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>Most computer game companies were probably tiny in the early 1980s. I also wonder what would have happened if Commodore, Radio Shack and other companies had managed to keep up with Apple.

You are under the impression that Commodore did not keep up with Apple. As others have said in this thread, the Commodore 64 dominated computer games in the 1980s in the US; Apple was a strong second, until Nintendo on the low end, and PCs on the high end, took over from both after 1988.

Compare the Commodore magazine Compute!'s Gazette for December 1983 (https://archive.org/details/1983-12-computegazette/mode/1up) to the 80 Micro and Rainbow issues I previously cited. It has ads from

* Spinnaker

* Atari

* Epyx

* Orion

* First Star

* Infocom

* Datasoft

* Avalon Hill

* HesWare

* Sierra

* subLogic

* Access

* Adventure International

By 1984 several of the above would disappear because of the video game crash, but at this time all were still well-known publishers on multiple platforms. Of the list, the Tandy magazines probably has ads from Infocom (which published its games on every computer known to man) and maybe subLogic and Adventure International. Tandy desperately tried to revive the Color Computer by finally promoting third-party software, which is why the Color Computer 3 (released in 1986) has some releases like King's Quest III (but not any others in the series).

>Didn't many vintage computers (and other electronics) come with schematics so you could troubleshoot/repair the machines and/or design your own expansions?

Some. Of the three 1977 computers, Apple was by far the best, with complete schematics and Wozniak-authored articles in BYTE with technical details. TRS-80 had, as I mentioned, nothing other than the BASIC tutorial accompanying the computer. Commodore was not as good as Apple but much better than Tandy, and would put out even more detailed documentation for later computers; its Commodore 64 technical manual is considered a classic.

Other companies also varied. Atari had by far the most sophisticated hardware when its 8-bit computers appeared in 1979. It, like Tandy tried to keep technical information to itself, which no doubt handicapped developers attempting to use that hardware, but in 1981 completely changed course by releasing lots of documentation. TI always kept everything to itself until after discontinuing the 99-4A computer after losing against Commodore in a price war. But no company came anywhere close to what IBM did by releasing everything, even source code to its BIOS. The resulting immediate massive development of hardware and accessories by others was hugely important to the PC architecture becoming the industry standard.

1 comments

> You are under the impression that Commodore did not keep up with Apple

Thanks for the interesting summary; what was the last year that you think Commodore was a viable competitor to Apple?

I do wish Apple paid as much attention to gaming on macOS as they do on iOS.

It is cool though that C64 is still a viable game platform in 2020, with products (C64 Mini) that you can buy. ;-)

> TRS-80 had, as I mentioned, nothing other than the BASIC tutorial accompanying the computer

Apparently you could buy this for $9.95: http://www.trs-80.org/trs-80-micro-computer-technical-refere...

>Apparently you could buy this for $9.95

Sorry, I should have clarified that I was referring to software development. Radio Shack, as a store chain prominently selling kits and Forrest Mims's books on electronics, would have embarrassed itself by not offering schematics for its computer.

What Tandy did not do was offer software documentation. Read this BYTE article from two years after the TRS-80's release (https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1979-08/1979_08_BYT...), which a) discusses how to implement machine language graphics and b) complains about the complete lack of Tandy documentation that motivated the author to write the article in the first place.

> complete lack of Tandy documentation that motivated the author to write the article in the first place

It looks like Radio Shack published this in 1979: http://www.trs-80.org/trs-80-assembly-language-programming/

It also appears that they supplied a machine language monitor/debugger, T-BUG. So armed with a Z-80 manual and a memory map of the system you could probably do basically anything.

Since the system used block character graphics (like ANSI block graphics), and a memory-mapped display, accessing them from assembly language (or any language) seems like it would be trivial unless they somehow kept the video RAM address and character set a secret.

However, it doesn't look like Radio Shack provided official source listings for their firmware the way IBM (and perhaps other companies) did. I expect that greatly helped with the development of software and tools for the IBM PC, as well as the development of compatible machines.

As much as I like modern computers and smartphones (and systems like the Raspberry Pi) which have absurdly higher speed and greater storage than vintage machines, it's always amazing to consider the explosion of creativity and fun that people managed to have with these pioneering "personal computers."

>Thanks for the interesting summary; what was the last year that you think Commodore was a viable competitor to Apple?

1985-1986, the period of about 18 months after the Amiga came out. You read BYTE magazine from then and it's clear that the magazine (and, more importantly, its readers) viewed the Amiga and the Atari ST as viable, realistic challengers to the Macintosh as leader of mouse-based graphical computing (i.e., anything not IBM/MS-DOS). Neither Commodore nor Atari succeeded in supplanting Apple for reasons I won't get into here.

But you're not asking the right question. Apple itself was having a very difficult time in convincing corporate customers that Macintosh was the answer to anything. Everyone acknowledged that Macintosh's user interface and software were excellent. But DOS was good enough, had a gigantic software library, and by the end of 1986 it was possible to pay $1000 for a PC clone that could run dad's spreadsheets he brought home, and also run Flight Simulator for him and educational games for the kids. The one exception was creative types; desktop publishing and graphic design, with the Laserwriter's PostScript capability, let Apple keep Macintosh alive, while the Apple II line kept bringing in cash even though the PC was eating it and everything else non-DOS alive.

By 1988, although the Commodore 64 still had the largest home computer installed base, the PC was growing so quickly that everyone knew that it would soon take over. Meanwhile, Nintendo was so popular that in one year it sold as the entire C64 installed base since 1982. So every game publisher began shifting to PC and/or consoles. Apple's also huge II installed base also kept it afloat as mentioned above, and the significant educational market let Apple keep producing II models until the early 1990s, almost exactly the same time as when Commodore went bankrupt and discontinued the C64. But realistically, neither the C64 nor the II had been viable markets for software or hardware companies since about 1990.

Apple survived because by the early 1990s Macintosh sales were finally trending upward, with the continuing creative market joined for the first time by substantial home and educational demand thanks to the low-cost Classic and LC models. But the relentless growth and dominance of the PC market, combined with mistakes by Apple in the mid-1990s, caused the company to come within moments of bankruptcy and/or sale in the late 1990s until Steve Jobs came back and pulled off a miracle.