Re: Apple II vs Atari 800

[Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca>]

On Wed, 16 Apr 2008, David Wilson wrote:

> On Apr 17, 11:27 am, Mike Willegal <m...@willegal.net> wrote:
> > Ohio scientific challenger - poor busines practices and poor software
> > killed this one.
>
> As far as I can recall, the OSI floppy disk controller was pretty
> funky - it used an ACIA to read/write the serial bitstream.
Well yes.  But that always seemed irrelevant because it was all
too expensive anyway, and other factors too.

My first computer was a KIM-1 in 1979.  Two years later, I got an
OSI Superboard II (minor changes from the original Superboard), because
I could afford it, and not really any of the alternatives.  I sort of
thought of it as a runner up to the Apple II, ie I would have gotten
an Apple II at the time if I could have afforded it, but I couldn't so
the choice was the Superboard.  (I've seen other people say that in
recent years, too.)

The hardware was fairly accessible, and the computer did come with 
schematics, though expansion wasn't easy since all you had was a 40pin
DIP socket that brought the bus lines out.

But it was a 6502 based computer, and cheaper than the rest.  That
wave that came in 1977 (and the OSI Superboad first came out that year 
too), was mostly about making computers easy, so you put them in a case
and they had all the common things you'd need like a keyboard and video
interface, and they were generally more expensive.  The S-100 and SS-50
computers were expensive too, so the OSI filled a gap.

But, commercial software was limited, and expensive (at least here
in Canada).  I paid $500 for the Superboard, but I can't remember the
price of the disk interface or any of the other hardware, it was so
expensive it was completely out of my range.  By 1981 when I got it,
the company was starting to fade anyway.  It was a good computer for
me at the time, that video interface, the ascii keyboard, the 8k of
RAM, even the Microsoft BASIC in rom, all were a big step up from the
1k KIM-1, and I spent a lot of time learning about the computer and
programming things that never really went anywhere but were useful
as exercises in themselves.

  Michael