1983 Commodore 64 article in CGW

[JamesD]

Also note that Atari and Commodore were made to be consumer products. IBM was made to appeal to businesses. A whole different philosophy and a whole different style of sales/income. The mom and pop consumer versus large multi-million dollar contracts selling thousands of machines to factories and defense companies - for example..

I'm guessing something about IBM having that got deleted for some reason.

Yeah, IBM was aimed at a different market at first and BASIC was only in ROM on some of the first machines.

[JamesD]

BTW, the list of machines in the disruptive post is pretty simplified.

 

If you look at the history of PCs you have something like this:

Altair

Upgrades to make Altair a stand alone machine.

Sol 20 (combined the above and keyboard in one box)

Apple II, TRS-80, and PET. The TRS-80 actually outsold the Apple II at first and only when the II+ was introduced did it bet to be as user friendly as what we usually consider to be an Apple.

Atari (PM Graphics, sound chip)

TI (another sprite & sound machine)

VIC20 (lower cost with color and sound)

Tandy CoCo (along the idea of the VIC but not as limited)

 

Somewhere in there Apple added the language card and you could have 64K RAM.

 

Notice a steady trend towards the C64 features.