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The Home Computer Hybrids

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56 pointscfmcdonald25 comments

The fact that the Apple II met the new FCC requirements was a major competitive advantage for Apple, and there have been rumors over the years about how that happened. The higher emissions allowance was why you saw the big shift from monsters like the Atari 800 (heavy cast metal frame, aluminum or pot metal) and Commodore PET to lighter chassis like the Atari XL series and the Commodore VIC-20 and C64.

The old FCC Standards kneecapped Atari. I think Atari would have had a much showing against Apple had they not had to have the heavy and expensive cast box inside every 400/800 and the increased cost for "smart" peripherals versus "dumb" slots. Those Atari machines are arguably more technically advanced and capable than the Apple II. The cost of FCC compliance drove up the price and hurt their market share.

I've always thought the whole Apple / aftermarket RF modulator trick was a bit underhanded.

When I was a kid, I had a green screen Apple, and I wish I knew about 3rd party RF modulators. (It didn't work with an Atari-style modulator.) I never saw a setup like that, so I wonder how common they really were.

It was the typical way to connect a TV to an Apple. I used one before I bought a monitor.

Maybe 'typical' only in the very early days? I just never saw one plugged into a television rather than a computer monitor, nor did I ever hear about such a thing. I would have loved to play those games in color.

I feel very old.

We are both old, buddy. My dad bought this pretty loaded used system from a 'hacker', so at least I can post about z80 softcards and etc.

Unironic use of CP/M qualifies you as O.G.!

Except that after the initial model, the PET's case was plastic, or rather, structural foam, with no shielding applied to it all.

After the initial 2001 model, Commodore used a mix of materials, with some models made of all metal and some of a metal/plastic hybrid (metal base, plastic top), according to this website: https://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/cbm/PETx/petfaq.html (look for "WHAT MODELS OF THE PET ARE THERE?")

Source? Every Commodore PET I've ever come across had a metal chassis. Commodore64s and VICs had plastic ones.

The chassis (the bottom black part) was always made out of metal. But all the white part above, on the very first PETs (the ones with the rectangular keyboard) it was made out of metal, and on all subsequent ones (with normal keyboard and green-on-black screens) it was made of this plastic material. Source: Personal experience (I'm old).

Interesting. I didn't know that.

The UK did not have emissions regulations at the time, and the most popular computer of the early 80s in the UK, the Acorn BBC Micro, had no shielding whatsoever.

Acorn wanted to break into the US market, and so they had to redesign the computer with a massive metal box inside the outer plastic case.

Their attempt to launch in the US was a huge failure, and most of those computers were shipped back to the UK and "unconverted" to be resold in their home market.

But they didn't remove the metal box. So Brits could always tell when they had an ex-US BBC Micro because it weighed twice as much and had a huge metal box inside it.

Seems strange no one came up with spraying the inside of the case with a metallic shielding layer of paint, as some later products eventually did.

Author of the OP here. The "spray" technique was known in the early 80s, if not earlier. It's mentioned in Michael Tomczyk's "Home Computer Wars":

> The solution came in several forms. One way was to embed ferrite balls in the plastic case. Another way was to spray the inside of the case with a metal coating. But the best way was to encase the offending electronics in a small metal box inside the case, which is what was done with the VIC-20. [0]

Why a metal box is the best way, he doesn't say and I don't know. My best guess is that it was more effective/reliable at passing the tests.

[0]: https://archive.org/details/the-home-computer-wars/page/205/...

One of the interesting factoids about the TI-99 series is that despite its lack of popularity compared to Apple and Commodore, it gave us the word "sprite" as a term of art in game graphics. The movable graphical elements of contemporary console displays, called "player-missile graphics" by Atari, "MOBs" by Commodore, and "OBJs" by Nintendo in their PPU documentation, were referred to as "sprites" in the design notes and patent application for the TMS9918 VDP used in the TI-99/4 (and its successor, the TMS9918A used in the TI-99/4A), doubtless as a reflection of the way they moved about completely independently of the underlying background tile map. The word appeared in the manuals for TI Extended BASIC and TI Logo, which gave even hobbyist programmers the ability to create and control these objects, and from there the word filtered out into the broader community, to the point where Commodore 128 BASIC had a SPRITE keyword. It's a very sticky term, easy to remember and eventually adopted by the whole community, and I'm kind of glad it came from the design process for my beloved TI-99/4A.

The TMS9918 would go on to be used in several other game consoles including the Sega SG1000, original MSX, and ColecoVision, in modified form in still more (all Sega consoles up through the Genesis), and inform the design of yet more (Nintendo's PPU). It was one of the first display chips to support sprites as full graphics, rather than a single row of a pixmap which must be reprogrammed every scanline (as Atari's player-missile graphics on the 2600 were).

The creator of the TMS9918 would go on to build the TMS9995 and TMS99100 CPUs and later the graphics processors behind TIGA.

And I'm reading this article while sitting at an EMC/EMI test facility monitoring the test for one of my products. Certainly an interesting, and somewhat on-topic, read.

> By June 1979, Atari had sold over one million VCS consoles.

Speaking of an even weirder hybrid before the hybrids... By 1979 Atari released a BASIC cartridge for the Atari VCS (later renamed Atari 2600): the VCS/2600 was a console. No keyboard. So the BASIC cartridge shipped with the most horrible keyboard ever invented.

So in a way the console themselves were the first hybrid.

Believe, I know: it's how I wrote my very first program ever. It was super simple: basically modifying programs drawing colored lines across the screen.

IIRC -- but I was a kid back then and now I'm nearly the mid 50s -- that BASIC cartdridge's keyboard required to be plugged in both joystick ports.

Oh. The. (128 bytes of RAM) Memories.

I had an Atari 400 as the first computer I bought myself, which I upgraded to a “real” (if small) keyboard that replaced the membrane keyboard. I took it to college and used it with a printer and the Action! cartridge editor to write papers. (My printer was a carbon electrode arc printer that burned marks into regular paper, producing a soft brownish print.)

> The 1983 FCC-compliant Apple IIe. Unused slots have metal covers for RF shielding.

Interesting--I always assumed the metal covers (particularly on the old IBMs) were to keep out dust.

Sorry I'm going to have to softly call bullshit on the TI 99/4 section.

> Texas Instruments intended to have total control over the software for its computers, and to reap all of the profits from selling ROM cartridges. Grown arrogant from their long string of consumer products successes (including 1978’s Speak and Spell), TI evidently felt they could dictate the terms for a new category without consideration for the existing, highly-competitive market for personal computers.

They're talking about GROMs here. The 99/4 firmware contains a virtual machine that implements what they call Graphics Programming Language, or GPL. What a search nightmare today!

The idea was that most programmers would be using GPL almost exclusively, and GPL was highly opinionated. The original designers wanted TI to actually build a custom processor just for it, but this was back when it was just a specification and not a design. Cartridges ended up with a non-standard ROM design for technical reasons first.

But ultimately the guy in charge of designing the damn thing intended the GROM requirement to be solving that technical problem first and offering a simplification to devs second. No need to find someone to build your own ROMs, just send us the data and some money!

Source: A five hour interview with Doctor Granville Ott. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keWwxWHGKtw

The guy's a good geek.

What the business did, though, is utterly incomprehensible. The company sounds like a complete disaster. No, there was no arrogant strategy. There was no strategy.

I'm currently working on an interview with the other guy on that stage (no, not the youtuber ... he's later) and writing an essay on the 99000.

The slant the article gives the 99/4 is really awful and doesn't seem planted in current knowledge.

usb mouse discovered

Joe DeCur, primary architect of the Atari SIO bus, was involved in the design of USB. Some of his Atari-era notebooks helped kill a patent troll who was trying to extract rents from everybody using USB.

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