Many believe that Microsoft has always been a company limited to software and especially operating systems. It is true that the Redmond giant excelled mainly in those two worlds, but That’s not to say he hasn’t taken his first steps in the hardware world where in fact she reaped more than one success at different times.

I know what you’re thinking, Microsoft and its adventures in the world of hardware are recent and that the Surface was its first experience in this sector. Well, the truth is that you are wrong, the Redmond giant launched its first hardware product in 1980, and it was very curious because it was an expansion card known as the Z80 SoftCard and was designed for use with the Apple II.

The Z80 SoftCard hit the market on April 2, 1980, the brainchild of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and featured a processor 8-bit Zilog Z80 running at 2041 MHz, However, it did not have built-in RAM. The original Apple II had a MOS Technology 6502 processor running at 1 MHz, so the improvement offered by this expansion card was clear in terms of performance, but mainly compatibility.

The Apple II was very popular, but it had a major problem, which was that it was not compatible with many of the important professional programs of the business world at the time. Paul Allen knew how to take advantage of the situation and formed the Z80 SoftCard that once mounted on said computer. made it possible to move all programs compatible with Intel 8080 processorsand also opened the door to software MS BASIC and the CP/M operating system.

The Z80 SoftCard was hugely successful, even though its introductory price was quite high ($349), so much so that at the time this accounted for nearly 50% of Microsoft’s annual revenue. With this in mind, Microsoft understandably decided to develop an improved version that included 16 KB of internal RAM, and also released new models with 64 KB of internal RAM that were compatible with the Apple IIe and Apple III.

This expansion card allowed you to use very popular programs of the time on the Apple II, like WordStar, which was a stellar word processor in the early 1980s and which allowed working with up to 40 columns of text. At the time, Apple offered an expansion card that extended the work possibilities to 80 columns of text.

Redmond Giant continued to bet on the expansion card market until 1988, the date when Microsoft began to focus more on the software and development of Windows, its well-known operating system. It’s been a long time since then, but you know that Microsoft has gone from being a software giant to a technology giant operating in many industries, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence, software, game consoles and video games, and hardware.