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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
-- Eric Hoffer
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 10 2021, @10:52PM
A few years ago I re-read all of the BYTE magazines up until about 1984, at which point after the introduction of the Mac, I get kind of disgusted with BYTE magazine. But I liked its early days.
Their meaning of the word "standard" was that each, on its own, presented a uniform platform that software developers could target. You could write for a TRS-80 and have a market for however many million that Tandy / RS sold. Similar for Apple. Similar for PET.
Prior to this, every "home brew", or "microcomputer" was different. They didn't even have things like keyboard interface standard. The best uniformity you could dare hope for on keyboard was a serial input from a serial keyboard -- at best. This is why there wasn't much commercial software prior to this "holy trinity".
Within each platform the BASIC was also standard. So you could also write commercial software for that. But the best programs were machine code for the specific platform. Such as: VisiCalc.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.