David Schmidt <schmidtd@my-deja.com> wrote:
On 2/14/2012 10:00 AM, Michael Black wrote:
[...]
But I don't see what great new development happened with the III that
helped the II line along. It was a separate branch, the never went
further. Unless the failure of the III meant Apple went back to
extending the II line in a more logical fashion.
The 80-column firmware was transplanted from the III to the IIe. As
Brendan pointed out, ProDOS is a direct descendant of SOS.
Yes, but these are both natural evolutionary developments that would have
occurred on any Apple II follow-on.
Apple tried to design a new machine for the business market and discovered
that what the market really wanted (besides IBM PCs) was an Apple II with
additional business features--like a lower-case-capable keyboard, an
80-column display, a clock-calendar, and a DOS with mass-storage
capabilities. (All of which had been delivered (suboptimally) by the Apple
II aftermarket!)
In 1981, I used to attend an Apple user group in Austin, TX, and several
members had Apple ///'s. I found it ironic that they were almost all used
in ][+ emulation mode (except when running the /// demo software)!
-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon