Re: Education PC seller says Apple is no good in that market
The Apple II didn't just fail to see much international usage in education, it generally didn't succeed internationally. But its method of colour generation* doesn't map to the world beyond NTSC** so that's not so surprising.
* a pixel clock that is four times the NTSC colour clock, with the developer required to store a suitable pattern of pixels to create appropriate colours. So a hypothetical PAL version would need a clock rate around 20% faster, and developers would need to rewrite their software for a different aspect ratio display and to deal with the phase alternating part of PAL.
** although the Oric pulls a similar trick, outputting four discrete levels for per colour clock (assuming a solid colour; the clocks are asynchronous), it does it in hardware via a small colour ROM. The programmer just asks for colour N, and the rest is taken care of.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
