19 Sep
2025
19 Sep
'25
4:36 p.m.
Yep, Mike Ellis was the coworker that shared the story and photos with me
(of the PETs they had acquired for the Aero division) c. 1978. YF's are
prototypes and they can fly without any combat software, then there are
Block upgrades done over subsequent years. He's long retired now, but I
may still be able to reach him. But to me the point was instead of a
$7000 single row HP, one could now get a full screen "Transactor" for
1/10th that cost.
On Fri, Sep 19, 2025 at 3:45 PM Milo Velimirović <milovelimirovic(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
on demand
On Sep 19, 2025, at 3:09 PM, Fred Cisin via
cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Fri, 19 Sep 2025, Steve Lewis via cctalk wrote:
> just an overall simpler chip?). I didn't get the impression the Z80
was
> "expensive" - contemporary prices
that I found placed the Z80 at
something
> like $60 (or at least, under $100) and an
8080 at over $300? (but it's
> hard to pinpoint individual price vs bulk order, and normalize across
those
critical
years of 1974-1977).
Also prices were volatile; announced at one price, and then up or down
> At Lockheed (then GD), when the F-16 was first being developed, I'm told
> they used Commodore PET's to do initial aerodynamics modeling because
it's
> BASIC had floating point support. Obviously,
that's not unique to the
6502
As did TRS80 ("Level 2 BASIC") where all numbers were single precision
floating point by default!
also AppleSoft, and many/most? of the other
Microsoft BASICs.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com
The timeline for the story about the F-16 & PET according to Wikipedia:
20 Jan 1974: First flight of YF-16
Jan 1977: Commodore PET debuted at CES.
—Milo