General public machines (Was: Altair 8800 name Was: Re: Altair 680 Expansion Boards?

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: 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. 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". 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