In article <34166fcd-a44e-40dc-9fa3-e510c928dfbc@26g2000hsk.googlegroups.com>,
mdj <mdj.mdj@gmail.com> wrote:
On Jul 10, 11:15=A0pm, 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. =A0No, 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.
Sure it was! But the Apple II didn't become popular mainly due to its
relatively cheap disk drives, other factors were more important IMHO.
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.
That's the perils of "backwards compatibility". ProDOS inherited pretty
much of Apple DOS's command line syntax.
Matt