Microsoft Consumer Products. (1980)

Microsoft's first hardware product was the Softcard, a Z80 coprocessor card that allowed the CP/M operating system to be run on an Apple II. CP/M (which stands for Control Program/Microprocessors, Control Program/Monitor or Control Program for Microcomputers, depending on who you ask) was a popular OS for Intel 8080/Zilog Z80 based systems, and ran on many early microcomputers. It was written in the late 1970's by Gary Kildall, founder of Digital Research, Inc.

The Softcard let the Apple II user tap into a large library of popular software that was only available for CP/M at the time such as Wordstar, Turbo Pascal, and dBase. Microsoft also sold several programming languages that ran under CP/M, including BASIC, COBOL, and FORTRAN.

The Softcard did not have any memory on it, and instead used the memory installed in the Apple II. It was compatible with most of the standard Apple II expansion cards, such as 80-column video cards, printer cards, serial cards, but they had to be installed in certain slots. Generally, if the Apple II configuration worked with Apple Pascal, it would work with CP/M.

The four DIP switches on the card should all be in the down (OFF) position. No other configuration is necessary. Once the card is installed in an unused expansion slot, usually slot 4 or 7, booting an Apple CP/M disk will utilize the Z80 processor on the card. CP/M version 2.2 is supplied on the system disk included with the Softcard. Several standard CP/M file utilities are included, such as format, copy, ed, and PIP, a file & disk utility. The system disk also holds two versions of BASIC. MBASIC is Microsoft's standard BASIC for CP/M. GBASIC includes extensions to make use of the Apple II's graphics ability. There is also a progam called APDOS that copies files from Apple DOS diskettes to Apple CP/M diskettes.

Most other Z80 cards made for the Apple II were clones of the Softcard, although there were some exceptions.