PBS show

[jim bell]

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 at pacifier.com