Re: Apple II Forever!!!!!!!

[glaurent@babar.inria.fr (Guillaume Laurent)]

Someone (can't quote who exactly) wrote :
|Be realistic. No calculator outperforms even a Vic-20.

sbdocker@acs.ucalgary.ca (Sean Brendan Dockery) answers :

|> I would venture to say that my HP48SX calculator can do *more* than my
|> Apple //c.

The HP48SX can have up to 256K of RAM. So yes, it outperforms a Vic-20, no
questions about that (ok, it has monochrome LCD display, but the graphic
resolution is better than on a Vic).

BTW, folks, let's start a little discussion (if not a flamewar) here :

I've been a dedicated Apple lover ever since I got a //e back in 1984. It's
still running, though its motherboard has been replaced a few months ago.

It took 6 months to my dealer to have it replaced. When I bought my //e, such a
repair would have been done in less than a week, and I'd have been lended a
spare one in the while.

I bought a //gs in 87, still have it too. My expectations about the //gs were
very high. I figured the // series would keep on ruling the domestic computers'
world for another 10 years. Now I have to face the fact that the // series is,
commercially speaking, almost dead. At least compared to what it used to be.

3 months ago I bought a second hand Amiga 2000, with an 68030 accelerator.
card, 80 megs HD, and 6 megs of RAM. The whole cost me less than $2000.

What I have now is a fast multitasking OS and GUI, that's rock solid. And when
I mean multitasking, I don't mean it coughes up blood as soon as two tasks are
running in the background. I mean you can easily have 3 shell windows without
noticing any performance loss.
I can format two drives at the same time, while moving files on my HD.

As for programming, well... emacs and gcc have been ported to the Amiga. Those
who work under Unix at their office know what I mean. They are freely available
through FTP (the sources too), like any GNU product. I've installed them
without any problem. True, you need at least a 68020 to run them, but that's
how are built all amigas today, so it's really not a big issue.

Developpers documentation for the amiga is also available through FTP,
Unix-like shells (CSH and KSH) too. You could develop for the //e without
spending a fortune in docs and environments, you can also do it on the amiga.

I won't discuss about the graphic/sound performance of both machines, as it's
not my point.

My point is : the Apple community used to be one of the greatest thing in
computers history, and that's one of the main reasons I loved my //e and //gs.
Why I like my new amiga (though it's a 5 years old machine) is that the same
type of community, with the same spirit, has grown around it.

So don't throw your old //s away. There is no equivalent to AppleWorks on the
amiga, as far as I know. But if you consider buying a new computer and you want
to "get the feeling back", well...

						Guillaume.