nem wrote:
> Michael Black  wrote in news:
> 
>> An analog might be the "IBM PC" that came with a
cassette interface,
>> but I'm not sure how many are aware of that.  You think floppy drive
>> when you think of that computer.  I remember people talking about
>> using it without a floppy drive when it came out, but that's so long
>> in the past that the "feature" is long forgotten.
> 
> The Apple II's cassette support was primitive and unreliable, but it had 
> nothing else at first.



>> Or, decades later, people have forgotten or even never knew that there
>> were home computers before the "IBM PC".  Again, it's because the
>> previous computers are dwarfed by the arrival of that computer, fused
>> with many people having arrived after that point.  It doesn't mean
>> there weren't small computers before IBM came along, just that few
>> remember. 
> 
> This attitude is mainly due to history books that focus only on Apple, IBM, 
> and Microsoft. Companies that were very prominent and sold a lot of 
> computers (eg. Commodore, Atari, and Tandy), usually just get a few passing 
> references in those books.

And there were "personal" computers long before then--my first personal
computer was an IBM 1620, and I could come in at night and on weekends
and use it personally for hours at a time--even reading its schematics
and modifying its operating software--very PC-like.

My next personal computer was a room-sized Burroughs 220, the last
commercial vacuum tube computer!  It had a 1000x1000 point display
scope (vector), a light pen, and a keyboard in addition to the
usual computer peripherals: printer, mag tapes, and paper tapes
(no card reader/punch).  It had been displaced by an IBM 7090, and
people could now sign up for up to a couple of hours on a blackboard!

(It's used to be said that "all the most interesting work with computers
is done on obsolete machines, because they are the ones that graduate
students can get access to!".  The latest machines were always run as
"closed shop" machines, often all night, and so were only available
to system programmers and friends of the machine operators. ;-)

If you remember the old Batman TV show, his "computer" was a B220
console with all the neon lights replaced by tungsten bulbs.  ;-)
That console could be played like an organ.  When the machine was
stopped (manually or on an address matching a debug register), all
the registers were visible in the lights, and any bit in any register
could be set or reset by pressing a small switch bar beneath the
corresponding neon.

Needless to say, the B220 console was a great debugging tool!

So the market for personal computers was primed long before
computers could be bought for under several thousand dollars.

-michael

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