Re: Apple II just won't die.

[John_L._Graham@adbbs.antioch.edu (John L. Graham)]

I "met" an engineer that was a panel member at a recent meeting on the real
needs of computers for special education and he commented the topic of the
Apple IIe came up. The issue being discussed is that for a LOT of needs the
current market offering are WAY over powered and WAY too expensive. For many
applications the Apple IIe (and it's kin) was ideally suited. It was also
estimated given the fact that the IIe was a mature platform (i.e.,
development and tooling costs long paid for) and production run of a million
machines could be sold with a reasonable profit for about $250. How they
arrived at these numbers I don't know, but over all they sound reasonable.

I feel I work in a similar area where the Apple IIe (and the GS) are a
perfect match of need vs. capability. Specifically, we use Apple II+'s, e's
and GS's as smart dataloggers and work stations. When high horsepower (or
more often better graphics) are needed we port the data to other computers.
As long as the world understands ASCII we're in good shape. The beauty of
this arrangement is that we use the strength of each system and aren't typing
up hopelessly overpowered (and expensive) hardware doing things that can just
as well (and in some cases better) with older less powerful computers. If
there's one thing we've gotten our money's worth out of, and then some, it's
our Apple IIs.

-John