Re: Apple II-Or Come on people, It's a 20 year old computer

["ruud.dingemans" <ruud.dingemans@wanadoo.nl>]

Paul Schlyter wrote:

> >> Well, without a CPU, a bus, mass storage, etc
> >> you can do absolutely nothing with that stuff.  And in THAT respect,
> >> most of today's computers are descendants of the IBM PC.
> >
> > Jeez, are you displaying a wealth of ignorance here. Ok, you really
> > think the PC was anything special in this respect, or "started" something
> > in this respect?
> 
> I never claimed anything of that!  The IBM PC was really a quite
> non-remarkable computer, who happened to be manufactured by the
> perhaps oldest coputer company in the world.  But the PC was open,
> and it was practical.

It was neither. It was not "open" for others to copy, and it was
certainly not practical
(put yer average grandma behind the original MS-DOS PC's and get my
point; then put them
behind a Lisa and see the difference. Also note which design is more
different from what
average people are using now - DOS or GUI).

> sources).  But that never happened, because Apple was paranoid about
> these clones: they didn't want them, but wanted the Mac all for
> themselves.

IBM wanted the IBM PC market for itself too, but because their design
was easily copyable (just need to reverse engineer
the bios) they didn't get the chance. And Apple creating a clone market
would have been an incredible risk at the time.
Later on, however, it's a different story.

> or remarkable!!  It definitely wasn't.  The reason it succeeded was
> that it was practical, and open -- the latter created a market of

See above. The IBM PC was neither a paradigm shift in design, nor open,
nor practical.
*QUITE* unlike the Lisa, except for the open. But then the PC wasn't
meant to be open, either.

> > Wrong. Go to www.blinkenlights.com, do the quiz, and then come back,
> > enlightened.
> 
> It was fun reading .... but OK, if you're going to include old
> mechanical toy computers too, then the view will of course be quite
> different.

Even without the mechanical 'toys' it's obvious the pc didn't really
"start" anything.
 
> >> Without microprocessors, there would be no personal computer industry.
> >
> > Wrong. There is no technical reason modern personal computers couldn't
> > run without a 'processor on a chip'.
> 
> There are very good reasons personal computers require a "processor
> on a chip": size, cost and performance.

They don't *require* this at all. Imagine just a 1972 PDP-11 cpu board
where the cpu consists of
several chips. Then shrink all these several chips with today's
technology. It's clear that it would
be *much* smaller, cheaper and more powerful by now. Such a cpu board
could fit on your fingernail.

> Most likely it'll be too heavy and too expensive to
> be called a "personal computer" (unless it's a toy computer).

Dead wrong here.
 
> But since you want to include mechanical toy computers in the
> category "personal computer".... well....

That's Blinkenlights' choice, but if we had such mechanical computers
with *today's* sophistication
and complexity, I think you'd be surprised how well they'd fit the bill.

> At blinkenlights they consider the "first personal computer" to be a
> mechanical toy computer from around 1950......

That's still heaps closer (1950!) in being "the first" than the Altair
(1975). Heck, even
the Alto came before the Altair - it's from 1973!

> I consider that an evolution: behind the scenes the computers still work
> the same way.  It's just the appearance that's different.

Ok, strip your computer from the mouse and GUI then, and then tell me
the gui wasn't a revolution.
The x86 cpu design has been *much* more evolutionary than the step from
cli to gui.

> <sarcasm>
> Perhaps you're also considering the recent Imac's a "revolution"?  After
> all, they're strongly colored, and thus look quite different.....
> </sarcasm>

I don't. The iMacs bring nothing really different in a *technical*
sense. And that's my angle.
 
> PC dominance confirmed it indeed was a success.  Now, suppose the
> Apple hadn't killed the Apple II line of computers but instead had let
> it evolve....

It did. The last IIs, like the IIgs, came with a GUI. But making a
II-with-GUI with 1979's
technology would have been very difficult, since you would get into the
same legacy issues
that have plagued the pc since DOS.

> case, even "sloppy designs" can work quite well -- such as a
> modification of the "sloppy design" of e.g. the Apple II (you've
> accused the IBM PC to copy most of the design of the Apple II, and
> you also accuse the IBM PC to have a "sloppy design".

I said it copied the basic design elements you mentioned (cpu, bus,
i/o). Not that
it copied the design outright. Besides, the II was from '77, whereas the
PC was from '81,
but still not stunning for it's time. The II and the PET were much more
so, in 1977. We have
to view these things in the timeframe they were actually made in,
otherwise it gets silly - they
couldn't see any better into the future than we can today.

> You wrote: "*set back* the industry's innovation for several years".
> A few years passes quickly -- why are you so impatient?

Because we could've had a better (computer) world in those years, and
"years" are "lightyears" in
computing terms.

Regards, RD