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
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
Jim: On Thu, 13 Jun 1996, jim bell wrote:
But the Apple II WAS a toy! Non-detached keyboard, poor placement of reset
I liked my Apple 2e, which had most of the faults you mention. And the editor had for it had one feature I haven't seen on any editor since.
And by refusing to build Masatoshi (?) Shima's design for the Z-80, they
The number one selling computer with a Z-80 chip inside was also the number one computer platform which ran CP/M which was The Apple 2e. << Yes, the Z-870 chip was a third party add on. >>
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.
Mainly because it has what has to be the world's most user hostile computer interface ever dreamed up, until Win95 came on the scene. xan jonathon grafolog@netcom.com ********************************************************************** * * * Opinions expressed don't necessarily reflect my own views. * * * * There is no way that they can be construed to represent * * any organization's views. * * * ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ * * * http://members.tripod.com/~graphology/index.html * * * ***********************************************************************
participants (3)
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Doug Hughes -
jim bell -
jonathon