Joel Koltner wrote:

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in message
...
Did you ever look at that Apple II video on a waveform monitor? The
ones I saw were nasty.

No, but from Woz's description of how it worked, I'm not surprised. Even he
says he wasn't sure it would really work on all TVs!

But for a hack that didn't cost much of anything, it's still quite clever.

The first computers I used were Apple II's and Commodore PETs (before the C-64
came out), and honestly... I'm amazed Commodore survived its PET era to go on
to make the (very good) C-64 -- compared to the Apple II, the original PETs
were quite crude. (...and the story goes that this was even after Chuck
Peddle had talked directly to Woz and knew a lot of how the Apple II was being
designed. Although, on the other hand, Peddle deserves a lot of credit for
realizing that a cheap CPU would completely revolutionize the industry...)

I find the entire history of the 8-bit computer industry quite fascinating --
it really demonstrated how a few smart guys (most of them without college
degrees) created widgets that were years ahead of what much-better-funded
large companies such as HP, IBM, Wang, and so on could cook up.

The C64 was cleaner than some low end ($1000)
NTSC Color character generators.

They did it "properly" (in the VIC-II) chip by taking their 14.318MHz crystal
oscillator, generating quadrature signals at 3.58MHz, and then adding in
various ratios of I and Q to get the desired phase shifts. Their hue (I/Q or
U/V), then, ended up as the ratio of a couple of on-chip resistors -- quite
decent -- but their intensity was a function of an on-chip resistor's raw
value -- kinda crappy. The story goes that Commodore was too cheap to let
them add, e.g., an external 1% resistor so that intensity could be reasonably
accurate as well:
http://unusedino.de/ec64/technical/m...ors/index.html


I had $65,000 worth of Metrodata character generators at a CATV head
end (2 systems * 4 channels each). They used 6845 Video chips and a 6800
CPU per system on the Motorola Exorcisor bus. There was 48 KB of RAM per
system. The C-64 was better quality, and a whole lot cleaner than the
Apple II used on our community loop by the local school system. Even
with it's 12 line, 22 column display you could barely read it.


--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a Band-Aid™ on it, because it's
Teflon coated.