Re: why did apple go mac?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <3A2C9D82.A061D651@Concentric.net>,
Gabriel Morales  <Togega@Concentric.net> wrote:
 
> It seems rather simple to me. Build-in Apple II compatibility into the
> Macintosh. FULL compatibility, where you could run GS/OS (and maybe not
> even this, since the GS/OS would probably have not been made in the
> first place) and Macintosh Finder apps in the same environment, and DOS
> and ProDOS apps with no problems (much like MS-DOS under Windows).
> 
> I'm pretty sure if Apple would've done this (full blown, from the
> beginning) they would've kept much more of their Apple II user base. I
> think a lot of Apple II users left Apple because of they felt
> (rightfully so) "abandoned" by Apple, not because of any "expandability
> views". Some users WOULD have had problems with the very first Macs, but
> remember that later Macs were fully expandable, including the current
> Power Macintosh G4 mini towers.
 
I'm one of those "Apple drop-offs", who once used the Apple II
heavily, but never found the Macintosh attractive.  However, I was
really abandoning the Apple II while I still was using it -- how?  By
using the Apple II mostly as a CP/M machine, with first the 2 MHz
SoftCard and later the 6 MHz AppliCard.  The Apple's own OS'es I
considered toys mostly: fun to play with, very interesting to "dig
into the machine", but if I wanted someting actually done, I would
turn to CP/M.  Why?  Mostly because of a superior choice of
programming languages (dozens of them, as compared to a few on the
Apple OS'es).  But also because CP/M had at least a somewhat decent
form of command line (the one on the Apple II was just a joke: no
comamnd-line parameters passed to your program, and it was very hard
to create your own, new, commands).
 
Later, when the 8-bit OS'es became dated, MS-DOS rather than the
Macintosh, Amiga or Atari appeared as the natural migration path to
me.  Yes, programs had to be rewritten, or at least recompiled to run
under MS-DOS.  I found the Microsoft Fortran-80 under CP/M quite
good, but the MS-DOS versions much worse, which led to me abandoning
Fortran programming on the PC.  The BDS C compiler was fast and fun,
but non-standard, however some of my CP/M programs in C migrated to
MS-DOS and were rewritten to compile under standard-conforming
compilers.  The most smooth migration part was offered by Turbo
Pascal: there I usually just transferred the Pascal source from CP/M
to MS-DOS and then recompiled it on the PC.  In a few cases I had to
change a line or two on the program (mostly due to somewhat different
screen sizes; under Apple CP/M there were 24 lines on the screen, but
on the PC there were 25 lines on the screen).  Naturally some Pascal
programs were so machine-dependent that they made no sense on the PC
-- for instance a utility in Turbo Pascal which transferred Pascal
source files from Apple Pascal diskettes to Apple CP/M diskettes
after having written that program, I completely ceased using the
Apple Pascal system.
 
If I had decided to migrate to the Apple Macintosh instead, most
if not all of my older software would have to be abandoned, and I
didn't want that.  Of course, for a programmer type like me it didn't
appear attractive to buy a new computer with no programming
langauge at all delivered with the computer...
 
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Grev Turegatan 40,  S-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
e-mail:  pausch at saaf dot se   or    paul.schlyter at ausys dot se
WWW:     http://hotel04.ausys.se/pausch    http://welcome.to/pausch