On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 14:35:53 GMT, Moll
<MollyBaker@Spam.GMAIL.Spam.Spam.Spam.Com> wrote:
Eric Smith wrote:
Jim Brain wrote (perhaps quoting Jim Butterfield?):
Nope; it was Jim Brain who contacted the Woz. On my side, I had gone
to the original site where I had found the data and asked if they had
any souces or supplementary information on this. Haven't heard back
from them yet (this is all VERY recent).
I was amazed both at how reachable Woz still is, and how the fate of
Commodore and Apple may have been different. I don't remember the
initial PET price and how it compared to the Apple II price, but I
believe the PET was much higher-priced.
It seems to me that the original 4K PET was pitched at about US$600.
The deal was this: you sent the money to Commodore, and if you didn't
get a computer in three months, you could ask for a refund if you
wanted it (honest!). Somewhere during that three-month period, early
buyers (orderers?) were told by Commodore that 4K would be really very
limiting, and they recommended switching to 8K, at a higher price
(say, US$800?). A very few buyers stuck to their original order, and
a few 4K PETs were delivered, but most buyers went to the 8K model.
This makes it hard to say what the "initial PET price" really was.
And of course we paid more up here in Canada; I vaguely recall a price
point of C$1200.
The PET was introduced at a substantially lower price than the Apple II,
as was the Radio Shack TRS-80. The Apple II probably had a lower
manufacturing cost than the PET, even if you don't consider the integral
video monitor and cassette drive in the PET, but that was not reflected
in the retail pricing.
Apple did something strange with the clock lines. The 6502 has two
clock output lines, called phi-0 and phi-1 or something like that.
Apple decided to use only one of these, and generate the second clock
line by inverting that one. Seems to me I've heard it claimed that
this made the computer capable of using dynamic RAM, whereas
conventionally clocked systems could use only static RAM.