Re: Crosspost: Did the cpu influence the display?

[larry@portcommodore.com]

Reading some of the computer history books gives some insight into
that.  It depended on the compnay, graphics chips back then were pretty
primitive either TTL logic or if there was sone hotshot designer in the
compnay maybe a chip.  Though it took a hundred thousand (or more) to
design  a custom chip.

Commodore had the in-house guys from MOS to do the work and developed
thier own chips, Atari had also lots of arcade machine experiece to get
their job done.  Apple had color, but conparitively the Apple ][
actually had a pretty primitive color system (it didn't greatly improve
until the 80 column board)

CP/M machines were mainly going for the business market and column
space was way more important than color (decent 80 column color
displays were VERY expensive back then) so it was an expense they
probably didn't want to risk putting to the consumer.

The only real spectactualr color 80 column computer then was the
CompuColor II and at something like $3,000 it was certainly one of the
most expensive as well.

It's just color was not a common technology and also it wasn't a cheap
technology to develop from scratch unless you really wanted it.  Those
that had it cheap were the ones how did thier magic in-house and went
for mass market sales,  those that were more expensive were probably
buying third party video chips at higher cost.
 
Larry