19 Sep
2025
19 Sep
'25
1:44 p.m.
On Sep 19, 2025, at 3:09 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Fri, 19 Sep 2025, Steve Lewis via cctalk wrote:
The timeline for the story about the F-16 & PET according to Wikipedia:
20 Jan 1974: First flight of YF-16
Jan 1977: Commodore PET debuted at CES.
—Milo
just an overall simpler chip?). I didn't
get the impression the Z80 was
"expensive" - contemporary prices that I found placed the Z80 at something
like $60 (or at least, under $100) and an 8080 at over $300? (but it's
hard to pinpoint individual price vs bulk order, and normalize across those
critical years of 1974-1977).
Also prices were volatile; announced at one price, and then up or down on demand
At Lockheed (then GD), when the F-16 was first
being developed, I'm told
they used Commodore PET's to do initial aerodynamics modeling because it's
BASIC had floating point support. Obviously, that's not unique to the 6502
As did TRS80 ("Level 2 BASIC") where all numbers were single precision floating
point by default!
also AppleSoft, and many/most? of the other Microsoft BASICs.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com