In any case, I meant to point out (in my first post in this thread) that I for one remember the importance and attraction of the Apple II very nearly like how it is described these days, I don't see any revisionist history there.
I lost track of what period we're talking about here, but going back to the "Holy Trinity" days (Apple II, Commodore PET, TRS-80) and measuring by market share there's basically no comparison:
The TRS-80 *massively* outsold the other two; it's not even close. Apple II's
didn't outsell TRS-80s until 1983. (Also note that by that time the Atari 400/800 family was actually outselling both of them; Atari really dropped the ball letting the Commodore 64 steal that lead away from them.) Apple II sales didn't really take off until 1984, when it became the *second* most popular 8-bit on the market after the Commodore 64, and it remained second most popular until both of them were discontinued.
The Apple II *may* have grabbed a disproportionate amount of "mind share" back in the day because it was possibly the most "interesting" of the original Trinity (it was color, after all, and the company had its great "out of the garage" story behind it) but even if people wanted the Apple II back in the beginning it's not what they bought.
True, and it seemed no one bought any drives when they were available. i dont remember ever seeing any PET with a disk drive until I got mine three years ago. ic'd seen PETs with modems, datasettes, and printers, but never disk drives.
I found an ad in a 1979 Byte magazine for PETs and peripherals, and it claimed that you could have a dual-drive 2040 for "IMMEDIATE" delivery for $1295, which was the same price as 32K 2001N. (Interestingly the add also claims there will be a "2040A" single drive available "SOON"; did such a thing ever actually materialize? Never heard of one.) If we look at total system prices, well, If you bought a dual-disk TRS-80 out the 1979 Tandy computer catalog it'd cost you $849 for the computer, $448 for a 16k expansion interface, and $499 each for the disk drives, for a grand total of $2,295 for the TRS-80 vs. $2,590 for the PET. Of course, you could knock about $500 off the TRS-80 price if you only bought the computer and a 0k I/E from Radio Shack and mail ordered third party drives and RAM, not really an option for the PET. As for Apple, well...
Here's a June 1979 price list. A two drive Apple II with at least 32k would have run you... $1,345 + $595 + $495 = $2,485
(If we *really* wanted to make the Apple compare straight across we should tack on $180 for the parallel printer port that came with the Tandy's expansion interface, thus taking the Apple up to $2,665. That barely makes it the most expensive again. Granted you might need to pay for a widget to connect a standard parallel printer to a PET as well...)
So... some sort of interesting conclusions you can get out of this:
1: If you call a two-disk configuration a "system" they're all really close in price, more so than I remember. The TRS-80 is still the cheapest; by how much depends on whether you're willing to buy parts out of someone else's catalog.
2: A PET cost more than either of its competitors, by a pretty substantial margin, to add *the first drive* to if you already had the computer itself. The Apple II was actually the cheapest. Maybe that explains the rarity of PET disk systems?
3: Although not specifically called out in this comparisons, of these systems the Tandy wins the prize for being the system that lets out get to an ultimate configuration by spending the least money *at any one time*; In 1979 you could have a 4k Level I Model I for $499, and incrementally expand that up to a two-disk system without ever spending more than $500 a shot even if you restricted yourself to the Radio Shack catalog. This is where I think Commodore really shot themselves in the foot; you could in *theory* get a 4k PET for $595, which considering it came with the tape recorder makes it pretty comparable, but Commodore did evil things like drilling holes in the motherboard so if you wanted to expand to a larger configuration you'd have to buy a whole new system. Without resorting to soldering (or possibly some third party memory boards that'd tack onto that big internal connector) if you wanted a 32K PET you had to buy a 32K PET, and in 1979 $1,300 was a lot of money. A 16k PET 2001N was $995, which was "only" $150 more than the comparable TRS-80 but that's still $150. (And it might still have a hole drilled through the motherboard to keep you from going to 32k later.) Apple's starting price of $1,195 for 16K looks almost more reasonable since at least all it takes to go to the full 48k is a handful of memory chips you *could* buy from someone else. (When you hit 32k the difference is only $50, and of course there's no such thing as a 48k PET.)
Anyway. Apple may have scorched itself into the collective consciousness but if you're talking about the era where most people first got their hands on a computer it's *not* the one most people had. Again, by the time it became the *second* most popular 8-bit IBM Clones were already selling about three times as many units. (That's the thing that makes the C64 so remarkable; there were two years where there were more C64s sold than IBM PCs and clones combined; the first one of those they sold more than PC Clones and *Apple IIs* AND TRS-80s combined.) If you want to talk about a company that had it all and completely blew it you have to look at Tandy; if they'd managed to introduce a compelling successor to the Model I that kept customers hooked with the "buy what you need when you need it" strategy instead of disappointing almost everyone with the Model III... I dunno, Tandy Corporate still probably would have managed to swallow their own head. But in any case, the Apple II seems to be more notable as being one of the last 8-bit systems standing than as the dominant system in the early years. Since they're also the last one of those *companies* standing, well... history's written by the winners, right?
