3 Jan
2012
3 Jan
'12
1:23 p.m.
On 3 January 2012 19:07, Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com> wrote:
From: Liam Proven
Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2012 4:07 AM
On 3 January 2012 12:05, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
That matches my recollections from my reading at the time. (Apple kit
was expensive and very rare in the UK.) Similarly with CP/M.
Visicalc was, as you say, the killer Apple app. If there were killer
CP/M apps, they were probably dBase II or Wordstar, at a guess?
--
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> ? I
>> remember watching my boss in 1984 use a CP/M card in his Apple II for
>> business apps (mostly spreadsheets),
Huh? Wasn't Visicalc a native Apple II app?
Indeed it was, and the first ever <hack><retch><spit> "killer
app" in
the microcomputer world. ?The market pressure of Fortune 500 employees
purchasing Apple II systems to run Visicalc was what led to the creation
of the IBM Personal Computer.
There was far more business software written for CP/M at the time, and
the creation of the Z-80 Softcard ("the CP/M card" in an Apple II) let
the typical business user run both Visicalc and CP/M word processors,
accounting packages, etc. ?I actually doubt that they were used to run
many CP/M-based spreadsheet programs, but I'm prepared to be wrong on
that.