Re: Wozniak vs Jobs

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

shack@onyx.southwind.net (Randy Shackelford) wrote:

>Jeffrey T Berntsen (jeffb@world.std.com) wrote:
>
>:>:According to an interview with Bill Mensch, even the 65816 at 4 MHz (which
>:>:it was capable of at the time it was engineered into the GS) could
>:>:outperform the original Mac, and 'Apple' purposely kept the clock speed
>:>:down because of this.
>
>:>Man I'm sick of propaganda like this. If you've been using IIgses since the
>:>'80s, you know the story of how Jean-Louis Gassee was giving a speech saying
>:>that WDC couldn't supply Apple with enough fast 65816s to build a faster
IIgs.
>:>Bill Mensch said otherwise, and the two nearly got into a fistfight over it.
>: The end result however is that 3 MHz is the fastest part you see in a IIgs.
>
>:Well, sure, a lot of folks know about that, but that's not the point.  The
>:point (and the real question) is this: Which one of them was telling the
>:truth, and if Jean-Louis wasn't then _why_wasn't_he_?  "Propaganda" doesn't
>:mean it's not true.....
>
>It no longer matters who was right. The end result is that no IIgses have a
>65816 with a rating higher than 3 MHz. And since Mensch hasn't delivered a
>successor to the 65816, that makes me lean toward the Gassee side of the
>story. (Now before anyone throws in some Scott G type "WDC needed Apple to
>support their R&D" malarkey, keep in mind that 6500 chips are a lot more
>things than Apple IIs. That's no excuse.)

That's funny, SOMEHOW, Applied Engineering got 10Mhz 65816 chips
in their Transwarp processors.  SOMEHOW, Zip Technologies got the
faster chips in their Zip accelerators.  SOMEHOW, only Apple didn't get
them.  We are talking about 1989 here...during the Gassee speech, they
were fighting about the 65816 in the ROM 3...10Mhz was out by then!

SOMEHOW, CMD got a hold of 20Mhz units when SOME people still
claim that WDC never upgraded the chip.

>The propaganda I'm sick of is this "Apple crippled the IIgs to keep it from
>competing with Macs" crap. I swear, militant Apple II users must be the only
>people around who can't grasp the concept of a product line with differing
>price and performance levels. They sold Apple IIs on the low end of the price

The Apple IIGS in around 1990 was sold at the same price as a Color
Classic.  The Color Classic was better equipped and had years of
upgrading behind it...that sort of shoots down the "Apple IIGS is the low
price" theory.  Apple DID cripple the GS, both stunting its development
and its marketing!

>and performance scale, and Macs higher up. Later they came out with low cost
>Macs to cover the bottom end, and Apple IIs vanished. That's not so difficult
>a concept if you ask me. I don't recall ever seeing a Classic II owner saying
>"Apple left out color and crippled my '030 with a 16 bit bus so it won't
>compete with the Quadra." Mac users get it.

You got new Macs if you wanted to upgrade from that Classic II.

GS users never got a GS upgrade in all the years from 1986-1992 except
for the ROM 3, which was simply a memory upgrade to 1MB...Mensh
DID have 10Mhz chips at the time...

I am BOTH a Mac and GS user and I do "get it."  Apple killed the IIGS,
simple as that...

The GS did not have to die for the Mac to succeed, but Steve Jobs
wanted to kill anything that he didn't touch (sorry, he WAS there during
the GS' development even if he may have been kicked out by the time
it was released).