Re: Apple's ways

["william strutts" <wrstrutts1@nospam.home.com>]

"Ralf Quint" <Ralf_Quint@hot_mail.com> wrote in message
unc9mtovcqhnco8ga5gvm8u5apbr5t2fhl@4ax.com">news:unc9mtovcqhnco8ga5gvm8u5apbr5t2fhl@4ax.com...
> On 29 Jul 2001 20:56:36 GMT, wbdesnoy@acs5.acs.ucalgary.ca (Byron
> Desnoyers Winmill) wrote:
>
> Well, there are a lot of newer motherboards out there that have
> dropped a lot of legecay support, but fortunately IMHO, they are not
> succeeding as well as Intel (and a few others) have hoped.

The other half only have one ISA slot.  Not good if you want to plug
in an ISA modem and a serial/parllel card.

> There are PC boards out there, that don't have any separate keyboard
> or mouse port anymore (AT style or PS/S), instead a few more USB
> connections build in. ISA slots are omitted on a lot of boards, maing
> it impossible to use a "real" internal modem (there are barely any
> non-Winmodems for PCI available). And as before mentioned boards don't

They are available but at higher price points.  A PCI Winmodem is
under $40 but a REAL hardware modem is almost $100.

> have any serial (RS-232)/parallel ports anymore either, you have to
> get an external USB modem and USB printers as well. Pretty tough if
> you want to print carbon copy forms on an good old, reliable dot
> matrix printer....

Actually, you can get a USB to Parallel cable.  I used to use one of
them on a Canon printer.  They work okay but you have to have a
special driver installed for the cable and some Parallel hardware don't
like the port.  My scanner refused to recognize the cable.

> Well, it was for a good part a problem with the price politics of
> Apple and/or Motorola that they didn't get more attention. But even
> the cheaper Atari and Amiga, which used the 68k series of chips didn't
> change much either....

The move to the PowerPC was that Motorolla wasn't going to
significantly enhance the 68K line of processors.  The last one
I believe they were going to make was the  68060 processor
so Apple decided to make the move to the newer PowerPC
architecture just announced by Motorolla/IBM.  IBM initially
announced that they would have a Common Reference Platform
which Apple planned on building a standard Mac OS for but
then IBM dropped that development and abandoned the PowerPC
for just  high end workstations. (CRP was a consortium of sorts
with Apple, IBM and Motorolla).

> The PowerPC was just another step to force a bigger incompatibility.
> There have been originally Windows NT and OS/2 versions for Power PC's
> too (i have seen them myself, on closed door demonstrations on the
> Hannover CeBIT computer fair, many, many moons ago), but they have
> been dropped pretty fast, as they were assumed not to be worthy
> markets....:-((( (though those demo versions i have seen rocked,
> compared to the stuff that was officially available those days!!!).

Again, IBM and the industry dropped the CRP and developers
lost interest in development of new stuff for the new platform.

> I liked the Apple II, it was my favorite machine in '79-'83, but it
> was far too expensive for me to get one for myself those days. I ended

Yeah.  Right  you are there.  I ended up with the 6809 Radio Shack
Color Computer due to the low cost in comparison to the Apple.
I was a poor college kid.

> up buying a PC clone (for quite a horrendous amount of money
> nowadays), as it offered more (expandibility and software support)
> than what Apple offered those days. And the original Macintosh, i
> never like these tiny boxes with this even tinyer monochrome screen.
> And Apple was always way to expensive for what they offered....
> Well, two years ago, i ended up buying a used Mac IIsi with a lot of
> peripherals, just for some nostalgic reasons...

I liked the original Mac platform except the limited memory and
expansion of the 128K and Fat Mac.  The Mac Plus I had was not
a bad machine.  It did great desktop publishing stuff and Hypercard
was pretty cool.

> Well, OS-X is just another Mac-goes-Linux in disguise. Ok, they base
> on a different kernel development, but let's face it, the result they
> came up with is not that much different than a Linux box with KDE or

It is based on FreeBSD Unix and the NeXT Mach kernel.  Although
Linux is Unix like it is not BSD Unix which is what OS X is based on.
Linux was developed as a cheap work alike of Unix which was owned
by Bell Labs and I believe SCO owns it now but they were bought out
recently too.  BSD is a real Unix code base.  The BSD were developed
by UC Berkley until they lost funding to do development on the code.
The code base then became Open Source and many different variations
were then developed such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD.  They just
can't call it Unix anymore due to licensing issues of the Unix name.

> Gnome (from the users perspective). They could have had this years
> ago, if they wouldn't have kicked out BeOS when Job's took over and
> brought in his NeXT people. And i don't think that there is much from
> the original NeXT OS left in OS X.....

Apple bought out NeXT and Jobs came with it.  They bought NeXT
with the intended purpose on using his Mach kernel as the heart of
the next generation Mac which was code named Rhapsody. This
later became System 8 and not Unix based.

Jean Louis Gasse left Apple long before Jobs came back.  He founded
Be to develop some OS ideas he was thinking about at Apple. If I
recall right, Gasse was a designer from Apple of France.  He was
brought back to the US to head some design projects. I forget
exactly what projects though.  He had a CD-ROM once that
he recorded a voice track to introduce the new upcoming System
7 back in the early 90's.  I used to own it but I tossed it out a few
years ago when I left the Mac market.

> >Just some ideas,
> same here,
>
--
--
William R. Strutts - wrstrutts1@nospam.home.com - Whatever!

C'est moi!  http://www.facelink.com/wrstrutts

Just hacking away...

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