Re: Apple ///?

[shack@deimos.frii.com (Randy Shackelford)]

In article <4APR199718310016@vax2.concordia.ca>,
Mitchell Spector <spec@vax2.concordia.ca> wrote:

[serious snippage since I agree with bjbear, woulda-coulda-shoulda is 
 pointless at this point                                             ]

>    According to history, the origins of the Apple IIe go back to at
>least 1980 ("Diana" project) and it seems the design was finished in
>1981. The project was purposely put on the side because of the Apple
>III. The IIe was released in 1983 _not_ because it was time for a new
>update, but because the Apple III had flopped and they needed to jump
>back to the Apple II again, which they had ignored all those years.

Apple III production continued into mid '84. It and the //c were concurrently
in production for a while. I still have seen nothing to indicate that the
III was intended to become a home/school system. Does any software exist
for it which isn't business oriented? Naturally Apple wanted a replacement
for the II in that market, since ][ pluses weren't really up to the task.

Keep in mind, I have one of the super II boards, which bears precious little
difference from the original //e logic board. It does say 1981 on it. So
a new II model was in the offing for a while.

>    You truly think there was no need to enhance the design of the
>Apple II Plus? The keyboard alone was in desparate need of changing,
>people wanted/needed a full ASCII keyboard with simple things you'd
>take for granted on another machine, like lowercase or cursor keys.

Well if we're talking '81, how many other systems were around to compare
the ][ plus to?

>    No...? Well how about this quote from Steve Wozinak in a 1985
>interview from Byte magazine:
>
>"When we came out with the Apple III, the engineering staff cancelled
>every Apple II engineering program that was ongoing, in expecation of
>the Apple III's success. _Every single one_ was cancelled. We really
>perceived the Apple II would not last six months. [...] To make sure
>there was a good boundary between the two machines, anything done on
>the II had to be done at a lower level than on the III. [...] We made
>sure the Apple II was not allowed to have a hard disk or more than 128K
>of memory."

What time is this? Remember that ProDOS debuted in Nov '83, and it
didn't just appear out of thin air. Ditto the //e and //c designs.

>    Gee, that talk about creating boundaries, lower levels and not
>allowing certain features (to make one project line stand above the
>other) sounds like it well applied to the Apple IIgs and Macintosh.
>Seems that mindset never changed at Apple. I can understand creating
>a low and high product in the _same_ product line (like your example
>of the Mac SE vs Mac II) but to go at great length to hold back a
>separate product line so it can not ever be equal or better than the
>other?

That would be called finding a market niche. Back to cars again, Chevrolet
designed the Chevette to never be equal or better than the Corvette. And
they had matching price tags. Regardless of whether that was the intention,
having different product lines with different capabilities and prices to
match is perfectly sensible.

>    Yup, all Apple II's sold ever. I was just using that number because
>the original poster asked why he had never heard of, let alone seen, an
>Apple III. If you have 100,000 of one thing floating around, and 6-8
>million of another, which are you more likely to come across?

Well we long since abandoned the original topic here :) Certainly the more
there are of something the easier it is to find. But to get an understanding
of the state of the computer industry in the III era means staying in that
time frame.

>    Not too mention it's just a shelf or two, which brings up another
>point, and that is that Mac software is not as available as PC software
>in stores. You have to mostly go through mail-order vendors to get what
>you want (like Apple II software), or have stores specially order it
>for you.

Here's my comment on that: I own a laserdisc player, and discs for it are
a little hard to find compared to VHS tapes. But the picture and sound
beat the living snot out of VHS. So I consider it worth my while to find
films on laserdisc rather than settling for VHS.

>    One reason was to program on the metal and gain more speed. Maybe
>they wouldn't have been forced to go this route had Apple updated the
>GS with a faster 65C816 or other enhancements. They just left the GS
>relatively untouched from 1986 until 1992, so people had to take matters
>into their own hands. That meant 3rd party upgrades and doing whatever
>you had to do in order to squeeze preformance out of the existing CPU
>through software.

This was mostly in the early days when ProDOS 16 was the native OS. It
sucked so people made apps run under ProDOS 8 instead. These apps started
to vanish after GS/OS came out. Apple did screw up by not getting a real
OS out sooner. Kinda like how it is with Powermacs now. They came out early
in '94, and only at the end of this year will the OS made for them start
to appear.

>    You still can't run ProDOS on an Apple III, which required 64K. Of
>course ProDOS didn't exist until 1983 and came from SOS itself, but you
>get the idea of how limiting memory access hurt it. Besides, many games
>and programs started using the 16K of Language Card space by even around
>the time of the Apple III, so 64K was almost a standard. No reason to
>block it in hardware so you couldn't even program around it.

ProDOS 1.0 runs on my 48K ][, and there is a MACHID bit combination defined
for denoting III emulation. 48K support was taken out of ProDOS around the
time III development halted. Of course, ProDOS in a 48K box isn't good for
much, but it can be done.

Plus keep in mind that the emulation was never updated.

>    The thing is many users added lowercase character ROMs and 80 columns
>text boards to their Apple II Pluses during that era. Apple could have
>written (and did) the first emulation boot disk to act _exactly_ like an
>out of the box II Plus, but why the need to block access to anything more
>with the use of extra hardware? That meant when things like 80 columns,
>more memory, etc were common on the II Plus, you could _not_ run those
>programs that required them when using the III.

Apple isn't in the habit of emulating things which come from third parties.
Since Apple itself didn't support lowercase, 80 columns, etc, you can't
expect their emulation to do so. If for no other reason, these things
were nonstandard at the time. Of course, a //e emulator, had it existed
would have had //e style lowercase and 80 columns.

>    Who said you would have needed 5 MB then, 2 MB would have been fine
>for most persons. I still don't understand why it was affordable and cost
>effective to put that memory on Macintosh motherboards, but not Apple IIgs
>boards. In most cases they were the exact same chips, didn't several Macs
>use 1MBx1 DRAMs on the main board? It was absolutely absurd that GSes in
>1986 shipped with 256K on the main board when Macintosh Pluses came with
>1 MB on theirs (how much native GS software ran on 256K, how about trying
>something close to nill?).

Mac Pluses have zero memory built in, only four SIMM slots. And I heard 
someone say once that 1 -> 4 mb cost $1400 on a Plus in those days. And
Apple did start bundling memory cards, so you had 512K at least. The dealer
where I got mine started doing that on their own before Apple did. Up until
system 3.0 or so, 512K was a pretty decent amount of memory. In '86, a IIgs
box would have cost $1500 or more if it had had 1 mb built in.

>    They only came out in late 1991 and at a cost of something like $150,
>plus another $300 for the external SuperDrive, is it any wonder? At this
>point it time it was the same cost to purchase a SCSI board and small
>hardrive.

When unidisk 3.5s came out, the card was $70 and the drive had a $499 list
price. They sold fairly well. Plus the list on the superdrive card was
$109 I'm pretty sure, as for the HS SCSI card.

>    The Ethernet card never came out because Apple managment decided they
>wanted all Apple II development halted, and no futher products to be sold.
>There was no logic in killing the board when it was fully completed and
>even the software support was done.

Going from all the unsold VOCs and workstation cards I've seen, I wonder
if they could have recouped the manufacturing costs. Has Sequential done
so on second sight cards if only 600 or so were sold? I'd like to have one,
but with as much bandwidth as the ol' IIgs pushes through my network, I can
make do with localtalk.
-- 
Randy Shackelford                                 
shack@frii.com