Re: Apple and the Holy War

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:

>>>Some 100 years ago, the word "computer" was in the English language,
>>>but it did mean something else than today: back then, a "computer"
>>>was a person hired to do computations all day long, usually by hand,
>>>later with a desk calculator as an aid.
>> 
>> It still does not change the fact that the original IBM PC 4.77Mhz
>> without math coprocessor chip could run text based Wordstar slower
>> than an Apple II could run AppleWorks.  I know this for a fact
>> because I typed on a friend's PC with Wordstar and my IIe with
>> AppleWorks was just more efficient.
> 
>Indeed, Wordstar was horribly slow.  But if you had the patience, it
>was also quite capable: Wordstar was able to edit a file one megabyte
>or large, if you had enough free disk space (at least 3 times the
>size of the file you wanted to edit) and if you had the patience
>while it did its swapping to/from disk) -- and it did all this within
>a 64K TPA !!!!!
> 
>Could you edit a 1 MByte file on AppleWorks?

I am pretty certain you can.  You would need greater than
1MB on your Apple II though.  Back in my IIe days, I was
running with 1MB of aux memory (a type of extended
memory that was not available on the II+ but instead was
a IIe enhancement).  This was 1MB in addition to the
128k space that AppleWorks ran in, so 1MB might have
been doable.
 
>> Interestingly, so was the IIe version of WordPerfect.  When my friend
>> switched from Wordstar to the DOS version of Wordperfect, performance
>> slowed down.
> 
>Interesting -- I got the impression that WordPerfect performed better
>than WordStar.....

Something happened.  Didn't WordPerfect have greater
memory requirements?  I know that he bumped the
RAM up to 640k after WP.  WordPerfect did have more
features if I remember correctly.
 
>>>> They were extremely expensive options back then.
>>> 
>>> They weren't cheap, sure, but they weren't "extremely" expensive
>>> either!  You could have one for perhaps 10-15% of the cost of the
>>> entire computer -- that's not much if FP performance is essential to
>>> you.  And if FP performance is so unessential to you that you never
>>> would pay extra for an FPU, then you might as well keep your old
>>> 8-bit computer.  For non-FPU related tasks, my first 4.77 MHz 8088 PC
>>> was outperformed by my old 6 MHz CP/M machine: the CP/M machine had
>>> both a faster CPU and bigger floppy disks (640K on the CP/M machine
>>> vs 360K on the PC; at that time I had no harddisk on my PC).  The
>>> PC then had only one advantage: meomory space (640K RAM on the PC
>>> vs 64K on the CP/M machine), which sometimes mattered.
>> 
>> And this was exactly why I stayed with the Apple II.  ;-)
> 
>You mean the memory space issue didn't matter to you?

It did.  On the IIe, I had 1MB of extended memory and all
of my productivity apps supported it.  If it were not for this,
I would have tossed the IIe.

The IIe addressed the memory space issue via bank
switching.  As a programmer, I would have not liked this,
but from an application use standpoint, memory was
memory.

When the programs I wanted couldn't be made available
via this method, the IIGS had appeared.  With its 16MB
memory space, it was just what I needed.  So I moved
up.

Wasn't the IIe released a few months after the original
IBM PC?

>> I didn't move to the PC until the advent of Windows 95 and
>> the '486 and when I moved over, the main thing I did was
>> still word processing and page layout.  The internet was
>> what caused me to jump ship, but I still have my IIGS
> 
>Here I think we have a clue to our different pserspectives: when I
>say "Apple II", I'm always thinking of the Apple II+ or possibly IIe
>or IIc.  I've never used the IIgs, as a matter of fact I've never
>even seen in in real life.  This is probably because the IIgs
>appeared years after I had abandoned the Apple II.

This is probably the root of the difference.  Also probably
because the Apple II series did not make as much a
dent overseas as it did in North America.

How about the IIe?  Was it widely promoted in your
country?

But I can see where you are coming from.  If I had a II+
as my only Apple II, I would see the Apple II as a
computer with a maximum of 64k of RAM with no
lower-case support.  I'm glad my first exposure to the
Apple II series was the IIe otherwise I wouldn't be on
csa2 now.  ;-)