Re: Wozniak vs Jobs

[toddpw@ugcs.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)]

supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) writes:

>That proves NOTHING.  Why would a well respected president of a
>company like Mensh fabricate something like this?

You give Mensch too much credit. If he had all those fast 65816's then how
come ZipGS/TWGS boards were shipped with overclocked CPU's for MANY YEARS
until the Sony 14 mhz parts finally showed up.

When I was an intern at Apple I tracked down some of the Apple II folks and
cornered them on this very issue. They needed tens of thousands of whatever
speed CPU's per month and WDC could not deliver that many parts until way
after it was too late and internal politics doomed serious new development
for the IIgs.

Mensch may have _thought_ he would have enough 65816's for Apple, but he
consistently overestimated his company's ability to produce. WDC always
published 65816 docs for 2,4,6,8 Mhz parts, but well into the IIgs' lifetime
you couldn't get 6 or 8, and every IIgs I checked had a part stamped with 3.

Compared to how hard Motorola was pushing the 68000 family and the sheer
resources they were able to commit to it, the 65816's performance and
availability growth was a complete joke.

> A much more
>likely explanation -- Apple high-uppers lead by Jobs (who was still
>there during much of the GS' development....as was Wozniak half the
>time before moving to Cloud-9) wanted to stunt the GS.

Ah, the conspiracy theory. Fact is, upper brass at Apple were split over what
to do about the "two product lines" concept. Many tried to make it work, but
others were convinced it was already a dead-end. And in the long term it was
-- my personal opinion is that we should condemn them not for killing the
Apple II but rather for the abysmally two-faced way in which they did it.

Or rather, allowing their internal indecision to show through to the outside
world as an appallingly deceitful ploy to keep customers they were screwing.

Jobs did not walk around thinking up nasty ways to screw the Apple II over.
He just took it for granted as a cash cow, and didn't think twice about
cannibalizing projects that weren't part of his "next great thing". As that
attitude trickled down the corporate structure, it became indistinguishable
from a vast conspiracy, for all practical purposes. Pro-Mac forces used it
as an excuse to screw the Apple II, and anti-Mac forces got to blame Jobs
as a scapegoat, but it didn't matter because he knew he was innocent and
ignored them.

>It meshes with the other lines of evidence -- no support for interlaced
>400 lines, no support for 256 colors per scan line, no higher resolution
>in monochrome  -- the overall stunting of the VGC chip...

The VGC was designed to beat the PCjr -- barely -- yet it had to produce
exactly the same video signal timing and visible area of the old graphics
modes. This was seen as a requirement for backwards compatibility with old
monitors, but it caused all kinds of gross technical kludges, including
tight integration with the Mega II's video timing.

When the VOC was developed, the lead engineer wanted desperately to do a clean
redesign using video RAM's, but upper mgmt invoked the classic "thou shalt
re-use proven components" dictum which forced them to bloat the card and the
price trying to synchronize a complete on-card duplicate of the IIgs video
system with the 1mhz bus while still doing the genlock synchronization. Barf!

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ ugcs.caltech.edu