Re: A question about 80 columns card

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Eric Smith replied:

>Michael Black wrote:
>> The IIe "80 column card" is just a bit of memory.  It plugs into
>> a special slot in the computer.  The IIe has the rest of the circuitry
>> for 80 columns, and when the extra memory is added, there is enough
>> room for the 80 column screen, and it all works.
>>
>> I can't remember, or the articles at the time never said, why they
>> didn't just put the extra memory on the motherboard.
>
>mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon) writes:
>> The only apparent motivation was additional profit from selling
>> the 80-column capability for a lot more than the cost of memory.
>
>Remember that you could buy just the 80-column text card, which only
>had a few Kbytes of memory, or the extended 80-column card, which
>expanded the IIe to 128K of RAM.  At the time the IIe was introduced,
>the cost of the 64 Kbytes of RAM for the extended card was not so
>completely trivial that Apple wanted to include it on the motherboard.
>By putting it on a separate card, it allowed customers three choices:
>
>    1)  64K IIe with no 80-column support
>    2)  64K IIe with 80-column - only slightly more expensive
>    3)  128K IIe - more expensive yet
>
>In my experience, many educational institutions purchased only the
>80-column text card, although typically they were later upgraded as
>more software started to require 128K.

I had forgotten just when DRAM prices collapsed, until I ran across
this quote (from a description of the dumping lawsuit):

 "Due to Japanese competition, prices for 256K chips have
 fallen from $18-20 in 1984 to $2 in 1985."

So when the //e was introduced, and certainly when it was
designed, the cost of DRAM would have added about $40
to the _cost_ of a //e, justifying the additional $2 cost for
making it optional.

By 1985, though, the cost of the second 128KB had dropped
to $4.

Yet another example of how Moore's Law (and a little dumping ;-)
can obsolete some good design choices.

-michael

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