Robert Boucher wrote:
In article <75df0f56-11eb-48a2-b07e-91c9678b5472@g26g2000vbz.googlegroups.com>,Sean Fahey <a2fan@hotmail.com> wrote:On Jan 7, 4:12 pm, Immortal Nephi <Immortal_Ne...@hotmail.com> wrote:The advanced programmers purchased an original Apple II rev 0 with 4 kilobytes RAM in old days of year 1977. Did they use Apple II Reference January 1977 book to write games? The games were written in either Assembly or Integer Basic to use low resolution graphics since they had sufficient 4 kilobytes RAM.I remember the salesman telling me I'd need 16K to do anything serious with my Apple II -- and I believed him. Buying RAM was expensive (it got more expensive later on) but instead of buying Apple-branded RAM, they'd unofficially recommend third party RAM at a significant savings. The user groups would also have group buys of RAM, and later on, "generic" Shugart drives and various cards to get a volume discount. That's how I went from 16K to 48K back in the day.When I got my II+, got it with 48K. I think it was $200 for the extra 32K. Several "knowledgeable" people in the local Apple group told me I had just thrown my money away!
I can understand that. When I bought my Apple ][+ at the end of 1980, it was available in 16K and 48K versions, with the 48K version costing substantially more. I don't recall the price exactly, but I recall it being more than $200 for those 16 4116 chips. Since the 16k machine was $1200, that seemed like adding insult to injury. I took the 16K machine home (it was just big enough to do hi-res) and ordered 32K of chips from California Digita--8 chips for $60, and theyarrived in less than a week. After five minutes plugging them in, I had a 48K machine for $1260! ;-)
Apple's corporate axiom is never sell anything for less than a multiplier of pi, so I was willing to put some effort into beating their system. For example, I hand-built most of my add-in cards for several years from knock-off PC boards. I even converted two SA 400 disk drives (cost, with cases, about $100 each) into Apple- compatible drives, saving myself about $800 for a two-drive system. -michael NadaNet 3.1 for Apple II parallel computing! Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."