22 Dec
2016
22 Dec
'16
8:45 p.m.
@Grumpy Old Fred
I knew my last missive would provoke at least one or two interesting (if
not informative) responses. Yours was no exception, and I thank you for it.
For one, I hadn't known that CP/M was written originally to the 8080.. I'd
always assumed it originated on the Z80. And I don't doubt that RS / TRS-80
held a large share (until 1982 or so..) of the home computer market.
At the time, I was in my (almost) young teens - and at least in the circles
I traveled, the TRS-80 / Osborne and Kaypro were viewed as boring, stodgy
machines without any redeeming entertainment qualities - no color graphics,
no sprites, poor or nearly non-existent audio, expensive joysticks and so
on.
The ability of the machines to serve multiple roles - for both 'serious'
work and video gaming / music - was a huge selling point in the early days.
This is one of the reasons that the C64 was so massively successful - it
pretty much had something for everyone, as the saying goes. That, and the
price of the base machine was just amazingly low for the time. Ditto for
the VIC-20.
On Thu, Dec 22, 2016 at 10:04 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
We all hang out with people who are smart enough to
see things the same
way that we do. Accordingly, our choices in computers, cars, cellphone
providers always look to us like the MAJORITY. They are the BEST, and
certainly the MOST POPULAR [among everybody that WE hang out with], but not
necessarily the best selling.
If the world were just, and the BEST outsold the worst, then we would all
be using Amiga :-)
On Thu, 22 Dec 2016, drlegendre . wrote:
"The Z80 had more players and more names
than all the rest"
And yet it was essentially a bit-player in the days of the 'home computer'
revolution - at least in the US. CBM, Apple, Atari - the three big names
in
home computers, all went with the 6502 family. And perhaps even more
importantly, so did Nintendo, in the NES.
And yet, somehow, z80 was outselling 6502!
http://jeremyreimer.com/m-item.lsp?i=137
Radio Shack, TRS-80, WAS one of the "three big names". It had a
not-insignificant share of the market, and until 1982 was the best
selling. Don't ignore the impact of having incompetents peddling in
thousands of store, in every city and town!
Atari took a while longer to get market share.
http://www.trs-80.org/was-the-trs-80-once-the-top-selling-computer/
At the same time.
Depending on how you define "first" ("first" to show V
"first" to ship V
"first" to be available for shelf purchase) will define whether Apple,
Commodore, or Radio Shack was "the first". It is trivially esay to select
a definition of "first" to make it your choice of those. Apple was the
first of those announced and shown.
I bought a TRS-80 ($400 (or $600 if you wanted their composite monitor and
cassette player)) because it was the first one [by multiple months] that I
could walk in the door of a local store and buy one. The more appealing
Apple, which had been announced earlier that TRS-80, was hard to come by
for several more months.
That time differential of months seems inconsequential 40 years later, but
it mattered to me right then. And, for most rational measures, Apple,
TRS-80 and Commodore initial releases were a tie.
(Was the photo finish by a nose, a whisker, or a hoof?)
When the 5150 came out in August 1981, it was months before I could
actually get one.
AFTER the 5150 came out, people relized that TRS-80 was doomed, and in
1982, Apple 2 finally started to outsell TRS-80. It was LESS obvious that
Apple 2 was doomed. But, within Apple, they knew there were troubled times
ahead, and came out with the disastrous Apple 3, and disastrous [from point
of view of SALES] Lisa.
'Course IBM poisoned the market for everything else, and nothing else sold
like IBM. On August 12, 1981, I said "In 10 years, 3/4 of the market will
be IBM PC and imitations of it."
It is amazingly impressive that Apple (Mac) survived IBM!
(If you think that Mac outsold PC, then you are looking at YOUR circle,
and need to look at actual sales numbers)
But, by the time that the Mac came out, TRS-80 was finally becoming that
"bit player" that some assume that it was, or should have been.
The main use of Z80 in US home
computing was in the absurdly small Timex /
Sinclair ZX80 series - with
their awful cramped membrane keyboards and seriously limited sound &
video.
Which was years later, and WAS a bit player and absurdly small. It was
NEVER the main use of Z80 in USA home computing. TRS-80 outsold them more
than 100 to 1.
Was that really a membrane keyboard, or was it just a PICTURE of a
keyboard as a recommendation, like the "part of this complete breakfast".
The Z80 also showed up in the Osborne, Kaypro and TRS-80 models.. mostly
due to the fact that CP/M was written to it.
Commodore also put one in the
C128, but by then, it was almost a dead letter.
CP/M was written to 8080. Z80 was simply the "hottest" 8080 compatible
processor available.
Osborne and Kaypro were literally years later, and they did, indeed simply
build clever, innovative CP/M machines.
I've never been sure how much market share CP/M had, since that was a
different circle than I was hanging out in. I'm sure that WITHIN that
circle, it would seem like it was MOST of the market.
Commodore's Z80 in the 128 was due to unnecessary fear that they might
lose market share to CP/M, when IBM should have been their big worry.
I don't know all of the details of the ST/Amiga technology swap, but BOTH
were too late, if the primary goal was competing with IBM.
What percentage of Apple 2's had Z80 cards added to them?
(once estimated at an unbelievable 20%, and reputed to be why IBM thought
that CP/M was a Microsoft product!)
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com