dwight elvey wrote:
The one thing I found is that the BASIC on the Apple
is really
slow. It is about the slowest I've ever used. How people put
up with it I don't know.
We put up with it back in the late 1970s because none
of the common,
inexpensive microcomputers available at the time were any faster. And
although the Atari 800 had better graphics, it had far worse I/O.
Even the 4 MHz Z80 systems and 5 MHz 8088 systems weren't much faster,
because the 6502 is more cycle-efficient than either. It really wasn't
until the 286 era that it became commonplace for microcomputers to be
significantly faster than the Apple II. Of course, by then there were
also faster Apple II models, but that was about the end of the line for
general-purpose microcomputers using the 6502, while the x86 was still
being aggressively developed.