of Microprocessors

138 MUSICAL ApPLICATIONS OF MICROPROCESSORS
The home and hobby type of microcomputer became even more
differentiated from the business type. This was the era of the mass-produced,
incredibly cheap, throwaway computer. The race was started by Sinclair, who
introduced a machine about the size of a textbook that used a 2-80, could
run BASIC, and connected to a color television set-for $100. Although it
had its shortcomings (it couldn't compute and display at the same time, for
example), it sold well. Commodore followed with their 6502-based VIC-20
and later Commodore-64. The latter was unique in that it provided 64K
bytes of memory for the same price others were charging for 16K and less.
Texas Instruments repackaged their 99/4 and trimmed its price substantially.
Atari also cut the price of their 400 and 800 machines to be competitive, but
Apple held firm on the Apple II. During 1983, a raging price war broke out,
which saw the Commodore-64 price fall as low as $180 with the other
contenders proportionally less. By early 1984, only Commodore and Apple
remained in the high-volume home market. Since then, Coleco and IBM
have attempted to enter the market but with limited success.
With the great power of recent 16-bit microprocessors, a third class of
microcomputer became possible: the scientific/engineering workstation.
These typically used a 68000, had memory from 256K to 1M bytes or more,
a very-high-resolution graphic display, and disk storage of 5M bytes and up.
The operating system was typically UNIX, a very large and complex
operating system originally developed for PDP-ll minicomputers. Unfortunately,
along with their great power and capacity came prices that started
at nearly $10,000 and went up from there. While only a tiny number
(compared to business and home microcomputers) have been sold, their mere
existence has influenced engineers, programmers, and product planners
greatly.
Apple Computer, in designing a successor for their aging Apple II,
used the 68000/large-memory/graphics-display theme of the engineering
workstations, scaled it down a little, and combined it with intuitive,
graphics-oriented software to create their Lisa and later MacIntosh computers.
The former was intended for business use and is more expensive,
whereas the latter seems appropriate for almost any application and costs less
than $3,000. Strangely enough, neither machine has any expansion slots nor
significant program development support and thus has not been attractive to
hobbyists and independent add-on manufacturers at all.
As you can see, the history of microcomputers has been tumultuous
indeed, and the immediate future is not likely to be less so. But use in
complete computers is just one application ofmicroprocessors. Outside ofthe
swirling computer mainstream, microprocessors are used extensively in
dedicated applications to simply replace logic or increase circuit capability.
Since the primary purpose of this book is to explore the musical applications
ofmicroprocessors, further discussion of specific computers will be held until
Chapter 20.