Mimic Systems Spartan: Apple II emulator for the C-64

ah the MacCharlie and the Amiga Sidecar, both horrendously overpriced for their respective markets. Though the Amiga peripheral arguably did a much better job owing to the host system's ability to both display color as well as multitask natively, so one could use both environments simultaneously. I believe even possible to exchange data between the two while both were rinning, due to the use of dual-port RAM on the Sidecar and some sort of simple driver running on both sides handled mutexes, locks and such.

In case you don’t know about it, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_128:

The C128 is a significantly expanded successor to the C64, with nearly full compatibility. The newer machine has 128 KB of RAM in two 64 KB banks, and an 80-column color video output. It has a redesigned case and keyboard. Also included is a Zilog Z80 CPU which allows the C128 to run CP/M, as an alternative to the usual Commodore BASIC environment. The presence of the Z80 and the huge CP/M software library it brings, coupled with the C64's software library, gave the C128 one of the broadest ranges of available software among its competitors.

[…]

The C128 runs CP/M noticeably slower than most dedicated CP/M systems, as the Z80 processor runs at an effective speed of only 2 MHz

Commodore sold a version of CP/M (2.2) with a Z-80 processor in a cartridge for the C-64. Due to slow 1541 disk drive speed, non-CP/M disk format, and a 40-column display, it was a slow and clumsy version of CP/M.

As someone else posted, the C-128 and 1571 disk drive had much better CP/M support. The 128 had a built-in Z-80 and 80-column capability. The 1571 could read/write CP/M format (and MS-DOS format for that matter) disks.

I feel it is slower now.

1981 IBM PC - turn key useful but expensive and clunky

1982 Commodore 64 - cheap, good gfx + sound

1985 Amiga - you could drop someone from today (2022) on an Amiga and they could still find their way around the UI and write a document, save it, print it, use the calculator, whatever. (Before you start comparing with MacOS v1 and Windows v1, yes, true, but Windows 1 has clunky UI and neither MacOS nor Windows could execute more than program at a time. Only Amiga had that.)

So, within 4 years we went from the "Personal Computer" becoming a real actual thing with the PC, to having basically the same desktop metaphor we still use today, with the Amiga. That's incredible development speed.

The only thing I have seen which was just as fast, was the iPhone driving adoption of touch interfaces and mobile Internet. This also drove the concept of an "app" as something you pick and choose and expect to be there for major brands and services.

It's hard to say if the "PC" (I mean that loosely) or the iPhone/touch/mobile trifecta had a greater impact.

On the one hand, almost "everyone" are or will soon have a smartphone, so that has a huge impact.

On the other hand, while "PC" adoption was not ubiquitous, it drove major changes in mass culture (printing, music, video) and industry and economy. Not everyone had a computer, but everyone was aware of them and were impacted by them in ways large and small.

What makes it seem that it moved much more slowly — look how long 8-bit machines held on — was just how much it cost to get into a system. Platforms had long lives then because people were not keen on seeing their investments disappear out from under them. Note that an Apple //c cost about $1300 in 1984, the equivalent of $3600 or so today. You're going to want to see just how long you can keep that going even though technology improvements are flying by outside your door, and they really were doing that back in the day. There were multiple, barely-interacting tech markets running concurrently.