Re: Happy 30th Birthday to Disk ][ and Apple DOS

[mdj <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

On Jul 10, 11:15 pm, pau...@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:

> Dunno about that either - both PET and TRS-80 had floppy disk storage
> too, as well as a number of CP/M computers from that time.  CP/M even
> *required* disk storage of some kind.  No, what put the Apple ][ ahead in
> the competition was its open architecture, which created a third party
> market which soon made lots of hardware and software available for the ][.
> And the entry of Apple ][ into the business market was due to one single
> software package:  VisiCalc ....

But really, the Disk ][ was fast, simple, and therefore cheap. The
controller was not only industry changing, but a work of art.

> Apple DOS didn't even have a decent command line!  Only a very restricted
> syntax of the command line was allowed by Apple DOS - other needed input
> parameters had to be obtained though a user dialogue by the application
> itself, or perhaps through some data (text) file.  Compare this with the
> very flexible command line interface of CP/M (which was directly inherited
> by MS-DOS): after the name of the executable file you could type almost
> anything you wanted.  CP/M and MS-DOS didn't object, it simply passed it on
> to the application and then it was up to the application to try to make sense
> of the command line, and to determine whether it was legal or illegal.

It's a shame this was never fixed - 10 years later the Apple II
'prompt' had much the same limitations.

Matt