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From: dhsu@crunchyfrog.Sun.COM (David Hsu)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.arch
Subject: Re: History of PCs (also kind of long)
Keywords: history, pc, workstation
Message-ID: <64653@sun.uucp>
Date: 17 Aug 88 21:55:58 GMT
References: <5946@venera.isi.edu> <5458@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> <121@leibniz.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: dhsu@sun.UUCP (David Hsu)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
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In article <121@leibniz.UUCP> hwt@leibniz.UUCP (Henry Troup) writes:
>
>The PET had little impact on the field.  I used to sell/program them.
>At the time they were already weak - max 32K RAM, BASIC only, closed
>hardware system...

This seems hardly fair.  The PET actually made a reasonable dent in the
educational market simply because it was the cheapest, fairly child-proof,
self-contained BASIC-running machine you could buy.  It was something of
a hit with elementary school PTAs that took up collections to buy computers.
I think the APF might have given it a run for its money had they bothered
to write a BASIC for it.  Anything fancier than 8k and a cassette was
too luxurious for most schools anyway until '79 or so.

My guess is that the PET was more crippled by the original rectangular
alphabetically-arranged keyboard than anything else, and Commodore's
delay let the competition emerge.

-dave

David Hsu
dhsu@sun.com			

"Feh."