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

[pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <395302AB.7BFF4756@wanadoo.nl>,
ruud.dingemans <ruud.dingemans@wanadoo.nl> wrote:
 
> 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;
 
Put the engineer who wants to hook up some custom designed hardware
to the PC and have it controlled from there, and get my point;
 
> then put them behind a Lisa and see the difference.
 
...and put him behind the Lisa and see the difference.
 
> Also note which design is more different from what average people are
> using now - DOS or GUI).
 
Well, the WIMP (Window, Icon, Mouse, Pointer) interface is most common
now -- no need to argue about that anymore.
 
>> 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,
 
And if IBM would have succeeded, today's computers would probably cost
3-5 times as much as they actually do now -- PC's as well as Mac's.
 
> 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.
 
There's still no clone market for the Mac.  When will there be one?
Ever?
 
>> 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,
 
Nobody ever claimed it was.
 
> nor open,
 
The original IBM PC came with a curcuit diagram for the motherboard,
as well as an assembly source listing for the ROM BIOS.  If that's not
an open computer, then exactly WHAT is an open computer ???
 
> nor practical.
 
It was quite practical: engineers soon made their custom-designed
add-on boards to the PC, to have the PC control their custom made
hardware.  This was a common application for the PC but a very rare
application for the Mac.  If that's not practical, then what IS
practical in your book?  You don't need to answer, I already know:
the only practicality you know about is a WIMP interface....
 
> *QUITE* unlike the Lisa, except for the open. But then the PC wasn't
> meant to be open, either.
 
If so, why did IBM publish a curcuit diagram for the motherboard as
well as assembly source for the ROM BIOS?
 
You need to check your facts better, so you don't make such obviously
erroneous statements.  If a computer manufacturer wishes his computer
to not be an open system, the #1 rule is to NOT, repeat, NOT, publish
hardware and software details for that computer -- except for the bare
minimum required to use the computer.  IBM published a lot more than
this bare minimum for its IBM PC.
 
>>> 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.
 
It's "obvious" only to Macintoy freaks, who try to close their eyes
and ears to all acheivements except those performed by Apple Computer
Inc.  The IBM PC did set what was perceived as a de-facto standard
for personal computers -- not by making the PC remarkable or
revolutionary, but merely through IBM's name as the world's oldest
computer company.  This spawned the PC clone market, which in turn
gave us cheap computers, and surely contributed to forcing Apple to
lowering the price in the Macintoy computers too.  So even Macintoy
users benefit from this contribution by IBM, no matter whether you
like it or not.
 
>>>> 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.
 
...only if they're all put on the same chip -- and then we're back to that
single-chip microcomputer.  BTW if this design is as good as you claim,
why was it never done?
 
>> 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.
 
You're of course entitled to your opinion here -- just don't confuse
your opinion with facts (only zealots do that).
 
>> But since you want to include mechanical toy computers in the
>> category "personal computer".... well....
> 
> That's Blinkenlights' choice,
 
Yes -- and you pointed me to Blinkenlight, so you must have approved
of their choice, or else you wouldn't have pointed me there.
 
> 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.
 
The bill of such a computer would be huge: 100 million worm gears/etc
in the same cabinet.  How many MIPS do you think you could get from
a mechanical computer?  <evil grin>
 
 
>> 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!
 
The Alto wasn't a personal computer on the market though.  Anyway,
the Mits Altair was at least the first general-purpose personal
computer that *I* ever heard of!  The only personal devices I had
heard about before were programmable calculators..... do they
count as "personal computers" in your book?
 
>> 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.
 
The x86 CPU design were intentionally backwards compatible, thus they
were OF COURSE very evolutional.  Intel made some other microprocessors
which were more revolutional though: the iAPX-432 (Intel's first 32-bit
microprocessor, which predated the 386) and the 80860 (a 32-bit high-
performance CPU which had no backwards compatibility to the x86 CPU's
at all) -- both flopped.
 
A revolution isn't automatically something good.
 
>> <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.
 
But you're talking about appearance all the time, aren't you?  You
think all that matters on a computer is a WIMP interface.  Don't you
think old gramdma care a lot about the color of the computer cabinet
too?  I mean, she's probably not using it for particularly sophisticated
things anyway, and it'll probably be switched off most of the time --
and when it's switched off, it's completely irrelevant whether it has
a CLI or WIMP interface -- all that matters then is the color on the
outside -- right?
 
>> 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.
 
Not as far as it could have done.  As you may know, the holy war
about the Mac raged also inside Apple Computer Inc, between the Mac
and the II development teams.  The II development team lost.
 
> 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.
 
This problem always pops up when you want to maintain backwards
compatibility.  The solution is of course to, at some point, scrap
backwards compatibility -- but to force users to abandon their
old stuff causes other problems.  It's a delicate balance.
 
>> 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.
 
We've been through this already, and we agree -- why do you bring
it up yet once more?
 
BTW I see nothing wrong in prpoagating a known good design, even it it
happens to be a few years old.  Why be in such a hurry?
 
>> 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.
 
"Years" is a time measure while "lightyears" is a length measure, and
they are not convertible into one another.  Please don't confuse the two,
they are in no way comparable to one another.
 
OK, suppose the transistor had been invented in, say, 1920, and the
microprocessor in, say, 1950, and the personal computer revolution
would have happened shortly after that.  Then we would have been
*decades* ahead of what we are now.  Don't you feel grief and enormous
dissatisfaction that this didn't happen?  If you're sensible, you
don't, because it would be pointless.
 
Likewise it's pointless to feel grief about that "*set back* the
industry's innovation for several years".  That matters only if one
group of people are set back relative to another group of people.
But if the whole world is "set back", it matters little, because then
again everyone would be on equal terms in the competition.
 
BTW was Apple Computer Inc "set back a few years" too by the PC clone
industry?  If so, why?  If not, why didn't they grab that opportunity
and present an overwhelmingly superior computer to the world, which
would have attracted most computer buyers?  If their product really
was that superior, this ought to have happened, right?  But it didn't
- why?  There you've got something to contemplate...
 
-- 
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Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
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