Re: What's to become of the Apple II?

[sheldon@atlcom.net (Sheldon Simms)]

In article <577pcj$1qig@uni.library.ucla.edu>,
some anonymous person posting as pubpc17@library.ucla.edu wrote:

> Three differences.  First, the Mac is a closed, shielded machine both
> hardware wise and software wise.  Sure, it has a slot or two, but they
> cannot be accessed by user "hacked-together" boards for dumping, say,
> research equipment data into the computer.

Of course they can. What use would a slot be if the information needed
to build a card was not public? Macs are semi-open. They have certain
completely open interfaces such as NuBus or PCI slots, SCSI ports, Processor
direct slots, etc. But they also have custom chips which are not openly
documented. What that means is that you can make all of the peripherals
you want as long as you use open interfaces (including card slots), but you
can't write your own OS, or things that similarly require in-depth
knowledge of how to program every chip on the motherboard.

> Also, on the software side,
> the IIGS is better suited- you can run shells or even BASIC or assembly
> to whip up a quick program to read the input from your custom board
> through the slots.

You can do this on a Mac also.

> It has a lot of
> hardware to tweak, resulting in cool demos and programs outside of
> the official OS.  On the Mac, everything is done through Mac OS and
> is bogged down by it.  You have no choice.  This is why we don't see
> cool demos and "programmed on the metal" games like we do on the IIGS
> or on the Amiga.

Finally, this is partly correct, but still mostly incorrect. It's true
you program "on the metal" in general on Macs, but on the other hand, you
wouldn't want to, because different Macs have different graphics and sound
subsystems. Just think how stupid your demo would be if it only ran on
Mac IIsi(s) or you loaded a new demo your friends were raving about just
to see "Sorry, you must have the Toby Frame Buffer card to see this demo"
pop up.

> Third, the Mac cannot run IIGS software.  I am sorry, but as a user
> of AppleWorks GS and other IIGS software and having many data files,
> I expect Apple to preserve my investment in both.  If the Mac is not
> a reasonable upgrade in this respect, in my opinion Apple has failed.

I agree with you here. Imagine if the Mac II had come with an integrated
Apple II emulator somewhat like the PowerMac emulation of 68k Macs.
Of course, the ~$7000 price tag still probably would have been quite a
deterrent to Apple II users...

-Sheldon

-- 
W. Sheldon Simms III - sheldon@atlcom.net