At 10:26 PM 6/12/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:
Most of the portrayals of Silicon Valley history was pretty accurate, especially the 1975-78 "Homebrew Computer Club" days. (I used to go to about every other one of these, mainly in '77-78, where I sometimes passed out free samples of the 8080 and stuff like that. A friend of mine at the time was one of the Apple II motherboard designers, and another was the first employee hired by Jobs and Woz. Personally, my first personal computer was a Processor Technology SOL, as I thought the Apple II looked too much like a toy. Shows you what I knew.)
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! Personally, I soured on the Apple II when I followed EDN magazine's attempt to build an engineering system with it, called "Project Indecomp." They ran into a boneheaded design problem with the Apple, due to improper clock synchronization and bus timing. They gave up the project, concluding that the Apple II was brain-dead. BTW, Intel shares a substantial proportion of the blame for Apple's choice of the 6502. The decision was made, I've heard, because Intel was still trying to get $200 for a slow 8080, while Western Design Center (?) wanted only about $20 for a 6502. And by refusing to build Masatoshi (?) Shima's design for the Z-80, they totally lost the race for the 8-bit PC world. The Z-80 turned into the highest-volume 8-bit microprocessor by far, leaving both the 8080 and the 8085 in the dust, and even the 6502. I have other, even harsher word for the design of the IBM PC. Oh yes, the Mac sucks bigtime as well, although primarily for legal reasons. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com