Re: Apple ///?

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

In article <29MAR199700464722@vax2.concordia.ca>,
Mitchell Spector <spec@vax2.concordia.ca> wrote:
>In article Marvin Jason Gallop <mgallop@ebicom.net> writes...
>
>>A few months ago, I heard of an Apple 3.  What is it?
>
>     It was Apple's attempt at a business machine (along the lines of
>the original IBM PC, which surfaced a year later) and intended to be
>the replacement for the Apple II. The Apple III was also created to
>keep the company profitable until the "future" of the company was to
>be introduced -- the Apple Lisa.

I don't really think the III was meant as a replacement for the II. IIIs
were meant strictly for business and IIs for home and school. It's hard
to say whether Apple planned the Lisa to amount to much considering that it
cost ten grand when it came out and the Mac followed only a year later.

Also, III production topped 100000 from what I've heard, reasonably successful
for that period. As the Softalk article from June '84 eulogizing the III
said, there were plenty of companies who would have loved to achieve the
III's success.

>     As things turned out, the Apple III was a miserable failure and
>so was the Apple Lisa. Despite that, the Apple II not only kept the
>company afloat, but highly profitable too (which came as a surprise
>to management at the Apple Computer). Oddly enough, Apple once again
>decided to try and replace the Apple II, this time with the Macintosh,
>but yet again their new computer didn't do to well and _again_ it was
>the Apple II that kept the company afloat and profitable. By the late
>80's the Mac was strong enough to stand on it's own though, so this
>3rd replacement had worked out. Ironically though, now that Apple has
>finally killed off the Apple II, it doesn't look like the company will
>have any future. :)

I wouldn't write 'em off quite so fast. 50000 Powerbook 3400s sold in a two
week stretch, double digit market share again, and other stuff says they're 
on the way back. They're what, the third best selling brand these days?

I'm still having trouble figuring how people think the II could still be
a state of the art platform in the late '90s, held back by '70s architecture.
Apple could do a PCI card like their Pentium DOS card, or offer Gus as a 
free product, but only running on an up to date platform.

>>When did it happen?
>
>    May 1980, although due to many technical glitches, it was officially
>re-introduced in December 1981 (chips would literally pop out of the
>motherboard, due to excessive heat, one reason for the re-introduction
>and it's eventual failure).

Only on the first 14000 or so. The lowest serial number on any of my III
boxes is in the 18000s.

>>Why haven't I seen it anywhere?
>
>    Mainly because it was a such flop and a short lived computer. They
>were only produced for about 3 or 4 years, and quite expensively, so few
>people bought them overall. The last model introduced, the Apple III Plus,
>came out in December 1983, which was then discontinued in April of 1984.

Six digit production is respectable considering the time period. I wonder if 
III pluses made the five digits though; mine is 7800-something.

>>What can it do?
>
>    Well it had some nice features built-in. Various ports in back (like
>the Apple IIc, IIgs and Macintosh) along with 4 internal expansion slots.
>A full ASCII keyboard, internal 5.25" floppy drive, 5-bit sound DAC, color
>text, DoubleHiRes-like graphic mode, 256K RAM (expandable to 4 MB, although
>only up to 512K was made available), ~2 MHz speed operation, clock/calendar,
>RGB video output, etc. It had a _very_ advanced 8-bit OS called "SOS" too,
>at least for it's time. It could even emulate an Apple II computer.

IIIs don't have a delete key, but III pluses have it plus a keyboard resem-
bling the //e keyboard with italic lettering. Also a slick two speed setup
on the arrow keys. Press them normally and they work like the rest of the
keys, but press 'em hard and they repeat much faster.

I need to pull out my Softalks so I can quote chapter and verse, but it's
always been my understanding that IIIs have an absolute limit of 256K and
III pluses 512K. Egad, no one imagined that kind of memory back then, and
even in 64K chips, the biggest available then, no way of reaching 4 mb on
board. III pluses came standard with 256K. I looked around and I think 
Apple never made cards to go to 512K, only third parties which would be
impossible to find now. IIIs don't use bank switching to access >64K by
the way; they have external hardware allowing the 6502 to access the memory.

>    More important was what it can't do. Apple purposely added extra logic
>to the motherboard to _prevent_ it's Apple II emulation mode from accessing
>the advanced features of the machine. By purposely crippling the product,
>this shows just what kind of company Apple Computer is (things didn't change
>years later when the Apple IIgs was introduced, it too had things purposely
>crippled or left out so to force you to buy them as extras). As for software,
>little was really written, other than business applications and productivity
>software.

Well remember that it's only ][ plus emulation, which, if you supported more
stuff than a ][ plus could do, wouldn't qualify as emulation any more. And
would cause compatibility problems if people wrote apps to use III features
under emulation. Considering that, I'd say the decision makes sense. I can't
think of any way Apple crippled the IIgs myself, aside from not upping the 
clock speed when ROM 3s came out, since faster 65816s were plentiful by then.
Guess they didn't want to have to offer an upgrade. "Install system software
5.0" is what they told ROM 01 owners when ROM 3 came out.
-- 
Randy Shackelford                                 
shack@frii.com