Re: There’s a quote:
For that price, in an end of year sale my H11 came with a H9 "glass tty" (fully assembled) and the necessary serial I/O card (in kit form), along with a single floppy drive (some assembly required). I bought a second 8" floppy drive because the sales dude was trying to shift 'em and offered me a deal..
I decided to buy the H11 in kit form because my father and I agreed that it would offer a better learning experience for both of us than getting it fully assembled. Yes, I bought extra RAM ... but that cost would have been the same per chip as for the Apple, which also only came with 4K. But remember that the base H11 came with 4Kwords, the base Apple with 4Kbytes.
Software was available thru' DECUS, which I could access from Stanford via a little-known thingie that some folks came to call "The Internet". Ride my Bultaco to the school with a 8" floppy or five, grab my software, bike home. The latency sucked, but my bandwidth could be orders of magnitude better than a 110 baud modem.
The time and effort was well spent. 40+ years on, I am still making money from things I learned building and testing the individual components. Apple's memory mapped video was OK, I guess, if you were into herky-jerky video games & the like. I was more into it as a career choice, not as a toy.
I learned how the actual hardware worked, PDP-11 assembler, Fortran and COBOL. You learned BASIC (maybe) and how to play games. In retrospect, we're both happy with the memories. Vive la différence. Have a beer?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
