Xref: utzoo comp.misc:3139 comp.arch:6092 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!ames!oliveb!sun!crunchyfrog!dhsu 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 Lines: 24 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."