On Mon, 9 May 2011, Sean Fahey wrote:
The Apple III was intentionally designed to be compatible with the Apple II
Plus, albeit with some artificial limitations. There are a few hard to come
by cards that can improve it's compatibility, but viewing it as a II, it's a
48K system.
The III itself is an interesting, charming, frustrating and at times
maddening machine. If you like to tinker, the III will provide plenty of
challenges -- especially if you get an older machine. The overall lack of
III specific software to explore may be discouraging but there are titles
that are very worthy, mostly business-oriented apps.
I used to have quite an assortment of III gear but ended up giving it
all away to Tony Diaz. Sometimes I regret it, because I didn't "kick the
tires" enough to really appreciate the platform. I think that despite it's
glitches, it's a great machine to explore and you can get a sense of where
Apple was trying to go in the early 80's. You can also see where
the early IIe earned it's dual pedigree, from both the II Plus and III.
And it represents pushing the boundaries of 8bit CPUs.
If 16bit CPUs hadn't come along, what would have happened?
The Apple III was on the cusp. I can't remember when the design started, but
either 16bit CPUs like the 68000 (the obvious choice for the next step)
weren't yet available, or not really an option. So how do you improve on the
6502 when there isn't anything yet available to do that?
Then wham, the Apple III comes out, and it is in competition with 16bit
computing not just the IBM PC, but a slew of S100 boards that allowed one to
run 16bit programs on their existing computers. So just in a few years, the
Apple III ended up being too late for the market. A different timeline and
it's improvements over the Apple II would be more noticeable.