![]() There’s truly something for everyone, but that wasn’t the case in the early days when computers from PET, Apple, and Commodore were available. ![]() Today’s computers vary from sleek laptops that weigh less than a pound to custom-built rigs with a NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti. It also affected the programs and games on both platforms, even if many titles were available through both. That gap, while small, made a significant impact on the hardware used in each computer. The Apple II was launched in 1977 while the Commodore 64 didn’t hit the market for 5 more years until 1982. The PowerBook 100 was the first laptop released by Apple.Īpple II vs. ![]() Apple transitioned from the Apple desktop PC brand to iMacs in 1998.Consumers could purchase the Commodore 64 in toy stores, unlike other home computers. ![]() The Commodore 64 is the best-selling desktop PC of all time according to Guinness World Records.Parallel port card, Serial port card, SCSIĪpple II vs. Wondering which machine was the best? Well, the answer might surprise you. It was challenging to compare the Apple II and Commodore 64 at the time, but today we can look at these two systems side-by-side. In the late 70s and early 80s, Apple and Commodore were two names at the top of every tech wish list. The Apple II was more of a business machine than the C64, so there were word processors and productivity tools, like Bank Street Writer, AppleWorks, and Magic Window.Paddles, tape drives, hard drives, daisy wheel printers, and even light pens were available as peripherals for the Commodore 64.A built-in RF modulator allowed users to turn any TV set into a computer monitor. The C64 was designed to compete with home video consoles like the Atari 2600 and computers.All of this fits onto a single 140k 5.25-inch disk image. In addition to the Bitsy Boot boot utility, the ProDOS 2.4 "floppy" includes a collection of utilities, including a MiniBas tiny BASIC interpreter, disk imaging programs to move files from physical floppies to USB and other disk storage, file utilities, and the "Unshrink" expander for uncompressing files archived with Shrinkit (helpful for using Apple II archives scattered about the Internet). There's also a boot utility that is under 400 bytes-taking up a single block of storage on a disk.Īrs is looking forward to booting up the physical Apple ][+ ROM image. Bitsy Bye is an example of highly efficient code: it runs in less than 1 kilobyte of RAM. The release includes Bitsy Bye, a menu-driven program launcher that allows for navigation through files on multiple floppy (or hacked USB) drives. You can test-drive ProDOS 2.4 in a Web-based emulator set up by computer historian Jason Scott on the Internet Archive. Which is pretty remarkable, considering the Apple ][+ don't even support lower-case characters. ProDOS 2.4, released on the 30 th anniversary of the introduction of the Apple II GS, brings the enhanced operating system to even older Apple II systems, including the original Apple ][+. Yesterday, software developer John Brooks released what is clearly a work of pure love: the first update to an operating system for the Apple II computer family since 1993.
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