Re: OS For IIGS

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article hattonr@aug.com (Rick Hatton) writes...

>Mitchell Spector <spec@vax2.concordia.ca> wrote:
>
>>     If I was a hardware engineer and there was still an Apple II market,
>> I probably would. My example of the Second Sight was to show what happens
>> to products when there is no competition, not to complain about the card
>> any further (there is little point since it never took off and probably
>> never will at this point).
>
>Let's see.. there is a new TCP package for the IIgs, and a telnet
>program.

    Both are Marinetti, a program Apple IIgs users were in desparate
need of, but still in a very early development stage. Before it can
be considered truely useful more than just a telnet application will
have to be written for it, along with PPP support too.

    It is more of a demo or teaser of what is to come (that was
necessary because many of us have given up hope on GS/TCP, the
commercial TCP/IP package that runs under GNO that is still no
where near a release date).

>Other programs are being written for the net.

    I certainly hope so, many of us are counting on that. In the
meantime, shell accounts are still the only viable means of full
Internet access for Apple II users.

>Spectrum/SIS will let you do web browsing.

    Well it is more of a fancy front end for Lynx, it is afterall a
text-only based web browser that requires a shell account (there is
no using it with SLIP or PPP, at least not yet anyway).

>Accelerators are still being sold.

    Nope. The TransWarp GS disappeared some 4 years ago when Applied
Engineering went out of business, and REMcorp (formely Zip Technologies),
recently announced they have discontinued the Zip GS. Stock of these
boards has been depleated, so the only place you'll find them being
sold (used) is comp.sys.apple2.marketplace.

>There is widespread interest (in the A2 community) about adding SCSI
>CD ROMS and removable HDs to IIs of all kinds.

    There has been for years, especially for the Apple IIgs if you
have any intension of using it as something more than a glorified
Apple IIe compatible.

>And the Second Sight card is gaining support.

    This is news to me, where did you get that idea? Sequential Systems
has all but abandoned the card (other than still selling it) and there
are no programmers interesting in writing software for it. The only
exception is Mike Hackett's FaceLift, which when finished, will finally
make the board supported by QuickDraw II.

    At present the only applications for the card are a couple of slow
graphic viewers, but the main value of the card is allowing you to hook
up modern (14-21") SVGA monitor displays.

>The II world doesnt seem dead to me.

    It is commercially dead. However, it is not dead in terms of interest,
there are still probably several thousand II's being used world-wide
and at least a couple of hundred people who are really loyal, dedicated
and devoted to the machine. If you add up the total subscription base of
the three remaining commerical Apple II printed publications, you get a
number close to 1,500 (although there is overlap I'm sure, since many
people subscribe to more than one).

>In fact. Im paricularly interested in the new software so I can do net
>things on teh GS while Im doing W95 stuff on the Mac.

    Same here, there are a couple of things in the works which I'm
anxiously awaiting (i.e. Kaboom!, Wolf 3D, GS/TCP, Marinetti 1.0+,
the Gameboy emulator, etc). It's a slow wait, and with pretty much
nothing released in between that time, which is why it is nice to
have a Pentium too.

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca