Re: There’s a quote:
The H11 was $1295 for a kit comprising of just the CPU and 4K of RAM. You needed an external terminal and an IO card on top of that as a minimum to make it do anything.
The Apple II was the same price, but all you needed to make it work was a TV and a cassette player. For that reason it sold very well to hobbyists. Following the creation of VisiCalc on the II it’s sales to companies skyrocketed.
The H11 may have had an existing library of software (PDP11 code, on paper tape), but it was much more expensive and took more time and effort to get it to the point it could do useful work, and it didn’t support memory mapped video so was incapable of many of the things that the Apple II became famous for even though it had a more powerful CPU.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
