When Microsoft first launched Windows 8 in 2012, it also launched the Microsoft Surface with Windows RT. Many people believed at the time that this was the company’s first venture into personal computer hardware.

Oh, sure, the company made and sold computer accessories like its many mouse and keyboard products, and it was also in the game console hardware business with its Xbox division. Some analysts believed at the time that it was a mistake for Microsoft to enter the world of PC hardware. They thought that other computer manufacturers would run Microsoft, which until then had only released software for their systems.

However, many people at the time didn’t realize that Microsoft was actually selling a PC hardware product, long before it launched Windows, and even before it released MS-DOS. So Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer actually mentioned this fact The first Surface press event in June 2012.

It’s called the Z80 SoftCard, and it was first released 43 years ago this month, on April 2, 1980. In an even more ironic twist, the product was created as an add-in card for the Apple II computer.

The card was launched not long after Microsoft moved its headquarters from its original offices in Albuquerque, New Mexico to Bellevue, Washington. According to A October 1980 issue of Computerworld, the initial idea for the Z80 SoftCard came from Microsoft founder Paul Allen. the card used Zilog Z80 8-bit processorwhich was actually created several years earlier in 1976. It had a clock speed of 2.041 MHz, according to Nicole Express. The card itself had no RAM on board.

While the Apple II computer was popular, it was unable to run many business programs that many people wanted to use on an Apple computer. These programs were not compatible with her processor. The Zilog Z80 was compatible with programs that ran on Intel 8080 processors. Allen believed that an add-in card for the Apple II would allow Microsoft BASIC to run on the Apple computer. The Z80 SoftCard could also run the CP/M operating system, allowing more programs to be used on the Apple II.

The starting price of the Z80 SoftCard was $349 at launch. To the company’s surprise, it was a huge sales hit and at one point generated half of Microsoft’s total annual revenue. The company later created a RAM card for the Z80 SoftCard (yes, a plug-in) that put in 16KB of RAM. Microsoft later created a version of the expansion card for the Apple IIe that had 64 KB of RAM on board and it did the same for the Apple III, this also inspired other companies to create their own add-in cards for Apple PCs.

One of the reasons for the initial success of the Z80 SoftCard is that because it can run CP/M programs, it can also run WordStar. WordStar was the word processing giant in the early 1980s. Getting the card on the Apple II allowed a lot of people to use WordStar who couldn’t before. Indeed, some users also bought a second add-on card, the Apple 80-Column Text Card, which allowed the computer to display 80 columns of text instead of the original Apple II’s 40 columns of text.

(Fun fact: Game of Thrones original creator George RR Martin Still using the DOS version of WordStar to write his novels and stories.)

Microsoft continued Create add-in cards and products for IBM compatible computers (Maybe we’ll write a separate article about those devices someday). However, the era of Microsoft’s first foray into PC hardware products was quite short-lived, the company’s final PC add-in cards were released in 1988.

Until then, Microsoft decided to concentrate on its software products such as Windows and a few years later, the first version of Office. This of course created input hardware accessories such as mice, keyboards and joysticks. However, we’ll have to wait over 20 years before the company comes back with a full PC product.