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

[Paul Guertin <pg@sff.net>]

"ruud.dingemans" <ruud.dingemans@wanadoo.nl> wrote:

> Paul Schlyter wrote:
> > 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

"Open" does not mean "available for others to copy". It means that
anyone (not just registered developers) can get their hands on
technical information about the inner workings of the computer, so
they can adapt it to their needs. The IBM PC was open, the Lisa
was not.

> 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.)

I taught "average grandmas" (65-year-olds with no computer experience
whatsoever) to do word processing on two different systems: WordPerfect
under MS-DOS and Microsoft Word under MacOS. Both groups took about the
same time to become reasonably proficient.

As the saying goes, the only intuitive user interface is the nipple.

Paul Guertin
pg@sff.net