On Feb 1, 12:28 pm, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
mdj wrote:
On Feb 1, 1:56 am, Michael Black <et...@ncf.ca> wrote:
Or, decades later, people have forgotten or even never knew that there
were home computers before the "IBM PC". Again, it's because the previous
computers are dwarfed by the arrival of that computer, fused with many
people having arrived after that point. It doesn't mean there weren't
small computers before IBM came along, just that few remember.
It really didn't help that Apple themselves tried very hard to forget
that they made any computers before the Macintosh. It's a great
historical irony that whilst Apple strived to build the ultimate
computing 'appliance', the industry was commoditised by a machine
architecture that owes more than a little homage to the Apple II
Absolutely.
The IBM engineers that designed the PC looked long and hard at
the Apple II and its runaway success and copied freely when they
recognized a good thing. The peripheral bus is a prominent example
of both getting it right (the bus itself) and wrong (no motherboard
slot decoding, no plug'n'play ROM convention).
Of course, the march of technology has rendered those deficits a
non-issue, but in the early 1980s, the extra chips per card and
software configuration problems were a real cost.
It's a great example of excessive minimisation; they clearly failed to
recognise that peripheral cards were a user-installed part, not
engineer installed!
And it is very interesting that the Apple II was the result of
Woz wanting to get the most fun potential and future-proofing as
possible for the smallest number of chips. ;-)
Indeed. It's also interesting that the industry (particularly in
software) still hasn't learned many of these lessons :-)