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From: doug@terak.UUCP (Doug Pardee)
Newsgroups: net.micro,net.arch,net.micro.6809
Subject: Re: Architecture, or Coincidence?
Message-ID: <740@terak.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 27-Sep-85 14:02:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: terak.740
Posted: Fri Sep 27 14:02:40 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 1-Oct-85 11:24:37 EDT
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Organization: Calcomp Display Products Division, Scottsdale, AZ, USA
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> Is this just cultural coincidence, or was there a hardware
> reason for the following: In home computers, descendants of
> the 8080 have aimed at "serious business" TEXT-ONLY applications,
> whereas the 6800's descendants' machines have featured 
> bit-mapped color graphics and sound to a much greater extent.

I doubt that anyone knows "for sure" how this situation came about,
but here's my understanding...

The 2-phase bus nature of the 6502-type chips was indeed a big
influence in their use on "color" systems.  Perhaps equally as
important, the 6502 was introduced at the unheard-of price of $25,
when 8080's were still going for $150.

What the 8080 (and later, the Z80) had going for it was, simply put,
"floppy disks".  For the "high-rolling" computer hobbyist who could
afford to play with floppy disks, the extra hundred bucks for an 8080
was unimportant.  And they could also afford the (not very cheap at the
time) Western Digital floppy disk controller chips.  These FDC's were
easy to connect to the 8080, but relatively difficult to connect to the
6502.  The bigger bucks bought much faster data transfer rates.  And
those transfer rates made it possible to write "real" operating systems
like CP/M and TRSDOS, and to develop applications which used significant
amounts of disk data.

Put this all together, and you get two very different kinds of systems.
Low cost systems with cassette (or, at best, very slow disks) were built
around the 6502; their big drawing card was color graphics.
Higher-priced systems with "real" disks were based around the 8080;
their big drawing card was performance on any application that used disk
heavily, especially for data storage.  Applications like word processing
and databases.
-- 
Doug Pardee -- CalComp -- {calcom1,savax,seismo,decvax,ihnp4}!terak!doug


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