, I just had to load it from disk.
However, did Apple 2 have anything like an Action Replay cartridge. Not only does it provide normal machine language monitor capabilities, but it does it through an NMI (non-maskable interrupt) that takes over the entire system, freezes it, and allows you to inspect all aspects of the hardware, including write only latches. It includes sprite editor, font inspector, and can even 'core dump' the entire C64 into a suspended state that you can load and resume.
This was used to "crack" copy protection much of the time by just dumping a freezed copy of the game after it had fully loaded.
> seven expansion slots of the Apple II
The C64 had both a User slot and a cartridge slot, in addition to RSS-488 serial bus which allowed daisy chaining like Firewire. So for example, you could plug 2 joysticks into the joy ports, a Ram Expansion Unit (REU 128k or 512k) into the cartridge port for GEOS or your BBS, and a RS-232 UART into the User port to get 9600 baud modems working.
My C64 had a 9600bps modem with UART in the User port, an Action Reply in the cartridge port, two printers, two disk drives. I never needed many "slots". The Apple II did not have the ability to talk to a printer or external disk drives without an interface card.
Yes, the Apple II had several so-called "copy cards" that allowed you to interrupt a running program, explore memory, dump it to disk, etc. Very useful for debugging, and as you say, automatically cracking single-load programs. My Apple //e had a Senior PROM installed, which provides similar features without taking up a slot.
I don't think you can compare the hardware accessories for the C64 with the wide variety of expansion cards available for the Apple II. You could really customize your hardware. My Apple //e had the above-mentioned Senior PROM, a CP/M card for running Turbo Pascal, a 4 MHz accelerator, 9-voice music card, an EPROM burner, and a "Quikloader" card that allowed me to put my most-used programs on EPROMs and have them instantly available at a moment's notice. Not quite like having a hard drive, but close. Later, I removed the CP/M card and music card I didn't use anymore and added 1 megabyte of battery-backed RAM.
> The Apple II did not have the ability to talk to a printer or external disk drives without an interface card.
And that means you could connect it to your choice of a parallel or serial printer (just get the appropriate kind of card), or go with third-party disk drives that had 2x or 4x the capacity. That's a good thing.
Man, I feel like I'm 16 again, arguing with my Commodore-owning friends about who has the better computer. Thanks, this is fun.
Update: it sounds[1] like other AC circuits might have been affected, perhaps the motors in the disk drive.
[1] "On the hardware side, there were timing differences on the ITT 2020 motherboard, due to the 50 Hz frequency used with the 220 VAC power standards in the UK and Europe." https://apple2history.org/history/ah12/#01
The C64 designed for European markets was slightly slower than its American counterpart.
I don't see how that is an exception to anything in the ad. It's from 1978, still four years before Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. The claim is that it is the best selling computer, in 1978, not that it always will be.
Don't get me wrong, it's interesting information. The phrasing of it as an exception to the claims of the ad is strange and confusing.
But, yeah, Commodore burned their retail network in the US time and time and time again.
Commodore made sure to fire designers promptly after every new product launch. C-64 custom chip designers founded Ensoniq in 1982, the year C-64 launched. Amiga team was "let go" before Amiga 1000 to 500 cost optimization redesign. This meant Amiga never got HD floppy controller - there was no one capable of upgrading PLL inside Paula.
Then we had to deal with customers who had just bought the same item in the last week or so.
Weekends spent doing protacker session, checking content of newly traded floppies, trying to stuff in 68000, and then coming home and trying to replicate something on a 386SX.
I was the only guy on computer gang that got a PC instead, due to the way my parents saw it as a safer bet for the money being invested. Somehow they were right, regarding how computer market evolved years later.
So I was floating between PC and Amiga demoscene.
By the time the 16-bit computers came about, they were mainly in stores like Curry's and Dixon's, and very accessible. I had an Amiga 500, and most of my friends did too, except one poor chap with an Atari ST.
There was a one "mom and pop" type store in my town by the time I got to my late teens. They sold a lot of the big box Amigas, some PC's and import consoles like PC-Engine. But they closed in the late 90's. I remember buying a used black and white TV from their closing down sale for £10.
I got a Mac SE and Mac IIcx 6Macs and a G3 iMac. I don't use them I collected them over the years to see if they go up in value.
It might not have been exactly a Walgreens, but it was that type of drug store, with the electronics behind the counter.
Just found my original 300 baud modem and hardware/software moving homes. War Games, once I found out it was created on a Commodore PET, was a huge influence at the time. Not sure if I have a single monitor with an RCA connector anymore.
Regardless, this article is 1978, before the VIC-20 or C64 came out.
The TRS-80 was, by far, the best selling of the 1977 Trinity. This was because it had the lowest price and it was readily available from Radio Shack stores. Commodore had trouble producing the PET and the inclusion of the monitor and tape drive made it have a higher price.
Not that there weren't games for the Apple II... there were plenty. Most of the biggest game publishers of the early micro era, including one or two that still exist today, developed for the Apple II first. Sierra On-Line, Broderbund, Electronic Arts. Programming an arcade game on the Apple II was so challenging, what with its bizarre screen memory layout, weird color scheme, and lack of hardware sprites, that many Apple II game programmers viewed programming for the C64 or Atari 400/800 (which used the same CPU but had actual graphics and sound hardware) as akin to cheating. Some of the most creative games of the era arose from these technical limitations. And hordes of young programmers cut their teeth learning how to remove the copy protection from these games so they could trade them for free games others had cracked. The guys who started id Software met at an Apple II publisher.
It was as dominant in business right up until the IBM PC took off and even for some time after, thanks to VisiCalc, the first killer app. When Apple released the integrated software package AppleWorks in 1984 it shot to the top of the sales charts. Not merely the Apple II charts, but the industry charts for all computers including the PC. It stayed there for months and served as a foundation of a healthy third-party development ecosystem for years.
The profits from the Apple II line paid for the development of the Lisa and then the Macintosh, and kept the company afloat until the Mac was profitable.
Yeah, the Apple II was a big deal. I got in a bit late myself (I stared my first job in the industry in 1990) but it was still the foundation of my technology career.
In the US as I remember the 1980's apple ][s were everywhere. And there were 6 models (or more depending on if you count the revisions), and a number of clones (Franklin Ace and laser 128, were two popular ones).
So, It would be interesting to get numbers for all those models, because each successive generation definitely cannibalized the previous ones. No one purchased the plus after the 'e' came out, and the gs was definitely the machine to own later in the life-cycle (particularly with an accelerator).
I couldn't find overall numbers with a quick google search.
TRS-80: 150
Commodore Pet: 30
Apple II: 7.6
Altair: 4
Others: 100
[0] https://jeremyreimer.com/rockets-item.lsp?p=137 [1] https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/3/
First the software. 8 bit software for small business ran on the Apple II (especially in the late 70s/early 80s). Ever hear of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet? Originally released for the Apple II. dBase? One of the earliest databases available for microcomputer systems? First ran on Apple II and then MS-DOS. Even a word processor was available: Apple Writer. So in 1979 you had a spreadsheet, database and word processor. Just the tools you needed for a small business.
Now the bus. Apple II had expansion slots and a whole industry devoted to creating every kind of interface imaginable. You had the standards such as printers and floppy disk drives, but you also had hard disk drives (which few of the other 8 bit micros of the time supported) and a plethora of lab equipment. It was kind of like the Raspberry PI of it's day - people were hooking up all kinds of stuff to those machines.
Bottom line, Apple II focused on small business, labs, and hobbyists. C64 and Atari focused more on a game console that could also double as a computer. Apple II went to the office while the C64 and Atari went to the home.
Apple II would continue to dominate in the small business environment until the MS-DOS machines reached price and feature parity - which happened in the late 80s. By that time it was clear Apple was headed the way of GUIs and wasn't as interested in investing more into the Apple II line, so it withered. But for a period of about 8-10 years the Apple II dominated the business and hobbyist market.
P.S. - the "Apple Tax" existed even back then. The Apple II machines were way more expensive than the Atari 400/800 (even the ST) and the Commodore VIC 20/64. I remember my C64 costing $600 whereas an Apple II+ (which was targeted for homes) ran $1,200-$1,400. Unless you were actually running a business you simply couldn't cost justify those machines.
Communists were firmly convinced that they've actually done a better job than the capitalist pigs at Apple and even self credited themselves with the invention of personal computing.
It was a wildly successful product throughout the whole eastern bloc. It was accompanied by a whole ecosystem of home-made software, games, peripherals, robotics kits, literature, magazines, and was very popular in the educational systems of nearby countries. A good portion of the brightest software engineers to come out of eastern Europe made their baby steps in programming on this gem [1]
I have very fond memories of it.
1. https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-these-communist-era-apple-...