Re: What has changed in the Apple world last 6 months?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <jEsY5.80$ME6.2879@dca1-nnrp2.news.digex.net>,
Frank Townsend <ftownsen@iamdigex.net> wrote:
 
> As for reliability, the uptime figures for Win95 are terrible.  Frequent
> reboots are the norm, and no one would use Win95 or Win98 for mission
> critical applications.  Even NT had average uptimes between reboots of only
> 7 days.
> 
> That being said, how many times do you ever remember your little Apple II
> ever going to the equivalent of a blue screen?
 
As a matter of fact, far too often.  When PC's arrived I found them
much more reliable.  But on my Apple II+ I frequently had to pull out
and reinsert various chips or expansion cards, to remove eventual oxide
on the connectors.  Having soldered the chips onto the motherboard would
have made it much more reliable, although harder to repair.  Perhaps
later Apple II models did solder the chips to the motherboard, making it
more reliavle, but mine wasn't if that kind.  A typical session mostly
included several reboots, as often for software failures as for
hardware glitches.
 
At the very beginning I had a particularly nasty problem with my
disk controller card, which led to some data losses: if I typed
"CATALOG" the disk could, instead of reading the catalog, erase it !!!
I got a new disk controller card, and that problem vanished.
 
> My memory is never (and I was probably a heavy user from 1981-1988).  Of
> course, since you had little practical use of the machines, you don't
> have much of a sample, but the notion of a General Protection Fault was
> quite alien to me.
 
Of course -- the Apple II didn't have any hardware protection mechanisms!
An application which failed could easily overwrite any part of memory.
 
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My old Apple II+ still works -- sort of.  If I turn it on after
having left it unused for a few months or so, I must usually first
pull out and reinsert all expansion cards -- to remove oxides on the
connectors.  If I don't, it will most likely crash while booting the
floppy.  But OK, I got it in 1980 so it's 20 years old.
 
As a comparison: my old 386, which I got in 1988, still works
flawlessly every time I turn it on (except once every 2-3 years when
its batteries are out and I'll have to exchange batteries, set its
clock, and re-enter the harddisk parameters).  Its CRT went dead the
other week and I had to find a replacement -- so now it's running
on its *fifth* CRT.....  I've been using all sorts of CRT's on that
one: CGA, monochrome, EGA, VGA.  The very first CRT on that one,
connected to the composite video output of a CGA graphics card,
was actually the same CRT that I used on my Apple II !!!!!  It's
now back on being used on that Apple II.
 
 
 
 
 
-- 
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Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Grev Turegatan 40,  S-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
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