Re: Apple II vs Atari 800

[mmphosis <markwstock@yahoo.com>]

1980, wow!  That was a long time ago.

In 1980, I remember the Apple II/II+ as having the best graphics/sound
at that time, and it had a disk drive!  Wow, no more loading from
tape.

The TRS-80's built-in screen was screen black and white.  It had
graphics and sound?  If it did, Radio Shack certainly didn't market
it, but I do give them big credit for actually selling computers in
their stores.

The Commodore pet was text with crude line/block characters in it's
font, but it came out roughly the same time as the Apple II.  The
VIC-20 would show up a LATER, and the C-64 even LATER.

The IBM-PC came LATER and did not have graphics built-in but it did
have slots like the Apple II which meant that graphics cards could be
added.

Other than in coin-op video arcade games and a game consoles, I don't
really remember Atari computers in 1980, maybe LATER in 1981/1982 they
started showing up in stores, but Apple had the market by then.  The
graphics and sound looked good in the demos and in the pre-packaged
Atari arcade games.  But, could you type:
]HGR : HCOLOR = 5 : HPLOT 0,0 TO 279,159
on an Atari and get a jagged orange line on the screen?
On the Atari, I think you had to write 6502 assembler which had to run
within a limited amount of time to do hi-res graphics, am I wrong
about this?

In the 1980's, I wrote educational software for the Apple II and Icon
computer.

Why schools go with the hardware they choose?  I think that it's a
government decision and the process changes.  I don't know.

Where I lived at the time, the schools in the province of Ontario,
Canada primarily had Commodore equipment.  And, later the government
latched onto putting Icon computers in schools, built by  Burroughs /
Cemcorp, later Unisys, later maybe Sperry at the end.  In the 90's, I
think they switched to Macintosh and PC.  But, by that time the legacy
Apple II still had the of the most educational and games software
going for it.  And, my friends and their children to this day still
play Oregon Trail on their modern computers!