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 <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Sep 19, 2025, at 3:09 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk < > [email protected]> 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 > on demand > > > >> 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 [email protected] > > 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
