Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE

[Bill Degnan]

> I suppose that the 68K only trickled down to the home/consumer market
> after about 5 years. The original Mac was circa $2.5K and the Lisa was
> around $10K -- *not* home computer prices for most people, even in the
> USA.
>
> The Sinclair QL was arguably the first affordable mass-market 68K box,
> and it used the somewhat crippled 68008 and 8-bit RAM to keep costs
> down.
>
> Before the Mac, I suppose that, as Cameron points out, the accurate
> comparison was with standalone multi-user machines such as the Sage
> and Alpha Micro. Desktop minicomputers, really.
>
>
Agreed.

A fully provisioned IBM PC / XT in 1981-4 was pretty expensive too, that's
why 8-bit machines continued to sell well into the later 80's.  16-bit was
overkill for most home needs.  Apple would not have survived the 80's
without their 8-bit machine sales, and Commodore, Atari, Tandy....

Bill