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Good morning and welcome back to the ValorosoIT channel, the channel dedicated to retrocomputers and vintage electronics. I'm at Varese Retrocomputing 2023 with Sergio Gervasini from ESoCoP, who will now give us a nice presentation of some computers from 1975 to 1980.
Hi everyone! Today we brought here ESoCoP, which is an association that deals with the rescue and preservation of computers from a certain era, in particular those perhaps a little older than others that are probably present at this event. And we decided to bring some computers that were representative of a certain period of time, which is the moment when computing could truly become personal computing, instead of being a niche thing like it was up until '75. In particular, historically speaking, let's start from the first car.
Here we have an Altair 8800. This machine was born in '75, but let's put it in the historical context of that era. Up until that point, computers were objects that cost thousands of dollars, they were things that only companies bought and were used for very specific tasks. In 1975, the design of this object which cost only 600 dollars appeared in the magazine Popular Electronics. It therefore allowed anyone to take home a full-fledged computer. It was very limited, certainly. We are talking only and exclusively about this part, but it had a huge possibility: the possibility of adding expansion cards. In particular, this machine has been expanded with a card that allows me to communicate with the terminal, which is this one. Communication with the terminal is via serial.
So imagine the revolution that this machine was for its time. In fact, they sold thousands of pieces. Microsoft was born with the Altair. That is, even Bill Gates worked for a few months for MITS, which was the company that produced the Altair. Then later they created Micro Soft (at the beginning the name was separate), which we all know from Microsoft now.
Historically speaking, however, let's move on to these other machines.
Following the success of the Altair 8800, which we saw a moment ago, many companies thought it was time to start making computers dedicated exclusively to the public, to normal people, let's say, not to companies, as had been the case up to that point. And here in '77 three machines came out, these three machines here that we see: one is the Commodore PET 2001, the other is an Apple II (Apple 2), which is quite well known, and the other in Europe, unfortunately, not very well known, but in fact in the United States it had a huge success, which was the TRS-80 from Radio Shack, which is a distribution chain to stores based in the United States. That's why it wasn't seen much in Europe, because it sold a lot in the United States anyway.
These three machines which all came out in '77, in fact, had the possibility of being used and were designed as a mass product, so they had to be able to be used by anyone. In particular, we see the Commodore PET with a machine that already has everything inside. I mean, we have a keyboard, we have a video, we have a cassette recorder. In fact it is a machine with which we can write programs, save programs, take programs already made by others (with cassettes) and then run them on our computer. Everything already included in one piece. Unlike, if you like, the Apple II: here we have the machine, then we separated the monitor and we separated the floppy disk again. In fact, you could buy just the machine, which you could connect to a television, you could connect it to a cassette recorder. Then, as you perhaps had money, you bought various pieces to be able to move forward.
Last, but not least, the Radio Shack TRS-80, which in philosophy is a bit reminiscent of that of the Apple 2, if you like, here in the keyboard part, in fact the computer is also included, the monitor is just a monitor that is branded Radio Shack. But in fact, here too we could connect it to a normal television. Here too we could connect a cassette recorder, here too we could add a floppy disk reader. Then we have these two machines (Commodore PET and Apple II) that use the same MOS 6502 processor. Apple too.
While this one (TRS-80) uses the Z80. This is the only big difference, if you like, between the machines, but let's say that from a usability point of view, they all used BASIC and therefore as such they could also be used by people who did not have particularly sophisticated programming skills, let's say. Because BASIC was born as an easy programming language. Yes, even the name itself says so (BASIC). If you want, yes, in fact, it's an acronym, but it's a little reminiscent. Thank you very much, Sergio, for the presentation. Thanks to you, Amedeo. And we'll see you for the next videos related to Varese Retrocomputing 2023. Bye!