1 Jul
2005
1 Jul
'05
1:46 p.m.
On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Scott Stevens wrote:
Well, a TRS-80, if it's a model 1, and not a model
3, arguably is more
important to history than an Apple 1 (though far, far more common). The
Apple 1 was just one of a number of hobby circuit-board-only computers
on the market at the time. The TRS-80 was one of the first big
_successful_ computers people really used.
Arguably, being the key. The Apple-1 is the predecessor to the Apple ][.
which was far more successful than the TRS-80 line, though it was
successful in its own right.
The significance of the Apple-1 in April 1976 was that, nothwithstanding
the Sol-20, it was pretty much everything you needed to get going with a
computer. It integrated the CPU, video interface, and had BASIC in ROM.
You did have to add the other half of the power supply (transformers) and
a keyboard, but otherwise it was a complete computer on a single board.
This was significant for the day.
Most other computers of the era required you to buy a whole bunch of
pieces of hardware and somehow figure out how to put it all together and
make it work.
The Apple ][ was really just a refined Apple 1 but with important
enhancements (graphics being one) and everything that a consumer computer
should've been. The Apple ][ came to market in the spring of 1977. The
TRS-80 came out later in the fall of that year.
There was nothing the first TRS-80 was that the Apple ][ wasn't. In terms
of capability, the TRS-80 was somewhere between the Apple-1 and ][.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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