I'm looking thru this June 1977 issue of Byte. Inside I find an ad from
Apple on page 14&15. The copy starts "Introducing Apple II", which makes
sense as the Apple II was introduced at the West Coast Computer Faire in
April 1977, so this ad was probably one of the first for the Apple II.
Now, one of the great things about the Apple II was its ability to display
color graphics, apparently a big deal at the time, as supposedly no other
machine in the home computer class had this capability (save for the S-100
machines with a Cromemco TV Dazzler, but that was an add-on, as opposed to
the Apple II's built-in capability).
Yet there is another ad on page 61 for the Compucolor 8001. The
Compucolor boasts pretty much the same features as the Apple II (64K RAM,
cassette storage, built-in BASIC) although it runs on an 8080. However,
the Compucolor came with an "integrated display", and featured 160x192,
8-color (vector) graphics (the Apple was capable of 280x192 bit-mapped
graphics). The Compucolor also had "mini-disk drives" (I assume 8")
available for it separately. The retail price advertised for the
Compucolor was $2,750, very comparable with a similarly equipped Apple
II.
Yet the Apple II is celebrated as having been the first home computer with
built-in color graphics, and almost no mention of the Compucolor is ever
made in any general computer history texts. The obvious difference
between the two is that the Apple II went on to enjoy tremendous success
for the next 15+ years while the Compucolor was relegated to an also-ran.
The victors do indeed write the history, or at least get the lion's share
of the mention.
I think its odd that a system such as the Compucolor, extremely comparable
to the capabilities of the Apple II (if not more so in some respects)
hardly gets mentioned in the computer history books I read.
Maybe someone who is cognizant of that era can shed some additional light
on this.
The lesson of this story is, you can have the best, most amazing product
in the world, but "build it and they will come" does not apply. You've
got to advertise. Apple was obviously more masterful at this.
Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar_at_siconic.com
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Received on Sun Sep 13 1998 - 23:43:32 BST