Did Commodore, more than Apple, contribute to the birth of the personal computer?

Apple (and some other "historians") would like us to remember that everyone had an Apple 2 in the 1980s, but of course that's not true.

E. Bolgnesi sets the record straight in the article linked above. Highly recommended!

(Via David Greelish on Twitter)

===Jac

(EDIT: I falsely reported in an earlier version that the article was by David Greelish. Sorry)

This is a difficult thing to establish for certain because there were so many players in the market in the late '70s-early '80s. It's certainly true that Apple and their cult like to overstate their importance, but you only need to poke around some threads on Lemon 64 sometime to see that Commodore fanatics can be just as history-bendingly zealous. And it was very much a regional thing at that time, too - listen to UK posters arguing the topic and you'd get the impression that nobody had ever even heard of Apple until the Macintosh and the Great War was between Commodore owners and Spectrum zealots. And then there's the TRS-80 contingent, and so on and so forth...

Interesting article! And a clever and careful title: this is not a question of who did what first, but between two organisations, which had the more influential role.

It's still a difficult question, and requires a historian's skills, and some understanding of culture and of business economics, to address properly. Nonetheless, we can all have an opinion!

For our purposes, perhaps, it's nice to have the two organisations in question both building around the 6502.

For me, the PET was visually iconic. It was also all-in-one, and was much more affordable than the Apple II especially when you add a monitor. But I was in the UK, and as we're saying, each territory has its own history. AIUI, in the US the Apple II, TRS-80 and PET were all reasonable choices for a home computer, if you had a fair bit of money to spend. They were even more so reasonable choices for a small business. And the trick which Apple pulled off around that time was to become the standard choice in education - that's a good market segment to be in, both for business and for cultural influence. Here in the UK Acorn pulled off the same trick.

As the article points out, the next generation of machines offered much more affordable home computers, and the market took off, I'm sure, when they were bought as games machines, not as computers.

If money had been no object for me - which has never been true! - I would have preferred the Apple II, for the high resolution graphics and, to a lesser extent, for the colour. In the event I started with a UK101, a clone of an Ohio Scientific design, a single-board machine with Basic, PET-like graphics, and a TV modulator. And then in the second generation of machines I bought Acorn's BBC micro, which was by no means cheap but was just about affordable.

(Umm, the article does not seem to be by Greelish, but by Bolognesi.)

Actually, I'm curious now - given that the Apple II produced its color graphics strictly by means of pixel-pattern-induced interference with the NTSC colorburst signal, did it even have color in PAL territories?

Good question! I did see an Apple II driving a colour monitor, but that's not the same as driving a TV.

I found this statement: "PAL configured Apples don't support color without an extra PAL board that plugs into slot 7."

Whoops! Fixed.

===Jac

For me personally, the PET was the first computer I ever worked with. I saw TRS-80s too, in the Netherlands but they were less common. I didn't even see an Apple 2 until 1986 when I was studying science and had to do a lab project with USCD Pascal. I was not impressed.

On the other hand, I was lucky enough to be one of the first ones in the country to have an IBM PC in the house, and I wasn't impressed with that either: the floppy disks didn't hold even CLOSE to as much data as the ones I could use at school (my school had a Commodore 8050 drive which could store 1MB per disk, if you made your disks into "flippies"). And the PC keyboard made no sense for BASIC programming: there was a separate numerical area, that was nice, but you needed to turn NumLock off to use it for cursor movements. And for all the symbols that you need in BASIC all the time such as quotes and dollars, you had to hold Shift down. I remember thinking it was a ridiculous waste of time

Everyone's experience and memory is personal. And it's definitely possible to find the truth about the history of personal computers, but I agree with the author that the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field is still in effect for casual readers. For one thing, there are many comments on the article that say things that are factually wrong (for example someone states or implies that Commodore/MOS was the only supplier for the 6502 and it wasn't -- MOS licensed it to others and it was a good way for them to make money and for companies like Apple to ensure that they would have a supply; certainly Commodore would never have shipped any 6502's to Apple so they could use them to make a competing machine).

And the article itself also has a couple of minor mistakes that could be seen as falsified history but are simply inaccuracies (not blatant misrepresentations or omissions). For example it implies that Jobs & Woz only sold 200 Apple 1's because it was an unsuccessful design. The real reason (based on Woz' biography and possibly some interviews with Woz that I've read in the last few years) was that Woz originally just gave away the schematic and the members of the Homebrew Computer convinced him to design a PCB and sell it, and Jobs said he would take care of the business side of things. Woz wasn't really interested in getting rich off them or even starting a company. He was just interested in designing something that his friends would admire him for. While they were still putting together Apple 1's in the bedroom (not garage), he was already working on the Apple 2; the Apple 1 was never intended to be a lasting product.

===Jac

This is a very personal subject for myself. Something that I've studied and researched for many hours. I always come to the same conclusions:

1) As someone else stated above, it's a regional thing. Where I grew up, we were poor. Our SCHOOL had TWO Apple II's. One for the sixth grade and the other for the office. No one could afford an Apple II. Well, I had ONE friend who had one but his parents pretty much bought him anything. I had a TI99-4/a because my grandmother found one at a Western Auto for dirt cheap. I later got a C64. Both computers combined cost less than a single Apple II. So those of us in my area that had computers (not many did) pretty much had cheaper Commodores. As another example, I DID NOT KNOW that Atari made computers until I was much older!! I only knew about 2600 and 5200. That's because Atari just wasn't anywhere to be found in my area/town. So any conversations I would have had about computers back then would have been more than likely very wrong.

2) There are lots of examples of computers with similar specs to the Apple II. Even better. Even SOONER. The Sphere 1 was somewhat on par with the original 4K Apple II (minus the color) and it came out a year or so sooner. But ask the average Joe what the Sphere 1 was. People remember Apple because it's Apple. People remember Atari because they think Pac-Man. People remember Commodore because of the C64. But no one (normal people) remember the history of any of them. Just that they existed when they were kids. So Apple is easy to believe they were the first on everything. Even the experts that lived during those times can't remember. People are very bad at remembering details. Most people who tell history have some hidden agenda (even if they don't realize it) so they tend to skew the truth with what they believe. i.e., Apple fanboys have a different view of history than Commodore fanboys.

3) I've done much of my research looking through old issues of Byte!, Compute!, etc. Magazines are great at telling us what was being sold back then. It's easy to put dates on stuff. However, what was being sold was only half the story. Magazines rarely told what actually SHIPPED. So "Computer X" might have been available before "Computer Y" but when did customers actually receive their orders? That makes a difference. Once again, people rarely remember these sort of details. As an example, I once owned a Bodega Bay for my Amiga 500. I have NO idea when I bought it (as a kid), how much I paid for it or even where it vanished to! I would love to have that back but it's gone. I cannot remember much else about it. So how could I ever really give good information on it when it's just a faint memory.

4) The term "Personal Computer" has never been clearly defined. I generally give it the "mom test". If my mom could buy it, bring it home, plug it in and do something with it, that's a personal computer. But that's opinion based. If put that label on it, then there are more than the "Holy Trinity" of personal computers back in the 70's. Which would also include companies like Sphere and maybe MicroTan.

5) Every time I think I have a handle on what happened and when, I find another obscure company that made computers. Then, I have to ask, "Did they ship?", "Is it a 'Personal Computer'?", etc. It's never ending.


I can go on and on. There are so many open-ended questions about computer history that I don't think historians could even answer most of it. Which means there will always be something for nerds to argue about.

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Cat; the other white meat.

My school had PETs, they were donated to us. I remember our science teacher, at an end of school year dinner, all giddy and, literally, on his knees (there just wasn't a chair for him), talking to the donors that were giving them to us for the next year. The PETs were going to replace our IMSAI 8080.

When I went to college, a few years later, one lab had Apples (to run software for the Animal Husbandry program). We'd still get to sneak in during down days to dabble with them and play Wizardry. It wasn't for another year, at least, before there were "public" Apples available for anyone to use. I think there were 4 of those. All of the actual study work was done on the CDC mainframes, or the PDP-11. There may have been some micro computer dabbling in the EE department, but I never really came across it. We also had a Terak and a pair of Tektronix 4050 series computers in the "Math Lab". The Terak was a UCSD system, the Teks just ran BASIC. I did some early 3D modeling code on the Tektronix machines (they had those storage tube displays like in Battlestar Galactica).

It wasn't until after I left that IBM PCs arrived and replace the mainframes in the general consciousness of the computing student body.

A lot of those "other" computer were not innovation per se, rather they were just jumping on the band wagon. But some were trying to stand out.

Hard to stand out in the generic CP/M market. I give mad props to Tandy, with their Computer Centers, and selling everything from computers to printers to desks to accounting software. I just don't know if their staff was up to the task.

The problem back then is that you could only "sorta" just sell a computer. What really makes it take off is a solution. A computer is as useful as a room heater if you don't have something for it to do. VisiCalc and word processors fixed that problem for many. That's when the personal computer became useful, for something outside of hobbyists. My Dad has Scripsit for the TRS-80. I wrote a letter to a high school friend using it, printed it out on aluminum coated roll paper that was printed upon using electrostatic charges. Stuff looked better when it was photo copied.

As to your "mom test", I'd argue that the Apple might well have failed that test, at least with a disk drive (and every Apple I ever saw had a disk drive). I think a TRS-80 was more Mom friendly than the Apple, simply that they didn't have to crack the case to wire floppy cables. But the Pet, Atari, and Commodores were more friendly in that regard with their D shaped big fat easy plug in connectors. When I bought my Atari 800, I got the cassette drive. It didn't last long, I quickly scraped the money to get the 810 Disk Drive. I never missed the floppy on the Pet, but I certainly did on the Atari.

All the schools I saw had Apples, people without endless .gov funds bought commodore 64's

In Apple's defense, they did provide pretty heft discounts to some school. I don't have exact figures but I remember reading they did that on several occasions.

But, to be fair, their discounted price was probably still more than a C64.

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Cat; the other white meat.

I was in a pretty good school district, and at first it was all PETs, then C64s with some Apples. It probably came down to which company was pushing sales more in that specific area.

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WFDis Interactive 6502 Disassembler
AcheronVM: A Reconfigurable 16-bit Virtual CPU for the 6502 Microprocessor

Yeah, I'd say that was true. What surprises me though is that I've read many times that school districts in Texas used Apples a lot. I would have thought the TI99-4/a would have been a very strong contender there. Maybe it was initially. The TI had TONS of educational software.

But TI really messed things up with that computer with the restrictive licensing.

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Cat; the other white meat.

Some interesting info on how Apple got the Apple II's into schools.
Texas gets a mention in the article as well, if things had have gone differently they could have ended up with Tandy machines.
http://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kid ... wait-apple