But the Apple II WAS a toy! Non-detached keyboard, poor placement of reset key, upper-case only, 40-character wide display, odd microprocessor, VERY SMALL capacity floppies (which were very slow as well), as well as a hostile legal situation regarding the building of clones. Hell, they even objected to other companies building boards which plugged into the bus!
The //e made a lot of improvements in this area. uppper+lower case + mouse text chars support. 80 column cards with double hires graphics. Also, the floppies weren't that slow compared to the terrible cassette drives in common use around that time, so some perspective is in order. Clone situation didn't help them, but then, it didn't help IBM a whole lot either, though it did wonders for MicroSoft. ;) Many many many companies developed cards which plugged into the expansion slots. Problem was, there were too few slots (especially since you couldn't use slot 3 if you had an 80 column card). :) (Printer card, modem card, hard disk card, 80 column card, mockingboard/sound card, graphics tablet/koala pad card, z80 card, RGB graphics card, etc etc.. BTW, what does this have to do with cypherpunks? can we cancel the topic now? -- ____________________________________________________________________________ Doug Hughes Engineering Network Services System/Net Admin Auburn University doug@eng.auburn.edu Pro is to Con as progress is to congress