Re: Apple's ways

[Ralf Quint <Ralf_Quint@hot_mail.com>]

On 29 Jul 2001 20:56:36 GMT, wbdesnoy@acs5.acs.ucalgary.ca (Byron
Desnoyers Winmill) wrote:

>johnw_94020@yahoo.com (johnw_94020@yahoo.com) wrote:
>: PC's on the other hand have followed a different route which I think
>: is one reason why more than 85% of the computer market in PC based. 
>: Most PC's use the X86 processor, and it has been this way for a long
>: time.  Most PC's include support for legendary hardware (serial,
>: floppy,PS2,etc), and probably always will.  This means that a MSDOS
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>: based program that ran on a 386 under DOS 6.22, in most cases will run
>: under a recent OS with a Pentium.  But my ProDos based games from my
>: Apple II days will not run under the recent Mac OS X without a OS X
>: emulator of some kind, which do not exist (to my knowledge).
>
>This is not entirely true, as the PC has dropped a lot of baggage over the
>years.  EISA and VESA slots died with the introduction of PCI, and ISA is not
>so common nowdays.  Software is not 100% compatible either.  Some stuff broke
>with the introduction of Win95.  Many DOS applications (particularly games)
>would certainly fail to recognise todays video and sound cards, beyond the
>lowest common denominator.  Indeed, a VGA card which I pulled from a 386
>had refused to work in a 486 (reason unknown).  The new world Macintosh
>probably dropped ADB and RS-422 and floppy support due to cost.  Undoubtedly,
>Wintel machines will follow suit when USB is more common.  So while Wintel
>machines may have better legacy support, I would not venture that it is a
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.
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
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....
>perfect solution.  (And certain components, RAM being the first one which
>comes to mind, are virtually impossible to share across different generations
>of machines.)  I would also challenge you to use a 'winmodem' or 'windows
>printer' running MS-DOS 5 and your favourite communications software or
>word processor.  You can still buy (more) expensive hardware which is more
>compatible with MS-DOS, but the same can be said for Apple II's and Macs.
>
see above...

>That said, Apple does appear to be more of a 'great ideas' company.  How
>great many of those ideas are, I will leave up to you.  The Apple II was one
>of the earliest consumer-oriented computers.  The 6502/65816 aside, Apple
>also used more sophisticated processors (the 680x0 and PowerPC were both
>common in powerful workstations) which did not enjoy the market leverage of
>Intel processors -- probably forcing the transition to the PowerPC.  The
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 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!!!).

>6502/65816 seemed to meet the same fate, as the rumoured 65832 illustrate.
>(This is not an argument for Apple switching to AMD/Intel.  Quite the
>contrary, I believe in healthy competition -- which is why I use my old
>Apple IIs and Macs.)
>
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
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...

>OS X is pretty much the same idea, the industry moved to a preemtive
>multitasking and protected memory model for operating systems, so Apple
>followed suit.  They probably selected a Unix kernel because it would be too
>difficult and expensive to develop an in house solution.  Besides which, if
>Mac-on-Linux is any indicator, the OS 9 support should be quite good.  If
>it is not, it really should be possible to port a Unix emulator over.  Kegs
>would be a good example if you run the X Windows system.  XFree86 will run
>under Darwin (including OS X).  Still, running OS 9 on a virtualized machine
>demonstrates that this shift is nowhere near as significant as the shift from
>the Apple II.
>
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
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.....

>Just some ideas,
same here,

Ralf