From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Mon Nov 18 2002 - 12:11:26 MST
> (John K Clark <jonkc@att.net>):
> >>Me:
> >>one of the chief producers of software for the Apple 2 was Microsoft.
>
> Eugen Leitl" <eugen@leitl.org>
>
> > This is not how I remember things.
>
> But it's true, Microsoft was second only to Apple itself in application
> programs for that platform, and I think there were a few years when it was
> number one.
The very first Apple II came with a BASIC interpreter in ROM that
was written by Woz ("Integer BASIC"), but not very many of those
units were sold. This was replaced by "Applesoft BASIC", which
was written by Microsoft; nearly all Apple IIs sold contained those
ROMs. They also produced other compilers, but they weren't a big
player in the application market: Bricklin's Visicalc was probably
the biggest-selling application (Microsoft tried to create a
competing spreadsheet "Multiplan", which failed), followed by a
couple of word processing systems like Lutus's Applewriter and
Draper's Easywriter, and some popular games like Sargon II and
C&W Adventure. The DOS was developed internally by Apple.
MS was not a major player beyond the BASIC.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:58:12 MST