Re: Still true today: Apple II: Too Good to Disappear

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <20010131020158.12215.00002249@ng-cd1.aol.com>,
Obsbedia2 <obsbedia2@aol.com> wrote:
 
>                Too Good to Disappear 
> 
>     by Deborah de Peyster, Editor in Chief
>                 inCider, V5,#5, p.8
> 
>    If you were to design a light bulb for yourself you'd want it to adjust to 
> variable lighting needs and, most of all, never burn out. 
> 
>    Steve Wozniak designed the Apple II for himself and people like him at the 
> Homebrew Computer Club.  He built in an attached keyboard, and then added 
> color, sound, and eight slots to take care of whatever other functions he'd 
> dream up in the future.
 
Well, no!  Steve probably built the Apple I that way, and them he was
overwhelmed by the requests from people to buy one.  So the Apple II
was designed for others.  That's why it had slots for instance -- a
computer you build for just yourself need no slots, since if you want
to add things to it, you just solder it in directly on the
motherboard!  Slots and computer buses are intended for consumer
markets -- no-one designs a new bus and slots for stuff they build only
for themselves!
 
> He built it to last forever.
 
No he didn't - he was probably fully aware that a 1 MHz 6502 certainly could
not satisfy the demands for computing power forever.  The Apple II was
remarkably long-lived though.
 
Or am I misinterpreting you? Perhaps you by "forever" mean "two years or more"?
:-))))))
 
>   But companies don't build products that way. They design products to have a 
> "life cycle" and a "market niche."  Clearly, if manufacturers were to produce 
> everlasting light bulbs, they'd put themselves out of business. 
 
Yet there actually are "ever-lasting light bulbs".  Ever heard about LED's?
They'll last virtually forever, and they'll consume less current too, making
the batteries last longer.  I have a few flashlights with LED's instead of
light bulbs, and I like them.
 
There are also fluorescent lights packaged in what looks like ordinary
light bulbs, i.e. you can replace virtually any light bulb with such
a fluorescent light.  No, they won't last forever, but they'll easily
last 10 times longer than a light bulb.
 
> As Apple grew into a company, it found the strength of the Apple II was 
> like that of the light bulb that won't burn out.  The Apple II could do 
> everything, and it wasn't aging.
 
:-) ... again, no!  I got my Apple II back in 1980 and was very fond
of it (it still works! I still turn it on from time to time, for
nostalgic reasons), but it failed to do some things I wanted it to
do.  For instance fast floating-point computations (during a time
period my Apple II was left on running overnight, or sometimes for
several days, crunching through some program which would run in
seconds on a modern desktop computer).  Or data handling of large
pieces of data (the 64K of the Apple II was just too small.  OK, if I
sacrificed some runtime efficiency, I could swap data to and from
disks -- but my two disk drives of 140K each could still only hold
280K of data at most.  How could I possibly use that to deal with an
array which is 500K large or larger?)
 
> It didn't allow room for a new follow-up 
> product. And, like a light-bulb maker, Apple wanted new products to make the 
> company grow. 
> 
>   So Apple began to artificially restrain the II.  When Apple II users began 
> to need the storage space of hard-disk drives, Apple saw an opening for a new 
> product. Instead of upgrading the II's operating system to support hard 
> disks,
 
What do you mean "instead of upgrading"?  The Apple II *did* support
a hard disk!  I ran it on a Corvus Constellation many times - with APple
DOS 3.3 !
 
Perhaps you should try to get your facts straight?  Or else you'll be
writing a fairy-tale....
 
.....................
 
> In the meantime, don't be misled by marketing hype. If you still feel your 
> Apple II is the light bulb that won't burn out, you know best.
 
Of course if you think the Apple II serves your needs, and you're able
to get one, do use it!  Today it has another advantage which it lacked
in its heydays of the early 1980'ies: it's dirt cheap!
 
But see it for what it is: a piece of the evolution of home computers,
not something everyone should stay happy with forever.
 
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Grev Turegatan 40,  S-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
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