Re: _Infinite Loop_ by Michael S. Malone

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

ChemSleuth@earthlink.net (Dennis Doms) wrote:

>I thought some might like this quote from the book:

Fascinating quote.  I'm going to have to get this book!  Few
authors have had the insight or the guts to tell about the reality
of the Apple II.  Thanks for posting this Dennis!

>--- start quote
>For them, the first generation of true Apple II loyalists, the Apple
>II line was allowed a swan song. And it was a doozy: the 1986 Apple
>IIGS (for "graphics and sound"), perhaps the high-water mark of the
>computer maker's art and, in terms of quality, price, and performance,

I agree.  Some argue that the IIGS was expensive and it was if
you look at it from a PC clone users' point of view.  But think
about what you were getting AT THE TIME.  Apple and IBM
were the major brand names.  When the IIGS was released,
a similarly configured *IBM XT* system was $1000 MORE than
a similarly configured IIGS system.  Same with the Mac Plus.

FOR APPLE, the IIGS WAS the high-water mark in terms of
quality, price, and performance.  You got a stereo sound chip,
8MB of RAM expansion and (with the release of the RamKeeper)
8MB of ROM expansion, an easily acceleratable CPU (the open,
socketed CPU option later taken advantage of by Zip and AE
harkens to todays' PC CPU upgrade market and the Socket 7)
and lots and lots of slots.  The Mac Plus was a closed box that
had less horizontal resolution (although more vertical resolution)
and that lacked even the grayscale that the IIGS had.

No, if one wanted to argue price versus performance, IBM and
Macintosh could not beat it.  The closest was the Amiga and Atari
ST and probably only the Atari ST could really beat the IIGS'
value.  It was sold fully equipped for slightly around $900.  The
Amiga, as a fully equipped unit, was approximately the price of
a fully equipped IIGS unit.

>the best computer Apple ever built. It featured an elegant box filled
>with the simplest componentry imaginable -- all superfluity having
>been winnowed out over the previous nine years -- a color display and
>stereo sound. It was a computer designed from the start to the finish

Yup.  The stereo sound chip was built in.  So advanced, it took
the PC years to catch up and then only with sound cards.  By
building in the wavetable synthesis chip, you took away one
level of complexity.  The IIGS had low chip count and there
were no IRQs or DMA channels or PIOs to configure when
adding cards and drives.  It had a PCs expandibility yet a simplicity
exceeding that of the Macs of the IIGS' day.

>to appeal to schools, which needed a reliable computer of considerable
>power at a reasonable price... yet so inexensive to build that it was

Very, very reliable.  I can appreciate this because my IIGS is
still going while I had to replace the CPU chip on my Win 95
unit recently after a rather spectacular CPU failure.

>like a license to print money. Plus the IIGS actually outperformed the
>Macintosh on the Mac's own turf. It was the II group's last hurrah.
>--- end quote

Yes it did, even though Steve Jobs did everything in his power
(before the IIGS was released and before he was kicked out)
to stop it from having "Mac style" features.

In the end, the only way the Mac survived was, under Sculley's
leadership, the Mac was remade in the IIGS' image.  Slots, the
color GUI, the ADB bus, the memory expansion, even the
monitor and computer case separation and the platinum color
and styling of the IIGS were taken and applied to the Mac.  Later,
Font/DA mover was taken out in favor of a system more similar
to that of the IIGS.

This means that even though Apple never admitted it, even
THEY thought the IIGS was ahead of its time.

>An interesting book. It makes some analyses that I'm not sure I agree
>with in context (for example, asserting a lack of technical expertise
>in Apple's highest level decision-making management as being a unique
>situation for a technology company at the time, but I think I remember
>Adam Osborne made the same complaint about Osborne Computer in
>_Hypergrowth_) but there's some stories here that sound all too
>familiar.

Indeed.  The story is similar in other companies.  Take Commodore,
for example, whose bad marketing decisions sunk the Amiga in
the US market.