Re: The IBM PC's slavish devotion to the Apple II

["Chuck Morris" <nospam@nospam.net>]

Rich <someone@somwehere.com> wrote in message
3EEDD574.6070000@somwehere.com">news:3EEDD574.6070000@somwehere.com...
>
> BTW, interestingly enough, spreadsheets were the reason for
> memory expansion. the extended memory system for the PC
> platform was developed because spreadsheet users needed more
> memory than the 8088's 1MB address range could provide.
>

Actually it would be more accurate to say that spreadsheets provided the
most compelling reason to date for most users to want to upgrade their
machines memory.  Memory expansions had been available for quite some time
before Visicalc came along, and in my Apple II+, the primary usage at the
time for the 16K language card expansion that was available was simply to
allow the use of Integer Basic, which could be loaded into the card from
disk.  Spreadsheets did fuel the need for much larger memory expansions
however, so in that sense there is some truth to the statement.