Re: Seeking reverse-engineers - Apple II VisiCalc

[nem <nem@nospam>]

Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> wrote in news:

> An analog might be the "IBM PC" that came with a cassette interface,
> but I'm not sure how many are aware of that.  You think floppy drive
> when you think of that computer.  I remember people talking about
> using it without a floppy drive when it came out, but that's so long
> in the past that the "feature" is long forgotten.

The Apple II's cassette support was primitive and unreliable, but it had 
nothing else at first. The IBM PC always had disk drives from the 
beginning, so there was no reason to use it with a cassette.

> Or, decades later, people have forgotten or even never knew that there
> were home computers before the "IBM PC".  Again, it's because the
> previous computers are dwarfed by the arrival of that computer, fused
> with many people having arrived after that point.  It doesn't mean
> there weren't small computers before IBM came along, just that few
> remember. 

This attitude is mainly due to history books that focus only on Apple, IBM, 
and Microsoft. Companies that were very prominent and sold a lot of 
computers (eg. Commodore, Atari, and Tandy), usually just get a few passing 
references in those books.