Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
7
The Personal Computer Comes of Age
"Atari promises to be the most popular Personal Computer System of the 1980s!"
- Atari advertisement, 1980
During the summer of 1977, Radio Shack began marketing the TRS-80 (Model 1) with
a price for a basic model starting at approximately $400. The machine's chip, the Z-80, was
a bit more powerful than the 8080. The machine came assembled, complete with monit-
or, keyboard, cassettes, and a start-up routine and BASIC burned into read-only memory
(ROM). The machine was practical, efficient and competitive. Sales boomed, being helped
along significantly by Radio Shack's staggeringly large storefront footprint across the Un-
ited States. Also released at about this time was Commodore's moderately priced PET. Com-
modore's PET used the 6502 chip. Though not dramatically successful in the United States,
the PET found a better reception in Europe. Concurrewntly, the Atari 2600 proved very pop-
ular stateside - but solely for game purposes. Atari was never to be able to break out of that
niche. None of these items compared favorably with the Apple II, released in April of 1977.
The 8-bit Apple II represented a revolution in design above and beyond what the
Apple-1 had offered. Despite being much more highly priced, the Apple II dramatically out-
sold all of its key competitors. A 4K RAM model sold for $1,298, a 48K RAM model for
$2,638. Peripherals were priced separately. The machine's external 143K floppy drive - in-
troduced in 1978 - sold for $495. This included operating system software and a controller
which plugged into one of eight internal expansion slots of the bus architecture. The Apple
II shipped with Woz's integer BASIC in ROM (later, as of August 1977, with a licensed and
better Microsoft BASIC customized for the 6502). Operating system and hardware enhance-
ments would become a regular occurrence throughout the machine's sixteen year production
life, eventually moving up to 16-bit capabilities.
Somewhere between five and six million Apple II series computers would be sold by the
end of production in 1993.
It did not take long before cool software started to be written for all the popular ma-
chines, but most especially for the Apple II.
The most important of these was Dan Bricklin's and Robert Frankston's
VisiCalc
(the
first commercial spreadsheet - or visual calculator - application) released in October of
1979. The partnership of these two men was formally known as Software Arts. Bricklin had
worked for DEC and was a graduate of the Harvard Business School. Frankston had worked
as a programmer on major projects at MIT. Although they at first envisioned their software
as a tool to run on DEC machines, Bricklin and Frankston wound up - through the happen-
stance of availability - doing most of their development on an Apple II.
