voidstar78
Veteran Member
Hey all, from the general Apple perspective, was the Microsoft Z80 Softcard from 1980 all that significant?
What would motivate anyone (in 1980) to spend $350 on it? Impression is that it sold "like hot cakes" and you do see them (or clones) in many 2nd hand Apples. And I understand the basic that it let you run CP/M - I suppose if you worked with an office that used WordStar, that might be a motivation to be able to interchange files more easily with them. I can't recall if/when WordStar was ever native to Apple, since Apple-folks also had EasyWriter. The Softcard also let you run any of the Microsoft compilers that had been ported to the Z80 (Pascal, Cobol), which had some worth to developers.
It wasn't clear to me if all Softcard's enable 80-column mode support, or was this a later feature (post 1980)?
Also, it wasn't clear to me about the Microsoft BASIC in the Softcard. That BASIC-80 is different than what was in the AppleSoft BASIC, correct? I mean AppleSoft BASIC added floating point and was a 1979 product (was it on tape? or disk? or both?). So wasn't quite clear on what was different about BASIC-80 (maybe it was altered or trimmed to adjust for this hybrid 6502/Z80 setup?)
What would motivate anyone (in 1980) to spend $350 on it? Impression is that it sold "like hot cakes" and you do see them (or clones) in many 2nd hand Apples. And I understand the basic that it let you run CP/M - I suppose if you worked with an office that used WordStar, that might be a motivation to be able to interchange files more easily with them. I can't recall if/when WordStar was ever native to Apple, since Apple-folks also had EasyWriter. The Softcard also let you run any of the Microsoft compilers that had been ported to the Z80 (Pascal, Cobol), which had some worth to developers.
It wasn't clear to me if all Softcard's enable 80-column mode support, or was this a later feature (post 1980)?
Also, it wasn't clear to me about the Microsoft BASIC in the Softcard. That BASIC-80 is different than what was in the AppleSoft BASIC, correct? I mean AppleSoft BASIC added floating point and was a 1979 product (was it on tape? or disk? or both?). So wasn't quite clear on what was different about BASIC-80 (maybe it was altered or trimmed to adjust for this hybrid 6502/Z80 setup?)