25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer" 4218

And that's crucial to this discussion. MOS Technology made it's mark in introducting the 6502 (actually, the 6500 which was pin compatible with the 6800 but I have no idea if it ever was sold before Motorola took issue) at $25 (or was it $20)? I well remember the article in Byte about the third issue in, and it was a mindblowing teaser on the cover. The other CPUs were still in the tens of dollars, if not over a hundred, so that single quanbreasty price did make a mbuttive impact.

Steve Wozniak knew about it, which is why he used it. It was cheap to him, for his design for his use, which only incidentally made it into a commercial product.

I wanted a 6502 from the day I saw that article, because again it was cheap compared to the rest. But then, I only needed one.

But, the other CPUs got cheap, if you bought enough. I've read that when the Altair 8800 came along, it was cheap enough that people could buy one and toss out the rest of the computer (I have no idea how much truth and how much exaggeration), the cost of the computer was still cheap for the price of a single CPU (at least in late '74 or early '75). But of course, there was no way MITS could have afforded to supply the rest of the computer for the price after paying for the CPU, so they were getting them a lot cheaper than the hobbyist would pay for a single quanbreasty. And Intel was a bigger company than MOS Technology, had various products including the all important memory, and had a few years over MOS Technology to build up demand. By the time of the Altair, they had various companies buying from them, big well known companies.

So Intel likely was in a better position at the time to supply large quanbreasties, had the means of increasing supply if a customer needed it, and in a better position to sustain losses if Apple had faltered. And buying in quanbreasty dropped the price so it didn't matter that much, either.

Michael