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Z80 Softcard was it relevant?

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voidstar78

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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?)
 
voidstar78 said:
It wasn't clear to me if all Softcard's enable 80-column mode support, or was this a later feature (post 1980)?
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You can technically boot CP/M without an 80 column card, but it's not of much use in 40 column mode, since most applications need 80 columns.

As you noted, not just wordstar, but CP/M itself was quite popular at the time. I would wager a lot / most of the cards were used in business use cases more than at home, but that is pure speculation on my part.
 
As I understand it, the Apple Softcard setup was one of the most popular of the CP/M machines being sold. Mind, that's not necessarily saying much, there were a LOT of different CP/M machine, so it could be only, say, 10% (completely made up number) of the total CP/M machines and still be very popular.

A CP/M machine was a much better business computer than the Apple II. There was a lot more vertical application software written for CP/M than Apple DOS, notably because there were so many CP/M machines. BASIC-80 was a much better BASIC than AppleSoft BASIC. Specifically in how it dealt with random access disk files.

Consider a business perspective in this case. A primary reason people bought Apples back in the day was for VisiCalc. But, VisiCalc did not run on CP/M. At the same time, there was vertical applications for your business (say you ran a small gift shop, or a law practice, or whatever) written in CP/M.

The SoftCard with an Apple II gave your the ability to run both VisiCalc and your business software. For a time, that was a unique combination. Sure, you could play games and run your accounting software, but VisiCalc was the big driver. VisiCalc drove people to Apples, the SoftCard opened Apple up to a much large community of software.
 
voidstar78 said:
So wasn't quite clear on what was different about BASIC-80
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BASIC 80 was just Microsoft's standard 8080/Z80 BASIC. Technically speaking Applesoft is kind of a port of it. (Microsoft's first commercial product was BASIC for the 8080, and in 1976 they were convinced to write a 6502 port of it which is the core on which Applesoft, Commodore's BASIC, and a bunch of other variants are based.) So far as I know there's nothing really Apple II specific about the BASIC running on the Softcard, it runs it like any other CP/M machine.
 
We were a ComputerLand franchise back in the day, and my memory is that we sold a fair number of the Z80 SoftCards. People wanted to run WordStar and dBase II along with the games, Visicalc, and educational software that ran on the Apple ][.
 
Looks like at least the original Microsoft Z80 SoftCard itself didn't swap to 80 col, but an additional VIDEX card (or some equivalent) was needed to enter the 80-col mode.

So, they were sold separately. Meaning, in addition to the $350 SoftCard, some 80-col solution was also needed.

Paul Allen wrote that the SoftCard sold pretty well until about 1983 and then got run over by clones (and he wrote that the SoftCard sales helped Microsoft financially during some recession years -- but I imagine the card also helped Apple sales as well? such as "I don't need an OSBORNE1, can just use the Apple2 with a SoftCard" ? ).
 
voidstar78 said:
an additional VIDEX card (or some equivalent) was needed to enter the 80-col mode.

So, they were sold separately. Meaning, in addition to the $350 SoftCard, some 80-col solution was also needed.
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Correct; but I would keep in mind, people/businesses using productivity software likely already had 80 column cards in their machines.
 
The Softcard was, for a while, the cheapest way to get a 64K CP/M system even including the cost of the required Apple II.

BASIC-80 was different from Applesoft. I think the BASIC-80 was the standard disk extended while Applesoft had gone in a different path for its extensions. That means that commands like CHAIN or KILL, or the CDBL function were available with BASIC-80 but not Applesoft. That made porting a BASIC business program much easier. There were more differences between the two; I only took a quick glance at one of the conversion books for BASIC and the BASIC-80 manual for some examples.
 
The Apple II was the first platform Visicalc ran on, which was pretty much the entire driver for the popularity of the Softcard. There never was a "vanilla" CP/M port of Visicalc; there was one obscure Sony machine that had a port, but it was proprietary to that machine because VisiCalc would *only* run on computers with memory-mapped direct-addressable video displays. (CP/M machines, even those that technically did have memory mapped video hidden behind a BIOS curtain, only "generically" supported crude TTY-level screen interaction via whatever dumb terminal emulation they implemented. In a lot of cases it was barely good enough for a decent word processor, let alone a spreadsheet.)

krebizfan said:
The Softcard was, for a while, the cheapest way to get a 64K CP/M system even including the cost of the required Apple II.
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I would put an asterisk after that and say it was the cheapest way to get a 64K CP/M system that could *also* run VisiCalc. Technically there was a VisiCalc port to the TRS-80 Model II, which could run both TRSDOS and CP/M, but it was an immensely expensive (and just straight-up immense) 8" floppy beast. AND I don't think the port was available for over a year after the Apple version.

(* Technically I bet you could significantly undercut the price of an Apple II plus Softcard by buying a TRS-80 Model I, which I think may have been the first machine other than the Apple II to have a port, plus a CP/M card like an Omicron Mapper, but there weren't 80 column cards for the Model I and by the time 1980 rolled around 80x24 was a pretty strong requirement for "business" CP/M programs.)
 
Any merit to the idea of using "business software" on your Apple was a tax credit for business expenses?

Asking because I noticed this was a claim on one of the Microsoft advertisements for the Z80 SoftCard. I can't find the image at the moment - but something about being able to run invoices, payroll, or such reports overnight. [ edit: not the SoftCard doing those things, but I mean through CP/M software that could now be ran on an Apple2 by using the SoftCard ]

Was the "running overnight" a criterion for being a business expense?
 
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I am fairly certain that running overnight was not necessary to be claimed as a business expense. Someone with the 1981 updated IRS guidance for Sec 167 specific to computer software would provide a more accurate answer. I just remember that some of the other suggested write offs were for computing devices that met the definition of computers but were not likely to be able to run overnight. I have been reading through some HP newsletters of the early 80s and every issue mentioned the tax deductibility of what HP was offering.

There was a large push to have functions automated enough to run overnight so that the computer would be available for interactive use during normal business hours. It would be inconvenient to either not be able to take orders because the printing of invoices has not completed or have to return at 2 AM to swap disks.
 
Chuck(G) said:
There were several CP/M spreadsheet programs, including SuperCalc, Multiplan, Microplan, etc. that were just as capable.
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But not as timely. VisiCalc was 1979, Supercalc was '81, and Multiplan was '82. And both of those had the momentum of VisiCalc to overcome as well.

2 years was an eternity technologically back then.

VisiCalc alone sold a lot of computers, much like Lotus alone sold a lot of PCs.
 
The Softcard was pretty useful to me for software development. It ran Turbo Pascal and the 8080 assembler. WordStar was great for writing papers and kermit was a good program to dial into to the university's network. The SoftCard also came with two versions of BASIC-80. One with hires graphics support and one without. The one without would give you more free memory if you didn't need graphics.

As for VisiCalc, the SoftCard wasn't required to run that, so I don't know why that would be a driver for SoftCard sales. I think most of the CP/M spreadsheets were very short lived as Lotus 123 became one of the killer apps for the IBM PC about the same timeframe.
 
whartung said:
But not as timely. VisiCalc was 1979, Supercalc was '81, and Multiplan was '82. And both of those had the momentum of VisiCalc to overcome as well.

2 years was an eternity technologically back then.

VisiCalc alone sold a lot of computers, much like Lotus alone sold a lot of PCs.
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SuperCalc was 1980--I should know; my code's in there. The founders of Sorcim were ex-CDC mafia. :)

Chang Labs' Microplan was around 1980-81 also. I remember meeting with Dash to hear his presentation, but all I can bracket with regard to dates is somewhere around 1979-81,
 
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krebizfan said:
I am fairly certain that running overnight was not necessary to be claimed as a business expense. Someone with the 1981 updated IRS guidance for Sec 167 specific to computer software would provide a more accurate answer. I just remember that some of the other suggested write offs were for computing devices that met the definition of computers but were not likely to be able to run overnight. I have been reading through some HP newsletters of the early 80s and every issue mentioned the tax deductibility of what HP was offering.

There was a large push to have functions automated enough to run overnight so that the computer would be available for interactive use during normal business hours. It would be inconvenient to either not be able to take orders because the printing of invoices has not completed or have to return at 2 AM to swap disks.
Click to expand...
Most likely this was the result of mainframes which performed a lot of batch processing at night.. The PC was a departure from this method of processing.
 
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