The first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, was developed and first released on the Apple II (and apparently accounted for lots of its sales) - native CP/M spreadsheets, which came along later, were frankly a bit crap.
But I agree, there was more business software on CP/M.
Exactly. I still have a //e on my desk and learned how to use VisiCalc because a high school friend's dad was an exec at Symbolics and we would swap back and forth between playing games and trying to figure out cool things to do with spreadsheets.
I swore I would never leave my Apple //e, at least until Borland released Turbo Prolog, and then I absolutely had to have a PC.
> but not an Apple II, which was an educational/hobbyist machine
Which makes it doubly interesting that the AppleⅡ eventually shared the same fate to allow Macintosh LC systems to run old edusoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe_Card
Re:Apple II Mouse Card (1981)
by flenserboy on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @01:48PM
(#27450886)
It was just that way — a hardware version of dual-booting your tower into Linux for work and Windows for games.
At the time, a CP/M machine was a business machine, because it could run a word processor, a spreadsheet, and dBase. (Literally the name of the database program from Ashton-Tate.) So you could buy a "serious" CP/M machine, but not an Apple II, which was an educational/hobbyist machine.
But if you bought an Apple II with the CP/M card, it was a business machine again.
The ways of people and accountants are strange.