Re: PBS show

At 7:30 PM 6/13/96, jim bell wrote:
>At 10:31 AM 6/13/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:
...
>>The comments about the floppies (" VERY SMALL capacity floppies (which were
>>very slow as well") is even more off-base.
>
>The original Apple II floppy held ONLY 90 kilobytes on a 5" floppy.  How did
>they do such a bad job?

And the cost of these floppies was very low--I seem to recall $150 or $175.
In those days, when 8" externals weighed 50-70 pounds and cost a few
thousand dollars, this was a notable achievement.

Remember, the standards of 1978 are not the standards of today. The
"standard" then, for personal computers that were affordable, was an
external cassette recorder ("TARBELL" standard). Go back and look at issues
of "Byte" or "Interface Age" or "Dr. Dobbs" to see what was really
available.

Given the low cost of the Apple unit, it's a marvel they could do it at
all. The "IWM" was the key. Just plain good design. And "only 90 KB" is
also misleading in implying Apple was behind the times. The IBM PC launched
3 years later had a built-in cassette port and only offered 180K diskette
drives (later upgraded to 360K).

Really, blasting Apple for poor design and for not providing
higher-capacity floppies, when the competition was doing far worse, is
laughable.

>The design for the Z-80 was completed and in Intel's hands.  Intel didn't
>want to build the Z-80, they wanted to focus on peripheral chips, so they
>let Shima go and start Zilog.

Your history is flawed. Faggin and Shima did not have a completed Z-80
design when they left; if they did, Intel would hardly have let them take
it with them when they left! As the Gen Xers would say, "Duh."

Read up on some of the histories of the time. Intel never chose to focus on
"peripherals," they chose to build both. (If anything, EPROMs were the
profit center in the mid- to late-70s, not either processors or
peripherals.)

At the time you are apparently referring to, the mid-70s, Intel had a huge
effort started to develop the "8800." While this was ultimately a failure,
it is supremely stupid to use 20-20 hindsight without looking at more
issues. All development efforts and companies involve lots of decisions,
lots of tradeoffs, lots of hurt feelings, and lots of apparent mistakes.
Arguing that Apple could have introduced a high-capacity floppy in 1978, or
that Intel should have developed the Z-8000, is just plain pointless
nonsense. We could all speculate about how some company should have done
things differently, knowing what we know now.

The rest of Bell's points are just typical PC-microprocessor flame material.

Use what you want to use, just don't rewrite history to fit your theories.

I won't comment further on this thread.

--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Licensed Ontologist         | black markets, collapse of governments.
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On Thu, 13 Jun 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:

> Given the low cost of the Apple unit, it's a marvel they could do it at
> all. The "IWM" was the key. Just plain good design. And "only 90 KB" is
> also misleading in implying Apple was behind the times. The IBM PC launched
> 3 years later had a built-in cassette port and only offered 180K diskette
> drives (later upgraded to 360K).

Also had more than enough computing power to break knapsack. It's not 
what you've got, it's how you use it.

Interesting gedankenexperiment... how much difference would it have made 
to ULTRA and it's predecessors if bletchley park had rediscovered 
and been able to manfacture semi-reliably primitive transistors? 

Simon



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