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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

Anyone remember the Apple II Z80 CP/M card (which always made me wonder why you would buy the Apple in the first place)?

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Z-80_SoftCard

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Ah, I know the answer.

At the time, a CP/M machine was a business machine, because it could run a word processor, a spreadsheet, and dBase. (Literally the name of the database program from Ashton-Tate.) So you could buy a "serious" CP/M machine, but not an Apple II, which was an educational/hobbyist machine.

But if you bought an Apple II with the CP/M card, it was a business machine again.

The ways of people and accountants are strange.

The first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, was developed and first released on the Apple II (and apparently accounted for lots of its sales) - native CP/M spreadsheets, which came along later, were frankly a bit crap.

But I agree, there was more business software on CP/M.

Exactly. I still have a //e on my desk and learned how to use VisiCalc because a high school friend's dad was an exec at Symbolics and we would swap back and forth between playing games and trying to figure out cool things to do with spreadsheets.

I swore I would never leave my Apple //e, at least until Borland released Turbo Prolog, and then I absolutely had to have a PC.

Perfectly in sync with hairstyle of the day - the mullet. (Business up the front - party at the back)

It was just that way — a hardware version of dual-booting your tower into Linux for work and Windows for games.

> but not an Apple II, which was an educational/hobbyist machine

Which makes it doubly interesting that the AppleⅡ eventually shared the same fate to allow Macintosh LC systems to run old edusoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe_Card

I purchased one in 1984 to learn CP/M and Z-80 assembly on the Apple II. Later I used it to learn Fortran and Turbo Pascal, and finally bought a PCPI Applicard to speed the things up. The Z-80 softcard could be one of the best cards in Apple II's history, IMHO.

I had that card for my Apple II (still have it in fact). It was solely to run WordStar. Once AppleWorks was released, I never booted into CP/M again. (For some reason, I never used Apple Writer. I can't recall why not.)

I remember using the CP/M card mostly for WordStar, but also for Turbo Pascal (after wasting a lot of time on Apple Pascal).

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