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Comment by alayne | Hacker News Reader

The Altair was very much like a modern PC in that it used a de facto standard S-100 bus and other standard peripheral connections, and was based on the Intel 8080 CPU which evolved into the 8086 used in PCs. It had the first commercial software. It was mass produced. It was able to run CP/M which has much more in common with DOS than Apple DOS.

The Apple II was more proprietary in nature and the line died out after the Apple III failed. Intel x86 based PCs are still made today. Edit - sorry, forgot about the IIGS.

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We'll have to agree to disagree. There's nothing even remotely proprietary about the original Apple II -- seriously, have you ever seen a Red Book? And IMHO, nothing that didn't ship with a keyboard and a ready-to-use video display port can be considered either a "personal computer," or a progenitor of them.

It had an RS232 port that could be connected to a serial terminal with a keyboard. This is an emulator, but you get the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxcFNOpnIIs

Sure looks a lot like any other early personal computer. Having a "video display port" seems like an arbitrary distinction.

Also if you want to talk about ubiquity, the TRS-80 which released a bit later in 77 than the Apple II massively outsold it.

True, the TRS-80 often gets short shrift in these arguments. What was revolutionary about it was the price, about $1K cheaper than an Apple II. It foreshadowed the day when almost everybody would be able to afford to own their own computer. I agree that the TRS-80 was an important milestone in its own right, even though it lost the race to call itself the "first recognizable PC," or whatever.

I think Apple's big win was in mindshare and getting the education market, maybe being more professional and establishing vendor relationships. You didn't see Altairs. I only knew about them from magazines. When I was in early gradeschool, all computers were Apple IIs as far as I knew.

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