CompuColor 8001?

[geoffm3]

Anyone got one of these? I was poking around on oldcomputers.net last night and was reminded of this thing. It looked pretty advanced for the time, and beat the Apple II to market.

I'm also reminded about how "silicon valley" tends to get a little too much press for "firsts" than other geographical areas when it came to innovation in the early days of personal computing.

 

[kyodai]

Back then it was pretty impressive - and pretty expensive. At 2700 USD in 1977 it was simply "out of reach" for normal families. The Apple II was still "expensive" at roughly half the price, but most middle class families could afford it if they really wanted to. The Apple II could be connected to any TV set with a cheap RF adaptor and everyone already had a TV in 1977. It supported a cheap panasonic audio casette tape recorder as a drive which made data store dirt cheap since you could even recycle your old audio casettes if you were in need for additional data storage. As nice as the CompuColor 8001 was - it goes to show that the price tag is important in the success of any device.