Re: PBS show

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

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