Re: Apple Drops Backward Compatibility for Next MacOS

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

In article <24OCT199621281979@vax2.concordia.ca>,
Mitchell Spector <spec@vax2.concordia.ca> wrote:

>>My God, man, the Apple II of the late 80's did NOT have an 8-bit processor.
>>The Apple IIGS has a 16-bit processor.
>
>    Agreed! I'm rather tired of hearing that stereotypical response
>spoken out so often, claiming the Apple II is "'70's technology"; and
>that Apple was right to end it. The words "Apple II" seem to conjure 
>up images of a 48Kb Apple II Plus, with monochrome screen and 5.25 
>drive in people's mind. Why? The Apple II line was more than that, 
>but ever so much more so if you consider the Apple IIgs.

Yeah, but there's no getting around the fact that all Apple IIs use a processor
derived from a chip which debuted in '75. Staying compatible means sacrifices
in power. The Pentium is pushing the limits of performance since it still
can execute 8086 code. The PPC is not encumbered like that.

>>There was no reason why it could not have evolved into a 32-bit computer, 
>>like Pentiums have evolved from the PC/XT!  The demand WAS there.  Apple 
>>chose to ignore it.
>
>    I have little doubt that continuing the original 8-bit Apple II 
>design wouldn't have made sense in today's market, but not the GS. 
>I hate seeing it lumped in with the rest of the Apple II's as far 
>as any future feasibility would have been concerned! 

Computers don't improve without newer processors. No successor to the
65816 ever left the design phase.

>    It would have been such a _simple_ matter to enhance it's design,
>it was so blatantly obviously that Apple left it in a crippled state
>on purpose. The VGC could have easily been updated to support at least
>a 640x400 mode, and 256 colors per scanline. The Ensoniq chip could have
>been given a full 128Kb of DOC-RAM, with stereo sound-out and sound-in
>connectors built-in (being forced to buy a "stereo card" was as silly 
>as selling a car without a steering wheel!). Better yet, they could 
>have dropped in newer Ensoniq chips with more DOC-RAM, as they became
>available. A reasonable amount of memory could have shipped out of the
>box (why did they wait until 1989, and then only supply 1MB?) as could
>a faster 65C816 have been incorporated. A hardrive and 3.5 floppy drive
>built-in would have been possible (as seen in the Mark Twain prototype)
>and as well numerious other bits. As time went on, the design could
>have grown and evolved. At some point the backwards compatibility with
>older II's could have been placed on a separate card, allowing Apple
>to have overcome the limited bus speed. The IIgs was two machines in
>one box don't forget.

Memory was still expensive even when the ROM 3 came out. It went through
the roof in mid '88, when a set of eight 256K DRAMs was ~$120. Gotta keep
in mind the time context. No faster processors were available, memory was
expensive, and hard disks were unholy expensive. It's easy to forget that
in these days of $200 gigabyte hard disks and $100 16 mb SIMMs.

If you want a new up do date computer with Apple II compatibility on a card,
all you need is a Powermac with a PCI Apple II card to go in it. Would everyone
be happy if there were such a card?

>>When the GS came out, the Mac sucked.  It is better now, but what Mac are
>>we talking about in '86?  The Mac Plus?  The GS was and is better than
>>the Mac Plus.
>
>    The fact of the matter is Apple purposely negelected the IIGS.
>As was stated previously in this thread, they failed to advertise
>it or reduce it's price over the years. Is there a reason the price
>remained virtually unchanged from 1986 until 1992 - when it was dropped?
>Or was there a reason why, during the 6 years Apple sold it, the only
>major update was the 'ROM 3' motherboard? The only significant advantage,
>from non-Apple users looking in from the outside: it shipped with
>a full megabyte of memory. If this was the *only* meaningful enhancement 
>Apple could come up with in 6 years, perhaps they're not as good a
>bunch of engineers as some may have thought. The Mac 128 started off
>as a very limited machine, though they somehow got it where it is 
>today. If the GS were a flop, it would have been discontinued fairly
>early in the game, but it made Apple large profits (I recall it even
>outselling the Mac one year!). Apple didn't want to kill it right away 
>because it made them profit, so they instead choose to milk it while 
>at the same time smother it (no enhancements, no ads, no cost cuts).
>There were people in the company who shared Steve Jobs' ideals, that
>there should only be the Macintosh. So despite all logic, they let
>a potentially killer product slip through their hands. 

No actually the Steve Jobs mentality is come out with a whiz bang new product
then forget about it when the next one comes out in a few months.
-- 
Randy Shackelford                                 
shack@frii.com